My daily readings 01/31/2010

• Resist the urge to punish everyone for one person’s mistake | Derek Sivers

  tags: Startup, management

  • As a business owner, when you get screwed-over by someone, it’s tempting to make a big grand policy you think will prevent you from ever getting screwed-over again.

    One employee can’t focus, and spends their time surfing the ‘net. Instead of just firing or reassigning that person to more challenging work, the company installs an expensive content-approving firewall so that nobody can go to unapproved sites ever again.

    One thief used a stolen credit card to make a purchase. Instead of acknowledging that was one out of 100,000 honest orders, the company makes all future customers fax a copy of their card and ID and wait days for verification.

    It’s important to resist that simplistic, angry, reactionary urge to punish everyone, and step back to look at the big picture.

• Ramble On » iPad – is it what education needs?

  tags: iPad, education

  • The ‘tablet’ form factor is ideally suited to education. Ever since Microsoft released the first Tablet PC it’s been clear to many in education that this interface was the answer to many of our needs. Unfortunately, Windows and the applications it runs, has never fulfilled the promise. Maybe Apple can provide us with the answer.
  • My first reaction to the iPad was the device when combined with the iBook store and iTunesU, would make the product attractive to Education. But now I’ve had time to think about it, I’m not sure if Apple has developed a product that will (just now) make massive inroads into (UK) Higher Education.
  • Whether it’s taking notes in class, using it in group work or even as a data recorder in  a lab, the form factor and the instant access to research materials and our core systems through Safari is perfect in so many ways.
  • When students are required to buy texts, they shop around or buy second hand copies from students who studied last year. Apple appear to be positioning the device as the front-end to purchasable content. The iBook store will undoubtably be a massive success, but it’s design appears to be centred around content you intend to keep.
  • But we already have a definite need for a good tablet, maybe in addition to their main laptop, because University staff have to mark assignments. Something as simple as marking paper submissions has proven to be significantly slower, when staff have to mark electronically. Last year we accepted over 80,000 electronic submissions, this year’s it’s likely to be double that amount. Within 5 years, I think all submissions will be electronic. So we’re desperate for a product with an interface that streamlines the marking workflow.
  • Most staff use the pen to add comments next to student’s mistakes and  the iPhone’s cut and paste mechanism demonstrates how easy it is to highlight sections with your finger. So adding inline comments should be pretty easy.

• Gowalla Opens Trips To All. A Simple Way To Organize Pub Crawls.

  tags: iPhone, Geo

• Wired Campus – The Chronicle of Higher Education

  tags: iPad, education

  • But wait — it might be time to take a deep breath to let the excitement of the sales pitch fade. Tablets have been tried before, with similar fanfare, and have fallen flat. And so far e-textbook sales are growing more slowly than expected. And even Apple doesn’t always hit big with new products (the Newton personal organizer being its most famous flop). Even the institution considering a give-away, Abilene Christian University, said it will have to play around with the devices before making a decision. “We didn’t want to jump blindly into something we don’t know about,” said William Rankin, director of educational innovation at the university.
  • Apple’s leader and chief pitch-man, Steve Jobs, listed plenty of uses for the new gadget at an event announcing the iPad in San Francisco, which some bloggers streamed online — but a vision of their use in education was not explicitly outlined. Mr. Jobs did mention iTunesU twice when listing the kinds of content that could be viewed on the iPad, referring to the company’s partnership with many colleges to offer them free space for multimedia content like lecture recordings. But he otherwise focused on consumer uses — watching movies, viewing photos, sending e-mail messages, and reading novels published by five trade publishers mentioned at the event. That does not mean that the company won’t later promote the iPad’s use on campuses, though, since it waited until after iPods and iPhones were established before beginning to work more heavily with colleges to promote those in education.
  • One reason is that students do not know about the option, said Eric Weil, of Student Monitor. “We still have a relatively low level of awareness that there’s such a thing as the e-textbook,” he said.
  • Ms. Hinds sees Apple’s cachet and “cool” factor as being another lure that will get students to try e-textbooks. “They are market-makers,” she said of Apple. “And higher education is ready for some game-changing.”

