Apple excitement mounts as the secret new iProduct launch looms
Few clues about latest creation but best guess points to touchscreen tablet offering music, web browsing and reading With hours to go until Apple unveils its latest creation – believed to be a keyboardless "tablet" computer with a 10-inch touch-sensitive screen – the internet is abuzz with last-minute rumours and speculation about what it will be like, and more importantly, who will benefit most from it. The machine – dubbed the iSlate by fans building on the Californian company's previous attachment to the i prefix, and slate for touch-screen computers without a keyboard – will be launched by Steve Jobs, Apple's chief executive, in San Francisco tomorrow. The excitement has risen to levels not seen since Apple launched the iPhone in January 2007. Fan sites have vied to produce composite images and ask: "Is this Apple's new tablet?" But the key question is about which partners, particularly in games, music and publishing, will join Jobs on stage to show off content specially adapted for the large-scale format, which is expected to have a screen area about four times larger than the iPhone's. The Guardian has learned that a number of print publishers have been developing applications to be showcased on Wednesday – including Condé Nast, the publisher of Vogue and Wired magazine, and other European and American print groups. Other reports suggest developers from the New York Times have been camped for several weeks near Apple's Silicon Valley headquarters. Today, the organisation announced it had created a Reader Applications Division , giving "an operational and financial home to the products that offer a digital reading experience similar to the print platform". Many publishers are believed to be looking to the machine to start an explosion in ebook and electronic magazine and newspaper sales – just as the iPod did for downloaded music with iTunes Music Store in 2003, and the iPhone for apps (software applications) in 2008
Read more:
Apple excitement mounts as the secret new iProduct launch looms
Bigger Kindle DX goes global from 19 January
The Kindle DX with 2.5x the screen area will soon be available outside the US, at its original -- somewhat hefty -- price Amazon has started taking pre-orders for a global version of the big Kindle DX ebook reader, which will be released on 19 January at the same as last May's US launch price: $489 (£301). The DX will ship from the US to more than 100 countries including Australia, Hong Kong, Germany, Japan, Norway, Spain, South Africa, and the UK. A zoomable wireless coverage map on Amazon's site shows where the device's built-in 3G/Edge/GPRS connection is supported. The Kindle DX is a much larger beast: it has a 9.7 inch E Ink screen (1200 x 824 pixels) instead of the 6 inch screen of the original Kindle ($259), which I reviewed in October . This makes it more suitable for digital newspapers and magazines. According to Amazon, it can hold 3.500 books compared to the original's 1,500 -- it has around 3.3GB of memory -- and offers longer battery life. A lot of ebook readers were on display at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, including new Sony models and Plastic Logic's much more stylish (and much more expensive) Que. However, the Kindle DX benefits from the Amazon infrastructure: more than 400,000 ebooks can be silently downloaded from Amazon's store, and it's all too easy to pay for them. Amazon.com Gadgets Ebooks Jack Schofield guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
See more here:
Bigger Kindle DX goes global from 19 January
Amazon admits: international Kindle users will pay more
• International buyers to be charged 40% more per book • Admission contrasts with company's earlier comments Amazon has admitted that international users of its Kindle book reader will be paying significantly more to buy books than their American counterparts. Since announcing the worldwide launch of the Kindle on Wednesday, many users had questioned whether they would be forced to pay more for downloading books wirelessly to the £200 gadget. The company had attempted to allay those fears by insisting that foreign users would not be paying extra for downloads - but it has now emerged that the internet retail giant will indeed be charging higher prices for consumers outside the United States. When asked by the Guardian precisely how much downloads would cost, an Amazon.co.uk spokesman revealed that foreign customers - including those in Britain - would be paying $13.99 (£8.75) per book instead of the American price of $9.99 (£6.25). That amounts to a 40% premium for the same title. "International customers do pay a higher price for their books than US customers due to higher operating costs outside of the US," said the spokesman. "Additionally, VAT rates in the EU are higher on ebooks than on print books." Those comments are in strict contrast to earlier statements by the company , in which it had said specifically that "there are no additional fees for international customers". The shift is likely to raise questions over the future of the gadget - which goes on sale worldwide on October 19. Although prices are likely to drop when the company opens a Kindle store on its local websites, including Amazon.co.uk, the move has already angered consumer groups who suggested that the price hike was bad news for non-American users. "From our point of view, clearly companies can charge what they want to," said Matt Bath, the technology editor for Which? magazine. "However, I find it gobsmacking that the same piece of digital data is going to cost $4 more for a British customer than it will be for an American one. It's not like it costs any import taxes. It will be interesting to hear if this is anything other than a stealth tax." The extra costs are believed to derive in part from the fact that the device is being sold through Amazon.com - rather than the company's local outposts - and allows users to download books wirelessly from the company's American website.
