Tech journalism is not an oxymoron
Analysts at Deutsche Bank estimate Motorola has sold about 100,000 of its Android-based Xoom tablets in the month since its launch. In the same period, Apple is estimated to have sold 2.5 million iPads. To put it in perspective, Apple sold 300,000 iPads in its first day of availability — and it sold out almost everywhere.
This tweet from @pdparticle may paint the picture best:
You know what’s funny?
iPad Smart Covers generate more revenue than the Xoom.
Nice spot by Apple that’s getting a lot of attention. In an industry that loves throwing out specs and features (We’re looking at you, Motorola Xoom), this spot makes its point by doing the same thing that Apple does with its products: focuses what you it allows you to do, not the technology that lets you do it. I’ve had fun with Apple’s frequent use of the word “magical” to describe the iPad, but I’ve come to understand that its a much more fitting way of describing the way people interact with it than touting GHz and RAM.
Two observations: the spot cleverly says that “faster, thinner, lighter” are nice but not enough, which makes it clear that, while there’s more to it, the iPad 2 absolutely is “faster, thinner, lighter.” Also, the image of the guitar is stunningly realistic — even when the strings are plucked, the suspension of disbelief is sustained.
Google today announced it was launching the beta version of its GMail Motion service, a “new way to communicate.”
From the site’s webpage:
The mouse and keyboard were invented before the Internet even existed. Since then, countless technological advancements have allowed for much more efficient human computer interaction. Why then do we continue to use outdated technology? Introducing Gmail Motion — now you can control Gmail with your body.
The service uses your computer’s webcam to “detect your movements and translate them into meaningful characters and commands. Movements are designed to be simple and intuitive for people of all skill levels.”
The company has included helpful video tutorials and other learning aids to assist users in adapting to the new service.
(I’d enjoy this even more if the announcement about approvals for early access to Android releases was an April Fool’s joke too.)
The pricing on the New York Times recently announced digital subscription packages has a lot people scratching their heads.
From The New York Times itself:
Beginning March 28, visitors to NYTimes.com will be able to read 20 articles a month without paying, a limit that company executives said was intended to draw in subscription revenue from the most loyal readers while not driving away the casual visitors who make up the vast majority of the site’s traffic.
Once readers click on their 21st article, they will have the option of buying one of three digital news packages — $15 every four weeks for access to the Web site and a mobile phone app (or $195 for a full year), $20 for Web access and an iPad app ($260 a year) or $35 for an all-access plan ($455 a year). All subscribers who take home delivery of the paper will have free and unlimited access across all Times digital platforms except, for now, e-readers like the Amazon Kindle and the Barnes & Noble Nook. Subscribers to The International Herald Tribune, which is The Times’s global edition, will also have free digital access.
Don’t miss that last key point: Subscribers who take home delivery (of any kind), get free and unlimited access to all digital content. That means you can take the cheapest subscription available for the paper edition ($161.20/year) and get digital content that the Times says is worth $455/year for free. Even if you throw the paper edition away or put it on permanent “vacation” mode, you can pay significantly less than half the price of a digital-only subscription.
I’m not defending the pricing. Far from it, I think it’s a disaster. I do understand it, though, and it has nothing to do with trying to promote digital subscriptions. Rather, it’s a result of a traditional publishing mindset. The Times sees no value in digital subscriptions. They are ephemeral, non-substantive. Only paper is real; only paper subscriptions “really count.” There may be a lot of reasons for this, not the least of which is the impact on advertising rates for the paper edition. But I think there’s an old-school bias at work here, too. The Times doesn’t really want to sell digital subscriptions — they want people to buy the paper.
I knew a barber who charged outlandish prices for a shave. I asked him why — did he give amazing shaves? No, the answer was that he hated giving shaves. By pricing them so high, he discouraged most of his customers for asking for them, and the few who did were paying high enough prices to make it worth his while.
The Times, I think, hates digital subscriptions. They’d rather give them away if you buy the paper than sell them on their own. And their pricing structure is designed to drive people to do just that.
On the tenth anniversary of the introduction of Mac OS X, I thought it would be fun to take a look at this RandomMaccess column from April 1, 2003 — an April Fool’s Day look at an imagined reception of Apple’s then still-nascent operating system:
“I blew it. It’s as simple as that,” said a visibly upset Steve Jobs as he announced he would step down as head of Apple, the company he co-founded on this day over 25 years ago.