  • CourseSmart, for example, recently released an iPhone app for its store, which sells more than 8,000 titles from the largest textbook publishers.

    Frank Lyman, executive vice president at CourseSmart, said he is excited about the iPad and other tablet-style computers because they may fit a student’s lifestyle better than full computers. He said that data from publishers shows that students do not carry their laptops with them to class, even though they are touted as portable. “They might do that with this kind of device because it’s smaller,” he said. “At the end of the day it comes down to not just can I take it with me, but am I happy to take it with me?”

  • That’s the view of Mr. Rankin, of Abilene Christian, which for several years has given free iPhones or iPod Touch devices to every first-year student, so that nearly every student on the campus has one. The iPad offers many of the same features, but with a larger screen that could make more classroom uses possible, he said. “We’re very excited about this device,” he said, because it’s big enough and robust enough to create content, not just consume it.

  • He also pointed out that several PC manufacturers have sold tablet computers before, which have been tried enthusiastically in classrooms. Their promise is that they make it easy for professors to walk around classrooms while holding the computer, while allowing them to wirelessly project information to a screen at the front of the room. But despite initial hype, very few PC tablets are being used in college classrooms, he said.

    Now that Apple’s long-awaited secret is out, the harder questions might be whether the iPad is the long-awaited education computer.

• Hacker News | IPad UI Roundup

  tags: iPad, app

  • The Omni Group announced they are working on Omni Graffle for the iPad. To me this is a killer app. A great example of where a desktop application would actually be better on the iPad than the desktop.
  • If Omni can put it all into an easily-browsed “notebook” format, that might just convince me to get an iPad.

    This is the first idea that actually has me considering it.

• Fraser Speirs – Blog – Future Shock

  tags: iPad

  • What you’re seeing in the industry’s reaction to the iPad is nothing less than future shock.

    For years we’ve all held to the belief that computing had to be made simpler for the ‘average person’. I find it difficult to come to any conclusion other than that we have totally failed in this effort.

    Secretly, I suspect, we technologists quite liked the idea that Normals would be dependent on us for our technological shamanism. Those incantations that only we can perform to heal their computers, those oracular proclamations that we make over the future and the blessings we bestow on purchasing choices.

    Ask yourself this: in what other walk of life do grown adults depend on other people to help them buy something? Women often turn to men to help them purchase a car but that’s because of the obnoxious misogyny of car dealers, not because ladies worry that the car they buy won’t work on their local roads. (Sorry computer/car analogy. My bad.)

  • It’s not. The Real Work is not formatting the margins, installing the printer driver, uploading the document, finishing the PowerPoint slides, running the software update or reinstalling the OS.

    The Real Work is teaching the child, healing the patient, selling the house, logging the road defects, fixing the car at the roadside, capturing the table’s order, designing the house and organising the party.

    Think of the millions of hours of human effort spent on preventing and recovering from the problems caused by completely open computer systems. Think of the lengths that people have gone to in order to acquire skills that are orthogonal to their core interests and their job, just so they can get their job done.

  • I totally agree. We witnessed on the 27th a step up to the next computing platform for the masses (albeit some may want to state an infant step, personally I think the step is much larger). Over the next 10-20 years we will see computing evolution based on this single event I’m sure.
  • The iPad is the start of useable computing.
  • I’ve been saying to people around me for years that computers are just not ready for daily use by ordinary people; they are not reliable or secure or even easy enough to understand. It has been very interesting to watch the iPhone progress and see it actually become the best way to achieve certain ends, even if you already own a laptop of some kind. I think you’ve expressed this thinking really well, thanks for writing this up.
  • Spot on. 50 years ago you needed a degree in mechanics to own and drive a car. You needed to know all the inner workings just to get it to work. Today, 99.9% of car owners know know the first thing about the inner workings – because they don’t need to. It just works. I’ve driven 150,000 miles in mine and all I’ve done is changed the tyres.
    The iPad is the computer my mum will finally be able to use. It might not please 10,000 geeks, but it will please 100 million normal people.