More:
Amazon admits: international Kindle users will pay more
Microsoft denies digital reader plan
Software group says it has no plan to develop an e-reader to rival Amazon's Kindle Microsoft has no plans to develop a digital book reader to compete with the fast-growing popularity of Amazon's Kindle or a device that rival Apple is reportedly developing. A day after Amazon announced an international version of its gadget, Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer said the company had no need for its own e-reader, since it already supplies the software that runs the most popular reading device. "We have a device for reading
Original post:
Microsoft denies digital reader plan
Petabytes on a budget
Backblaze was shocked by the cost of data servers and cloud-based storage systems, so it decided to build its own drive pods. But along the way, it has also raised interesting questions about the long-term costs of cloud computing, and how firms like Amazon can turn a profit Just after I'd bought my first terabyte hard drive, up comes a blog post about assembling cheap petabytes of storage (1 petabyte = 1,048,576 gigabytes). Backblaze says it provides unlimited storage for only $5 per month, so, the post says , "After looking at several overpriced commercial solutions, we decided to build our own custom Backblaze Storage Pods: 67 terabyte 4U servers for $7,867"
Continued here:
Petabytes on a budget
Technophile: Amazon’s Kindle DX is bigger and bolder than the original
Amazon's Kindle DX is bigger and bolder than the original but there's still no UK release date in sight The Kindle DX has a lot to live up to. At its grand unveiling in New York in February, Amazon's chief executive, Jeff Bezos, suggested this large ebook reader for textbooks and periodicals (costing $489, or £296) would boost students' grades, kill the inkjet printer and, oh yes, save the newspaper industry. Even in the face of such hyperbole, unboxing the Kindle DX is a joy. A device that previously felt awkwardly mid-sized and halfway between an overweight mobile phone and a flimsy netbook now feels comfortable in its slim, plastic and brushed-metal skin. However, the price of its new gravitas is a 535g weight that requires two hands. As with the original Kindle ($359), the DX uses e-ink technology to deliver crisp text that is extremely easy on the eye. The largest font size (you can alter it at the touch of a button) has letters that are nearly 0.5cm tall and virtually leap off the screen. Pictures also benefit from extra room, despite a grainy monochrome reproduction. Its 9.7in screen, while larger than its predecessor, still only provides the reading area of a large paperback. That's considerably smaller than a full-sized textbook, let alone a Berliner-format paper such as the Guardian. The formatting of newspapers (including the Independent, the Times and the Financial Times, from the UK) remains basic, with a single column, no crossheads and a clunky menu system. The physical appeal of browsing headlines and flicking through sections is reduced to a tediously linear slog, much like reading the thousands of blogs you can also subscribe to. There are compensations for working digitally, of course. You can add bookmarks and notes to books and magazines, "clip" articles and blog entries to read later, and search any of your items for words or phrases. The DX works well with other formats: text documents and .mobi format ebooks work as smoothly as Amazon's proprietary AZW files, and PDFs render quickly with plenty of detail, although you can't annotate, rotate or zoom in.
Excerpt from:
Technophile: Amazon's Kindle DX is bigger and bolder than the original
We must make e-books pirate-proof | Seth Freedman
Publishers must learn from the mistakes of the music industry and protect e-book copyrighted content from thieves On Monday, I said the traveller's prayer when getting on the bus, as I do every time I go on a journey out of Tel Aviv. Rather than carrying a prayer book with me, I have an e-siddur installed on my phone for just such occasions, allowing me instant access to the necessary text. Likewise, I don't bother buying a paper anymore, preferring to sit and read the news via my phone's LCD screen; over the space of the 40-minute bus ride, I'd devoured articles and op-ed columns from a plethora of publications with the greatest of ease. By using my phone in this way, I play my part in contributing to the slow death of both the media and publishing industries , not to mention all the related trades which suffer in the wake of their decline. Publishers of prayer books miss out on the revenue from potential purchasers who opt instead for free online versions; likewise, newspapers have lost control of their own content, and are paying a heavy price for their incapacity. As far as newspapers are concerned, there appears little that can be done to stop the rot, save for desperately trying to salvage some scraps of revenue from online advertising and subscription. For the publishing world, however, there is still time to address the potential catastrophe awaiting the industry, if only those at the helm of the flotilla are willing to chart a course out of earshot of the e-book sirens' song. It is no secret that the moment the music business sold its soul to the compact disc devil, the industry was in serious trouble. CDs, followed by MP3s, meant that the listening public now had access to high quality files of their favourite music, and could pirate copies at will, should their desire to save money prove more compelling than their sense of ethics. The music industry went into near-terminal decline in the Napster years, thanks to an inability to keep control over, or make money from, the copyrighted material for which the record companies had paid through the nose. The lure of forcing consumers to "upgrade" from vinyl to CD, then from CD to MP3, was financially expedient in the short term, but in the long term was a modern-day equivalent of Dorian Gray's fateful pact. The publishing world is teetering on the brink of a similarly suicidal drop today. With the advent of the Kindle , along with all manner of related new royalty systems and e-publishing deals, the industry is being lured into a trap from which it might never escape – and it's easy to see why they're tempted. Borders' latest financial results showed a 12% decline in revenue at its bookshops, largely due to the impact of the credit crisis, and in a climate where the public has less disposal money to spend, low-cost models such as e-book publications are seen as a natural way for publishers to ride out the economic storm. With resistance weakening towards the concept of e-books, Amazon reported a 24% increase in earnings in the first quarter of this year, driven in no small parts by sales of its Kindle e-reader