CFO Fred Anderson quickly announced the company would end its two-year-long transition to the UNIX-based Mac OS X and would release Mac OS 9.5 within the month.
“Our customers have told us they while there are a lot of things they like about OS X, they feel more productive in the Classic Environment, so that’s what we’re going to give them,” Anderson said. “Hell, Quark was never going to release a native version, anyway,” he admitted.
Almost two years ago, I wrote a piece for the Mac Observer entitled “The Every Other Year iPhone Club.” In it, I explained not only why I was upgrading my original iPhone to the then-new 3GS, but why I hadn’t upgraded to the 3G a year before.
This year, I find myself in a similar situation: I love my iPad, and though I’d love it even more if it were faster and had two cameras, those new features are not enough to warrant buying a whole new device. Projecting a while further into the future, I’d be surprised if the iPad 3 had enough new bells and whistles to make me move from an iPad 2. But going from an iPad 1 to an iPad 3? I suspect that’s going to be a no-brainer.
And it seems like I’m not alone. Early reports say that up to 70% of iPad 2 purchasers were first-time buyers. That’s also great news for Apple, because it means they’re expanding their installed base — making it even harder for competitors to catch up, if and when they start actually shipping.
The phrase “evolutionary not revolutionary” has become cliche in describing the iPad 2, but it’s accurate. It’s also a smart strategy. By focusing on moderate but incremental improvements, Apple will continue to grow its customer base, while minimizing the backlash from its installed base (“Whaddaya mean I can have all these great new features — I just bought this thing?!”)
Apple’s resurgence and continued success has been built on the idea of introducing a revolutionary concept (iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad — even the MacBook Air) in a basic — almost vanilla configuration — and then gradually to add significant features to it.
That steady, sustainable growth strategy is a concept that seems so simple and so obvious, yet it’s one that amazingly few others in the tech world seem to grasp.
Now: back to saving up for that iPad 3.
At first, it could be mistaken for a conventional, albeit extraordinarily sleek, airplane. The craft’s engines roar, and it picks up speed as it races down the runway. Upon liftoff, though, it doesn’t level off like an ordinary plane, but continues upwards at an increasing angle as if it’s straining to reach the stars. Suddenly, booster rockets kick in, and the craft reveals itself to be a true spaceship, rising higher and higher into the sky, its clean white body marked only with a light grey Apple logo on the tail.
It may sound far-fetched, but it might make sense for a computer maker that’s revving on all engines and enjoying iconic status as a purveyor of all things cool. After all, who would have thought just a few years ago that Apple would own such a large percent of the music business. And surely Apple’s cult-like followers would line up to plunk down big bucks for a ride on the “iCraft.”
Practically admitting the rumors were true, Apple refused comment on the story.
—–
OK, back to reality — “down to earth,” if you will.
The above scenario is pure wild-eyed speculation, based on absolutely no evidence and fewer facts. Which means it’s got a lot in common with another piece of nonsense published in Forbes. All that’s missing in our little piece of fiction is a quote from Rob Enderle, who’s practically made a cottage industry of writing dumb, wrong things about Apple.
In “Everybody in the Pool,” Forbes writer David M. Ewalt reports on how Apple is considering launching its own mobile phone network. Go ahead, read the story. Now read it again. Nowhere is there a shred of evidence — or anything other than Ewalt’s imagination, for that matter — to suggest the story might be true. To give the writer credit, (I suppose) he doesn’t even try; there isn’t even a suggestion of an “according to sources who wish to remain anonymous” attribution. The only facts in the story concern other companies’ plans, not Apple’s. Disney, for instance, has announced it plans to launch a “family-centric” wireless network. ESPN has already launched a service, as has convenience store chain 7-Eleven. How Ewalt makes the leap to Apple launching a service is no less reality-defying than our own little iCraft fantasy.
The one item that relates Apple to phones is the iTunes-enabled phone being developed with Motorola. Since when is launching a mobile network a prerequisite to developing a mobile phone? And why would Apple want to limit the potential distribution of such a phone to its own fledgling network? Even Enderle’s quote doesn’t suggest that. He only asserts that mobile carriers would prefer to sell music through their own service and would rather have an iTunes phone sync through their networks rather than a computer.