• The iPad Is Like Holding The Future. But Only Because I Graduated From iPhone School.

  tags: iPad

  • After the Apple event today, I got a chance to play with the new iPad for quite a bit of time. My takeaway? The thing is beautiful and fast. Really fast. If you’ll excuse my hyperbole, it felt like I was holding the future. But is it a must-have? That’s a complicated question.

    The quick and dirty answer is: for many people, right now, no. Unlike the iPhone, which filled an already well-established need (cellular telephone usage), there is no existing need the iPad fills. That is, unless you’re an iPhone or iPod touch user. If that’s the case, the iPad does fill a couple of needs — it’s the best way to use apps, and more importantly, the best way to browse the web in a style that is likely your preferred method: by touching it.

  • Towards the end of his keynote, Steve Jobs alluded to this idea when he said that the 75 million iPhones and iPod touches that have already shipped ensure that those users will already know how to use the iPad. During the hands-on demos, two different Apple employees said basically the same thing. “If you have an iPhone, you already know how to use this,” one said.
  • But the key point is that it only does the one thing (and those Kindle apps won’t help that much because the device is way too slow) — as many of us have long suspected, it’s going to be relegated to a feature of a device that does more. And that’s exactly what Apple is doing with the iPad (which we correctly translated Jobs as saying back in September when everyone else seemed to think he said he would never do anything with eBooks).
  • The thing is, as a heavy iPhone user, I immediately recognize the iPad’s appeal. If it can perform anywhere close to the promised 10 hour battery life, I’ll likely ditch carrying around a laptop most of the time and simply take an iPad with the keyboard accessory. The thing is that snappy — and, at a pound and a half and a half-inch thick, the weight and size savings will be substantial. Oh, and at $30-a-month for unlimited data (yes, sadly through AT&T), I can ditch my $60-a-month laptop 3G card.
  • What it comes down to for me is that when I don’t need to do something that’s typing-intensive (like writing), I’d much prefer to use my hands to move around applications and browse the web. The iPhone has taught me that. Meanwhile, the rapid movement of data to the cloud has taught me that I have next to no need for most desktop applications anymore. In other words, I’m perfectly primed for this device.
  • The iPhone and the iPod touch have in a way served as training wheels for us to use this new type of device, the iPad. To a lesser extent, so have Apple’s multi-touch trackpads and the new multi-touch Magic Mouse. All of these devices are pointing towards what Apple obviously believes is the future of computing: touch. That is more clear now than ever before — the iPad is their biggest step yet.

  • Allow me to explain using my life & computing needs as a business student:
    -Microsoft Office. Mac ports are good but not perfect. OneNote is great for taking notes in class and Excel on a Mac doesn’t compare at all.
    Currently my Acer Netbook serves this need. Ideally, I would also have a workstation at home (be it windows or an imac with bootcamp) for when I really want to sit down and pound things out.
    -Mobile needs include phoning, ability to jot down quick notes, simple web surfing and access to media, email and text messaging. Right now I use a combo of a blackberry pearl and my iPod.
    -Web surfing. When I’m not doing school work, I spend a lot of time surfing the Internet recreationally. This includes streaming video, blogs, newspaper articles, forums and general web surfing. Right now I switch between my netbook and my parent’s macbook to do this.
    —>This is where the tablet comes in. For casual web surfing I would prefer form factor. Often I’m not in the most comfortable position possible because I have to twist myself towards my laptop. I need a lightweight, intuitive tablet. Of course, most of us just don’t know that yet because it hasn’t been an option.

    smartphone + laptop/netbook + workstation
    and now, Tablet.

    They all satisfy slightly different needs. This is what Steve Jobs alluded to when he talked about product lines in his presentation. The iPad will be a success because it is sufficiently differentiated from all three.
    Remember, Apple’s a consumer company. This isn’t a heavy duty tablet for engineers, architects, artists and business users. It’s for relaxing on the couch. And it does that better:
    -iPod screen is too small
    -Laptops keyboards are somewhat cumbersome
    -And I don’t want to sit in my office

  • I can’t wait to see the educational implications the iPad will have. Imagine these in the hands of 1st graders.

    Easy to use. Touch screen. Anyone can develop apps. It might not be a must to have but its still a game changer.