Originally posted here:
We must make e-books pirate-proof | Seth Freedman
Nick Booth on the earning potential of working for a question answering service
A growing number of mobile and computer services actually have people behind them answering the questions. But can you even earn the minimum wage? Society has a neat way of neutralising the advantages that technology brings us. Take working from home. In the 1990s, early adopters found that working from home could be a joyous, productive experience. As ever, though, industry and society are collaborating to create new ways of neutralising these quality-of-life gains. As the scope of work we can do at home broadens, companies are using technology to outsource more and more tasks. Sometimes they'll exploit the knowledge of enthusiasts, AKA crowdsourcing. And other times they'll trade on the expertise of part-time homeworkers, assigning them mini-jobs and paying them by the minute. Which could be called crudsourcing. But can these micropayments be aggregated into macroeconomic wages? Or are these peanut payments turning us homeworkers into monkeys? Answers at your fingertips The text information service AQA 63336 (Any Question Answered) routes all its incoming questions to homeworkers to look up and answer. For every pound charged to the mobile phone user, the homeworker gets 30p. As part-time jobs go, this is pretty cerebral. You need initiative, fast fingers and an impressive mental map of cyberspace.
Read more here:
Nick Booth on the earning potential of working for a question answering service
Amazon readies bigger Kindle for news and textbooks
Amazon is preparing to launch a new, big-screen version of its Kindle e-book reader - just three months after it for releasing the second generation of the gadget. The new Kindle, which is due to be introduced at a press conference in New York on Wednesday, is set to supplement the existing model by providing a larger screen that can more easily display newspaper and magazine pages... potentially giving the struggling print industry a chance to find some light at the end of the tunnel. Rumours of a larger model have been doing the rounds for about a year, but the New York Times reports that not only is it imminent, but that a number of print operations are hooking up with Amazon for the announcement, including (surprise) the New York Times: Unlike tiny mobile phones and devices like the Kindle that are made to display text from books, these new gadgets, with screens roughly the size of a standard sheet of paper, could present much of the editorial and advertising content of traditional periodicals in generally the same format as they appear in print. And they might be a way to get readers to pay for those periodicals — something they have been reluctant to do on the Web. The existing Kindle already offers users the chance to buy some newspaper subscriptions, so that their paper is delivered to their e-book each morning. But it's no secret that newspaper organisations have been looking for a device that they feel can do the printed form justice and help them shift to a more hi-tech delivery system (I know plenty of titles have had exploratory meetings with hardware manufacturers over the years). For all the talk of newsprint, however, Larry Dignan at ZDNet says the move is really about textbooks : allowing students, a natural constituency given their propensity to lug huge piles of books around, to use larger format titles without losing anything. That's certainly a big potential market, even if the Kindle 2 has been selling well . The new device is expected to have a screen that's approximately the size of an A4 piece of paper, as opposed to the current paperback-sized 6-inch display. But reaction so far has been muted - Peter Kafka at MediaMemo says "It doesn't matter how you deliver the information if you can't afford to generate it in the first place", while MG Siegler at Techcrunch says it's a Hail Mary pass. I can't help but agree; it's a strange little manoeuvre from Amazon
Go here to see the original:
Amazon readies bigger Kindle for news and textbooks
Letters and blogs: 30 April 2009
Reading the future People are paying for the same content when it is consumed on devices or in another format (Ebooks battle for next chapter, 23 April). Example: books are the fastest-growing category on the iPhone. The Espresso book machine is revolutionary. Nokia's Comes With Music is becoming a success. The Amazon Kindle is already making traction and we see that the traditional media will lose out – unless it evolves, ITV will miss out on Susan Boyle fame. The caveat is: prices may be lower in the digital world – and that means traditional media will suffer due to their large overheads, ie, content will be paid for, but at a lower pricepoint. That's partly why ebooks never took off, since many tried to charge the same cost for the ebook as they do for the print version (which is silly) but only now is the ebook market taking off driven by Kindle and Sony book readers but at lower pricepoints
View original post here:
Letters and blogs: 30 April 2009