So why make Apple the focus of this piece of pure speculation? My guess is it’s because stories about Apple draw eyeballs. Lots of them. And lots of eyeballs translate into lots of advertising dollars. It’s an old trick that still works. Even when Apple wasn’t the wunderkind of American, even worldwide, culture, websites would run “Apple is dying” stories that would incite Macophiles, excite PC users and make giddy the advertisers who were serving ads to everyone. These days, however, its getting harder to run that kind of story without looking genuinely clueless, so “What-secret-device-will-Apple-unveil-next” stories are taking their place — to the delight, no doubt, of the twenty or so advertisers on the page hosting the Forbes article.
“Everybody in the Pool” could have been a nice little look at boutique phone networks, and the ways companies are extending their brand equity through emerging technologies. It could have been a nice thought piece about why Apple might want to consider such a move — but that would have required analysis, and analysis is hard work. Instead, it becomes a sensationalist supposition unworthy of Forbes, good for nothing but generating page views. It can’t even be called a piece of good old rumor-mongering, because by all the evidence available in his article, Ewalt isn’t reporting on rumors, he’s making them up.
So does that mean Apple isn’t launching its own phone network? I have no idea. But based on what we can see in Ewalt’s article, neither does he.
At first, it could be mistaken for a conventional, albeit extraordinarily sleek, airplane. The craft’s engines roar, and it picks up speed as it races down the runway. Upon liftoff, though, it doesn’t level off like an ordinary plane, but continues upwards at an increasing angle as if it’s straining to reach the stars. Suddenly, booster rockets kick in, and the craft reveals itself to be a true spaceship, rising higher and higher into the sky, its clean white body marked only with a light grey Apple logo on the tail.
It may sound far-fetched, but it might make sense for a computer maker that’s revving on all engines and enjoying iconic status as a purveyor of all things cool. After all, who would have thought just a few years ago that Apple would own such a large percent of the music business. And surely Apple’s cult-like followers would line up to plunk down big bucks for a ride on the “iCraft.”
Practically admitting the rumors were true, Apple refused comment on the story.
—–
OK, back to reality — “down to earth,” if you will.
The above scenario is pure wild-eyed speculation, based on absolutely no evidence and fewer facts. Which means it’s got a lot in common with another piece of nonsense published in Forbes. All that’s missing in our little piece of fiction is a quote from Rob Enderle, who’s practically made a cottage industry of writing dumb, wrong things about Apple.
In “Everybody in the Pool,” Forbes writer David M. Ewalt reports on how Apple is considering launching its own mobile phone network. Go ahead, read the story. Now read it again. Nowhere is there a shred of evidence — or anything other than Ewalt’s imagination, for that matter — to suggest the story might be true. To give the writer credit, (I suppose) he doesn’t even try; there isn’t even a suggestion of an “according to sources who wish to remain anonymous” attribution. The only facts in the story concern other companies’ plans, not Apple’s. Disney, for instance, has announced it plans to launch a “family-centric” wireless network. ESPN has already launched a service, as has convenience store chain 7-Eleven. How Ewalt makes the leap to Apple launching a service is no less reality-defying than our own little iCraft fantasy.
The one item that relates Apple to phones is the iTunes-enabled phone being developed with Motorola. Since when is launching a mobile network a prerequisite to developing a mobile phone? And why would Apple want to limit the potential distribution of such a phone to its own fledgling network? Even Enderle’s quote doesn’t suggest that. He only asserts that mobile carriers would prefer to sell music through their own service and would rather have an iTunes phone sync through their networks rather than a computer.
So why make Apple the focus of this piece of pure speculation? My guess is it’s because stories about Apple draw eyeballs. Lots of them. And lots of eyeballs translate into lots of advertising dollars. It’s an old trick that still works. Even when Apple wasn’t the wunderkind of American, even worldwide, culture, websites would run “Apple is dying” stories that would incite Macophiles, excite PC users and make giddy the advertisers who were serving ads to everyone. These days, however, its getting harder to run that kind of story without looking genuinely clueless, so “What-secret-device-will-Apple-unveil-next” stories are taking their place — to the delight, no doubt, of the twenty or so advertisers on the page hosting the Forbes article.