  • I used to own a netbook (acer aspire one) that I bought for $399 some time back.

    Although it had most of the features you mention, I hated it because it was jack of all trades and master of none. I barely used the camera ever. I never in the 3 months I owned it had to use to output (it was VGA though) even once. Its wifi radio was sub-par. It tiny mouse was shitty as hell (let me not even get started on the bad mouse buttons). And, it barely had 3 hrs of charge. And, even though it had flash, I could barely watch movies on HULU because it couldnt handle high-def videos.

    If this tablet delivers even half the features it promises it does, it beats most of the netbooks out there.

    I agree that this this thing doesn’t have a freaking camera, for reasons I cannot even think of, and that it has no multi-tasking is a turn-off.. but for $499 it is a deal much better than any notebook can offer. Especially for college students like me who get blazing fast wifi all over the campus for free.

    Plus, I am hoping OS 4.0 will bring the background apps feature since they barely changed anything to the iPhone OS for the iPad.

  • You don’t “need” it. You don’t need anything really… other than food & oxygen. But you want it. That’s key.
  • The iPad would definitely kick your Asus Notebook’s ass bigtime. That’s why you would need one.

• Top 10 Reasons The Apple iPad Will Put Amazon’s Kindle Out of Business

  tags: iPad, kindle

  • 3) The compatibility. iPad supports ePub out of the box, overcoming publishers’ resistance to having to support a proprietary format such as Kindle’s; and creating compatibility with books sold through a leading standard format through any channel. (Something tells me Amazon will be making an announcement about ePub support real soon…)
  • 5) The experience. The Kindle provides a good functional experience for readers—in a very Bezosian way, it meets all our needs. But Apple’s creation goes beyond, to make the experience fun and cool.  You can swipe through pages on an iPad.  On the Kindle, you have to dutifully click a button.
  • 7) The apps. In a digital age, a book is (finally!) becoming more than just words on a page. But the Kindle has been slow to recognize this.
  • 9) The price. For $10 more than a Kindle DX, consumers get an incredible ebook reader, and so much more: a device that they can use for, well, pretty much anything. The options, consumer experience, and flexibility for that $10 are a no-brainer.
  • It’s clear that Amazon is already scared: witness their recent moves in the last few days running up to Apple’s announcement. Just this month, they’ve announced an app framework and a new royalty structure to be more attractive to publishers – and both moves are clearly defensive catch-up plays to respond to the threat of the iPad. Amazon is even trying to win love by giving away free Kindles to their best customers.

  • Plus the 10 hour battery life stinks for an ereader. If I take a trip I just want to pack my ereader and go. I don’t want to have to worry about packing a cord, finding an outlet, or bringing a power converter to charge it. I have to bring all those for my laptop why would I pack both.

    Give me at least 3 days of battery life, on battery life not standby. Then maybe I could at least take it on a weekend trip without concern.

    And as for it replacing my laptop on a trip, no way. I can’t do work on this, I can’t answer 50 emails in 30 minutes, I can’t edit Word documents, nor can I listen to pandora and work at the same time.

    Sorry, this is just a cool looking toy, but it serves no purpose.

  • I am not Apple fanboy. I never had iPhone or Ipod touch. But i want to get iPad. The reason why:
    I am an engineering student. I read a loooooooot of color PDFs and i buy eTexbooks on Coursresmart, which has an app in the app store. I also could use some of the calculator apps…Plus i need portability and low weight. Both of wich iPad has.
    And if i can watch movies, browse internet, listen to the music – that is a big plus.

    In my opinion iPad will not be as popular as iPhone, but it will fill the “want”(not need) of the average consumer. And Apple created iPad precisely for an average consumer.

    Bottom line if you don’t like it, if it is not what u want – don’t buy it. But i will.

  • This is about creating a new category of device that fills needs people didn’t even know they had.
    And Apple is very, very good at that.

    No, I’m not a fanboy. But I can recognize when someone creates a breakthrough device.

    Yes, it’s a 1.0 device – and it will surely only get better with future releases.

  • However, some people (maybe a lot) will buy ipad, but IMO these will be a totally different kind of costumers. More the kind that wants the new gadget to show of (and because it’s fun to use).

    Then, apple will leverage on these gadget lovers to claim X million people bought its crap and they’ll say they have the best ebook reader, blablabla… In the end everyone will start thinking they are right and they’ll buy their tablet thinking it’s the best experience when it’s not.

    PS: I still love macbook pros

  • If you want a conventional reading experience, then, of course, the Kindle/Sony wins. Eink alone will guarantee that. But conventional reading is being challenged here and for that reason the iPad will be a major contender in the field. In the long run, the richer reader experience will trumph. In the short run, there is a place for both types of devices.

  • A lot of the books I read are design-focused. Color is a must have and is why I held off on buying a device until now.

    There is no one, single use case that applies for all people

  • Callywag & Rick,

    I don’t think you understand the broad consumer audience.

    Only a small percent of consumers are as passionate as you are about e-Ink. Most would rather have something they can click a hyperlink on and get a full-color rendered page.

  • Kindle is a niched product and not necessarily threatened a multi-purpose device such as the iPad.

  • Maybe so if you think of ebooks in the paradigm of printed books.

    There is a space for a new style of book that is a whole convergence of different media – to which e-Ink would be unsuited.

  • e-Ink. Not so hot for other forms of printed media. Newspapers, Magazines, Comics, and Text Books.

    GAME OVER. (Actually maybe i’ll wait until the iPad is actually released)

  • I read for hours on the iPhone using the Kindle app and Stanza, and the assertion that doing so on a LED backlit screen “kills your eyes” is completely and totally false.

    The idea that the Kindle is more comfortable on the eyes is another common assertion, and in my view it’s also false to fact. I had two Kindles (G1 and G2) and sent both back. You want to really kill your eyes? Try reading the Kindle’s fuzzy low-resolution low-contrast 75% gray text on a 25% gray background.

    It was so bad that the only way to make the text legible was to increase the font size… to the point where the iPhone’s screen displayed more words per “page”.

    So much for a dedicated reader.

    The Kindle might be better if you spend most of your time standing outdoors and reading under the light of the noon sun, but forget reading indoors under anything other than optimum lighting conditions… unless, perhaps, you clip a glaring, silly-looking book light to it.

    Then there’s the slow refresh rate, the headache inducing let’s-invert-the-entire-screen page turns, the…

    Never mind. The ONLY thing e-ink had going for it was battery life, and today that’s simply not enough. The sooner it’s relegated to the technological scrap heap, the better for us all.

  • Thank you for your comment, Michael. It made sense.

    I have extreme allergies to dust, etc. I read digital books on my Kindle iPhone app and have waited for a color eBook reader.

    I watched videos showcasing the Kindle 1, 2 and DX and was troubled by the method that pages were “turned” and refreshed. I simply didn’t like it. The B&N Nook seemed even worse. So I have held off buying anything.

    I like the iPad a lot. I know I will buy one as my official eBook reader as soon as they are released.

  • I am thoroughly impressed by Amazon’s PR triumph regarding e-Ink. It is utterly remarkable how there are so many people who genuinely believe e-Ink is better on their eyes than a LED-backed LCD display. This is just utterly false.

    When I want to read in bed (while my wife sleeps), I have to clip on one of those little book lights. It’s convenient and practical, but after 30 minutes, my eyes are very tired. The book is unevenly lit, some parts of the page are darker than others, it’s very straining. I usually just put the book down and open a laptop instead. Clear, bright, crisp, evenly lit LCD is infinitely more pleasing on the eyes. I dial down the brightness a bit (my pupils are fully dilated in the dark) and I can read like this for hours.

    E-Ink is a masterful marketing gimmick by Amazon and eventually, people will figure this out.

  • The only advantage I see of the ipad over the kindle is the color screen. And that gets defeated by its battery life (10 hours is nothing compared to the days or weeks a kindle can go).

    When e-ink comes out with its color screens that will fall as well.