“Everybody in the Pool” could have been a nice little look at boutique phone networks, and the ways companies are extending their brand equity through emerging technologies. It could have been a nice thought piece about why Apple might want to consider such a move — but that would have required analysis, and analysis is hard work. Instead, it becomes a sensationalist supposition unworthy of Forbes, good for nothing but generating page views. It can’t even be called a piece of good old rumor-mongering, because by all the evidence available in his article, Ewalt isn’t reporting on rumors, he’s making them up.
So does that mean Apple isn’t launching its own phone network? I have no idea. But based on what we can see in Ewalt’s article, neither does he.
A slow but steady outcry has been building up within the web-based Mac press over the revocation of GraphicPower’s media credentials for the upcoming Macworld New York Conference and Expo. Unfortunately, some in the Mac web have turned it into an ill-informed, inbred hissyfit based mainly on second and thirdhand reports, and the idea that if two or more sites quote the same piece of innuendo it qualifies as “confirmed by independent sources.”
In the beginning, there was the word.
But it was quickly followed by concerns about distribution channels, business models and revenue streams.
Over the past two years, two different authors — horror master Stephen King and TidBITs publisher Adam Engst — have made attempts at bypassing traditional paper-and-ink publishing and physical distribution in favor of a completely electronic model. Other than the “electronic-ness” of their offerings, though, the two experiments have very little in common.
When King conducted his experiment in online publishing in 2000, he wrote a serialized novel, The Plant, and made it available for download — one chapter at a time, purchased on the honor system. But there was a twist: if the pay-to-download ratio dipped below 75%, writing would cease and the experiment would be deemed a failure — proof that people weren’t trustworthy enough not to “steal from the blind newsboy,” as King put it.
After just a few installments of The Plant, though, King announced that writing on future chapters would cease while he “devoted himself to other projects.” While not out-and-out charging readers with assault on that sightless paper carrier, the implication was certainly there; according to the New York Times, the percentage of paid downloads of the latest chapter had dipped into the forties.
There’s room for more than one conclusion from King’s experiment, though: one that doesn’t require indicting the majority of The Plant readers as thieves. The most obvious is that King’s plan to sell and distribute The Plant was based on a bad business plan and flawed analogies. One that even in the most optimistic scenario could only have worked for someone of King’s stature, anyway, and therefore would have been meaningless for the publishing industry as a whole — or for authors in general.
What King wanted his readers to do is pay $1 for each of the first three installments (for each format: PDF, html, plain-text, PDA-formatted) of his story. Although King couldn’t say exactly how may installments would comprise The Plant, he did commit to a maximum charge of $13 — about the price of a hard cover novel, he wrote on his website. Some readers immediately criticized the cost as too high. They complained that when they paid for the paper and toner/ink to print the installments, the price would rise even higher.
There were even more vociferous complaints over King’s insistence that each time you downloaded a particular installment, you had to pay again or be labeled a leech. The problems were obvious: Accidentally erase installment one? Here’s another, please proceed to the cashier. Want to read it on your Palm at the beach? Sorry, you downloaded the PDF. If you want a version formatted for a handheld, pony up another buck.
I don’t think the problem here is greed, but rather King’s flawed comparison between paper and virtual publishing. The Plant may wind up costing about the same as a traditional novel, but it’s not one. Long documents like novels are not easily read on screen, and the cost of the paper and toner or ink to print out each installment is not insubstantial. Further, the electronic version of the book doesn’t have nearly the same production costs associated with it. Sure, there’s the cost of hosting the site, the bandwidth charges for the thousands of downloads and the processing costs of online payments. But that’s nothing compared to the cost of make-ready, galleys, film, plates, printing, binding, book jackets, distribution, publisher’s markup, seller’s markup, promotional displays, etc., etc. For King to compare the two methods that way is either disingenuous or naive. If I am going to pay full price for a book, you’d better believe I’m going for the one that I can pick up and hold, read in bed or on a park bench, put on a bookshelf, save for my kids or donate to my public library. The potential of online publishing is that it makes it possible to get literature distributed without the overhead of conventional publishing. And if it’s going to succeed, the prices of the online titles must be substantially lower than those of their paper-and-ink counterparts.