    The additional functionality is all already covered by my iphone. So price/value wise… iphone (which is also a phone and fulfills a real need) + laptop (which is also a huge productivity tool and fulfills a real need) + kindle (toy to augment the other two) really is a far better value than iphone+laptop+ipad.

    the thing that will sell the ipad is the brand which will make it a moderate success. but if you break your ipad, will you replace it? If you break your laptop/iphone you most certainly will. If you break your kindle… you probably will because its far cheaper.

  • If Apple supports epub, then there are plenty of sources for ebooks OTHER than the iBookstore, or one could always run the Kindle app, or the B&N app, or the Stanza app, or…

  • It’s not a just Large iPod. Can you imagine writing penning notes on an iPod? Nope! But what you can imagine is a developer making a pretty sweet Journal app that will allow us to do just that…

    Wake Up people.

    Just because you didn’t see a “Mind Blowing” app yesterday doesn’t mean they won’t be created within the next two months.

    What we all witnessed yesterday will soon be extended way beyond the cliche techies. It will be in anybody’s hands that doesn’t mind plopping down $500 big ones.

  • totally agree. It doesn’t replace anything for me. I have a macbook, iphone and a kindle. all the hubbub about eyestrain – i have significantly less eyestrain on the kindle than I do with an lcd display.
  • You are also forgetting the younger generation who are accustomed to reading on backlit screens (smart phones and computers).

  • I read entire books on my iPhone. I’ve read entire books on an iPaq, and on a Palm.

    The primary reason most people don’t read ebooks on notebooks is that when you’re relaxing or in bed a laptop is heavy and awkward to hold and manipulate.

    The backlit screen has little to do with it.

  • I can use a kindle outside in full sun.
  • Comparing the iPad to the Kindle isn’t like comparing a computer to a typewriter, it’s like comparing a knife to scissors. The knife is obviously better because it can cut so many different things and the scissors are really good at one important task. I predict that scissors will be replaced by knives. They are so much prettier too and come with 60% more hype.
  • A digital ink reader under a touch sensitive glass pane with gesture control would be nice though.

• The iPad Will Make Apple’s Acquisition Of Quattro Wireless Look Even Smarter

  tags: iPad, Ads

  • Bigger ads that feel more ‘natural’ than on smaller-size screens, in other words, which undoubtedly means more revenue from in-app display advertising, not to mention an almost certain increase of in-app purchases in most cases.

  • During the latest Apple earnings call, the company made it clear that they did not step into the mobile advertising game as an afterthought, and that they want developers to make money off their apps through advertising with a network they own and control, too.

    Meaning, Apple will not let Google / AdMob and third-party mobile advertising players run the show. Owning Quattro, Apple has picked up another moneymaker from the App Store goldrush it has itself unleased, and the iPad will only reinforce that situation.

  • The same will likely be true on the iPad, but the extra screen real estate gives publishers and ad networks a lot more leverage. And conveniently, Apple is now in a position where it controls both the development environment, the hardware apps run on, the distribution and purchasing platform, as well as a powerful mobile advertising network developers can tap in order to grow their returns on development and marketing investments.

    Advertisers spent just $416 million on mobile ads in 2009, compared with $22 billion on Web sites, according to eMarketer, but mobile ad spending is expected to grow to $1.6 billion by 2013. Apple clearly wants a significant piece of that pie, and it already has a lot of what it takes to get just that in place.

• Cocoia Blog » iPad UI Roundup

  tags: iPad, design

  • 

• A Kindle World blog: A Million Free Google Books in ePub – for Kindle

  tags: kindle, epub, google

  • To get a free Google book (most written before 1923 but there are some nice older magazines there as well), go to Google’s book site.

      To find a free book (they are all mixed with $$$-books), click on “Full Preview” as those tend to be the free ones.  Then do a search for what you want.

      At the top right, once you choose a book, you’ll see “Download” which will be a pull-down menu showing a choice of PDF or ePub.

      If you have a Kindle DX, you might prefer to just get the PDF.  If the words on the PDF are too small though, then get the ePub file.  IF you download an ePub file, then:

• Google Now Offers Over a Million Free Ebooks in EPUB Format

  tags: epub, books

  • To download a book, search for a title over at Google Books. Public domain titles will have a download link in the upper right corner. Which brings us to the first major difference between the Kindle and this Google ()-Sony open book strategy: while Amazon only offers 300,000 titles, Google’s million books aren’t, for the most part, the most attractive ones, and Sony’s own ebook library doesn’t offer a choice as good as Amazon – at least when it comes to modern titles.