Another complaint was that King expected payment each time a file was downloaded, even if it was just a different format of the same installment, for instance, by a reader who downloaded a PDF version, then wanted to read it on the train with an eBook. King’s analogy was that was akin to walking into a bookstore and telling the clerk that since you already had the hardcover version of a book, you expected to get the paperback version for free. It’s an analogy that doesn’t work on several fronts. First, if you already have a physical copy of a book, it’s unlikely you’d need another one. You can take the same book with you on that subway, or the living room of your house, or into the bathroom of your office, for that matter. With an electronic book, you are tied to the hardware that can display it. (Just try getting your desktop computer into your office bathroom.) Besides, a hardcover and a paperback version of the same book each has a significant cost associated with its production; there is no additional cost in producing another copy of the same electronic file. Again, physicality carries extra costs that virtual products don’t. By not realizing this, King virtually doomed his virtual experiment.
Think of it this way: for King’s experiment to have been considered any kind of success, it would have to be repeatable. But who, other than someone with the following and status of Stephen King or Tom Clancy or John Grisham, would have had even a chance of pulling it off?
This week, technology writer and TidBITs publisher Adam Engst wrote that he was conducting an experiment in online publishing of his own. Backed by Peachpit Press, Engst is publishing his forthcoming book (about Apple’s iPhoto) as a PDF list priced at $20; buyers will then get a paper-and-ink version of the book’s next edition for free. “It was a perfect solution,” Engst wrote in his newsletter, crediting his wife Tonya for the idea. “Since it didn’t require people to figure out the value of an electronic book, it wouldn’t automatically cannibalize sales of the next edition, and it would ensure that people could benefit from the book for months before the next edition would be available.”
Engst faced the same concerns about “robbing the blind newsboy” that King did, but took a decidedly different stance. “The only people who will have it initially are people who have paid for it,” he wrote, “and my foreword to the electronic edition asks them to share the book as though it were a physical book, at least in the sense of asking the recipients to buy their own copy if they’re using it a lot.”
Still, Engst is realistic about unauthorized copying, and comes to a conclusion the horror writer might find, well, shocking. “After a while, I’m sure there will be copies floating around from a variety of pass-along situations, but you know what? I think that’s a good thing. This electronic book will be obsolete within a few months, and it will be replaced with a paper edition that can’t easily be copied. Sure, some people will get a copy, read it, and determine it’s not worth buying. That’s fine with me — they would have been unlikely to buy it anyway, so no harm done. Others will get a copy, find that it’s useful, and purchase a copy so they can have the print version when that comes out. That’s great — the copies served as free advertising. And undoubtedly there will be some who will get a copy, find it useful, and never pay, which sounds much like what happens with books stored in those subversive organizations called libraries. Frankly, I don’t mind — I’m happy that someone will have benefited from my efforts in such a way that doesn’t add to my email workload.”
The different roads to online publishing taken by King and Engst belie their different backgrounds. King, coming from conventional publishing, sees electronic publishing as analogous to the physical method.
Engst, on the other hand, with his technological perspective, sees things differently. As we wrote back when King uprooted his experiment with The Plant, there’s a far better analogy he could have used in creating the business model for his literary experiment, and it’s one every online denizen, including Engst, is already aware of.
Shareware.
The difference between commercial software and shareware is basically the same as conventional publishing and electronic publishing: overhead. Eliminate the physical production, distribution and promotion of a product and you greatly reduce its cost. By passing on this cost savings (or at least a good deal of it) to your customers, you make it worthwhile for them to forego any of the benefits of the physical model and put up with any inconveniences associated with the virtual (like downloading files, or printing out your own pages).
Here’s our humble suggestion for fixing Stephen King’s experiment. Online books should always be priced significantly lower than an equivalent paperback. We say no more than five dollars — maybe $10 for a long title like King’s more expansive efforts. Like software, your money buys you a license to what’s in the file. That means you can download any format of the same title for no additional charge, but you may not give the file (or a copy, printed or otherwise) away for someone else to read.
The title should be complete, or if there are further installments, they should be available at no extra charge, and should be password protected so only those who paid for them can read them.
If Stephen King put this experiment to the test, we think he could start a real electronic publishing revolution — one that could impact authors who might otherwise never reach a broad audience.
In the meantime, Engst’s experiment with dual-publishing — still at least loosely based on the shareware concept — strikes us as having a much better chance to succeed, and to have a far more long-lasting impact on publishing.
Stephen King uprooted The Plant, but Adam Engst may have planted the seed for a whole new way of publishing.