    Sure, if you’re interested in an oldie, such as the Memoirs of Granville Sharp, Google’s library is a good choice, but if you’re looking to buy a digital copy of the latest bestseller, you’re more likely to find it on the Kindle than in Google’s library and Sony’s ebook store combined. You can sometimes buy an ebook online and then transfer it to your Sony ebook reader, but on the Kindle it’s simpler and easier to do.

• Savory: Native Kindle epub and PDF Converter – O’Reilly Radar

  tags: Kindle, epub, converter

  • He is developing Savory, the first native Kindle application. Savory is an open source epub and PDF converter that actually runs natively on the Kindle. While it doesn’t add anything that you couldn’t do from a desktop, it streamlines the process, allowing you copy epubs and PDFs to your Kindle over USB or download them from the web, and immediately read them offline. (O’Reilly provides bookworm, which converts DRM free epubs to HTML and lets you read them through the Kindle’s web browser, as well as DRM-free .mobi formatted versions of much of O’Reilly’s catalog at O’Reilly Ebook Bundles.) Here’s Jesse on why he created Savory:

    I’m in love with my Kindle. I’ve been reading ebooks on screens of various sorts for many years, but the Kindle2 is the first device that I actually enjoy reading as much as I enjoy reading paper books. I’ve tried other ebook readers, but for a variety of reasons, they just don’t work for me. My goal is to make it easier for readers to read more free content on the Kindle.

    Savory is based on the open source project Calibre — a python application that lets you convert between multiple ebook formats. The implementation is a background daemon that uses inotify to immediately convert the file to the mobi format. To get a performance boost, it uses unladen-swallow — Google’s optimized version of Python. I find it exciting that this paves the way for 3rd party applications on the Kindle.

• 分析师预计苹果iPad成本：499美元版本成本仅270美元_业界_科技时代_新浪网

  tags: iPad

  • 　　较之只能通过Wi-Fi上网版本的iPad，具备Wi-Fi和3G上网功能版本的iPad给苹果带来了更高的利润。只能通过Wi-Fi上网、32GB版本iPad售价为599美元，实际造价为316美元，苹果获得了48.1%的利润率；具备Wi-Fi和3G上网功能、32GB版本iPad售价为729美元，实际造价为332美元，苹果获得了55.1%的利润率。根据马绍尔的估算，这是苹果从iPad获得的最高利润率。

    　　如果只能通过Wi-Fi上网版本的iPad销量超过具备Wi-Fi和3G上网功能版本的iPad，那么苹果从iPad系列产品中获得的总体利润率大概为50%。马绍尔在研究报告中表示，iPad是苹果的又一个吸金产品，他将iPad今年的销量预期从220万部上调至700万部。

• 乔布斯放言出版商不满亚马逊 iPad挑战Kindle_业界_科技时代_新浪网

  tags: iPad, Kindle

  • 　分析师们预计，iPad发售第一年销量将达到400万-1000万部。恩德勒预计为400万-600万部，具体数据主要取决于市场竞争反应。不过，亚马逊不会坐以待毙，任由苹果重演在数字音乐领域的成功，争夺电子书出版领域的主导地位。亚马逊可能必须作出调整，从而与iPad以及竞争对手的第三代电子书阅读器产品展开更为激烈的较量。

• 苹果iPad推出疑问缠身_业界_科技时代_新浪网

  tags: iPad, Kindle

  • 　　此外，电子书籍的价格也值得注意。当初推出iTunes音乐店面的时候，苹果方面对于每首歌曲99美分的售价是着实大力宣传了一番的，但是在 iBookstore身上，他们的调门显然就低了许多。乔布斯的演示版已经购买了肯尼迪参议员(Edward Kennedy)的回忆录《真正的指南针》，而其售价是14.99美元。亚马逊则不同，他们在出版商方面所进行的努力确保了每本书的价格最高不过9.99 美元。

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