Apple Intends To 'Digitally Destroy' Textbook Publishing 396
bonch writes "Apple is expected to announce e-book creation and social interaction tools at their January 19 media event taking place in New York, the heart of the publishing industry. Along with expanded interactivity features such as test-taking, the event is expected to showcase an ePub 3-compatible 'Garageband for e-books' to address the lack of simple digital publishing tools. Steve Jobs reportedly considered textbook publishing to be 'an $8 billion a year industry ripe for digital destruction' and was directly involved with Apple's efforts in this area until his death."
$.99 Textbooks? Doubtful but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's hope this will loosen the grip of the major publishing companies. Paying $150 for a textbook (at least in the US) because you HAVE to get the newest revision to correct a few spelling mistakes is bullshit!
gasmonso ReligiousFreaks.com [religiousfreaks.com]
Re:$.99 Textbooks? Doubtful but... (Score:5, Insightful)
With the way things would go, we would end up paying $175 for an e-book that would get denied access to upon the end of the semester, or at least pay $150 for something that cannot be resold.
Re:$.99 Textbooks? Doubtful but... (Score:5, Informative)
How the fuck is this insightful when Apple has been the one keeping the price of content down traditionally? You forgetting the $1.99 and $2.99 RIAA was asking for, for single tracks?!
Dumbass.
You are ignorant. Apple raised the default ebook price when they entered the digital publishing market with the iPad. Amazon had set a very low ebook price and Apple colluded with publishers who were upset that Amazon was actually subsidizing the price by selling it below cost in order to raise ebook prices by 50%. With a large digital publishing alternative to Amazon, the publishers forced Amazon to raise prices by 50% as well. Thanks to Apple's meddling, most ebook prices went up by 50%. This was widely publicized when it happened - we even discussed it on Amazon.
So to reiterate, the GP is insightful because Apple's only previous digital publishing endeavor was based around Apple negotiating to raise all prices for ebooks by 50%.
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I wouldn't require that book for the classes I teach. I think that most university professors would do the same.
There's no point in requiring a book that expensive. The students wouldn't buy it, anyway. They would get by as best they could on lecture notes and other resources.
Re:$.99 Textbooks? Doubtful but... (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's hope this will loosen the grip of the major publishing companies. Paying $150 for a textbook (at least in the US) because you HAVE to get the newest revision to correct a few spelling mistakes is bullshit!
gasmonso ReligiousFreaks.com [religiousfreaks.com]
While I had no love for the whole textbook scam back in college either, nor am I all that comfortable with Apple (or anyone else) "destroying" print textbooks.
Re:$.99 Textbooks? Doubtful but... (Score:4, Informative)
I am. Good riddance to an evil industry. Even better, since these e-textbooks will be digitally transferred, it won't be long before some smart people figure out how to pirate them, so even if they try to change obscene amounts for the ePub versions, rampant piracy will help keep costs down for struggling students.
Re:$.99 Textbooks? Doubtful but... (Score:4, Informative)
It's a lot easier, faster, and cheaper to email copies of a .epub file to all your friends, or better yet to post it on BitTorrent, than to go to Kinko's and make thousands of copies of paper. Of course, a paper textbook could be scanned into .pdf form, but even so someone has to take the time to do it first, and either have a lot of time on their hands to scan page-by-page on a flatbed scanner, or have access to a $$$$$ automated scanner.
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Re:$.99 Textbooks? Doubtful but... (Score:5, Insightful)
You know that an industry is way overcharging if buying a $500 tablet to buy cheaper books is a desirable option.
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You know that an industry is way overcharging if buying a $500 tablet to buy cheaper books is a desirable option.
Exactly!
However, I am also in unison with the others who expect expensive eTBooks and only marginal increased utility.
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Granted iPads do other things as well, but they aren't anywhere near good enough with battery life to compete with a book. I think by the time my nephew is in college in like 16 years or so it will be a much more reasonable proposition in that regards, but for the time being, the book is probably better for studying.
I personally prefer ebooks for most things these days as it means that I no longer have to decide whether to store or sell my books, but buying an iPad is going a bit far IMHO.
Re:$.99 Textbooks? Doubtful but... (Score:5, Interesting)
Granted iPads do other things as well, but they aren't anywhere near good enough with battery life to compete with a book.
I'd also argue they don't do nearly enough to compete with a book. When I used to use physical textbooks, I'd write all over them. Then I started using a tablet PC for all my note taking, and I would scan in my textbooks to use digitally. With the stylus I was still able to write in them, but I would also cut and paste images, charts, etc into my notes during class. One notable example I remember is when professor trying to draw a diagram from the book onto the chalkboard, I just copied the diagram over. Everyone else was going off his mangled reproduction while I had the real thing.
Now we have the iPad, which doesn't have a digitizer and doesn't allow you to cut and paste much between applications. Everyone is trying to shoehorn it fit into education, when much better (albeit poorly marketed) alternative have been there all along.
Re:$.99 Textbooks? Doubtful but... (Score:5, Interesting)
You can use your finger or a stylus easily to draw over things.
This is not nearly the same as a good digitizer/stylus. With my tablet PC I had near pen/pencil level of precision and detail. I own an iPad and a stylus, and it is laughably inferior.
As for cut & paste, you can screen-shoot ANY application with a simple press of power + Home. and use that image in any application. In most apps you can also cut + paste text as well, iOS has much better universal support for that than other platforms.
On my tablet, I had my textbook open on the left, and One note open on the right. I would just lasso the image with the One Note screen grab and it was right in my notes. What you're suggesting is cumbersome and takes far too much time to do in the middle of lecture.
I'll believe it when I see it (Score:2)
Please remember this is the same Apple that forced ebook prices higher because they wanted to take a larger cut than places like Amazon, but Apple forced publishes to set retail prices the same for all outlets.
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In my undergrad, I took biology and chemistry classes. But then they go and charge the same price for information/research (for introductory level courses anyways) that has not changed for decades. The same book that cost $200 in 1990 is still $200 in 2010, still has tons of typos, ambiguous phrasing, still doesn't source the material and is by that point in the 50th edition. Maybe the typos are introduced on purpose as an excuse to come out with a new revised edition, with -different- typos.
If you want $20
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It depends on the subject. I am retaking an accounting class, and that text book is on a update schedule of every year and a half to two years. Now what exactly has changed that much in the practice of accounting? Much of accounting, I will remind everyone, is dictated by the IRS. So again, how much has changed? Catch is that they change the workbook problems at the end of each chapter, so you will be buying it.
For the most part, professors let the publishers go nuts. I had *one* professor that talked dire
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I think you just stopped reading my post before the end. I said, professors I know in that situation post both numbers in the assignment handouts. I've been a student and an instructor in this situation enough, and most people are aware of it, and we work around it. Yes it's a problem when these new editions come out. But the point is I've never seen a situation where the student was told "No, you MUST buy the new edition." I've even seen the situation where there's an entirely new chapter, and the professo
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If it's anything like digital software distribution, the online price for a new book will be the same as the retail price. Maybe cut off a few dollars to attract some school board attention. When the middle man is cut out it means that the publisher can pocket the savings instead of passing them on to the consumer.
OUGHT to be FREE textbooks (Score:3)
And by "free" I both free as in freedom and free as in beer.
90% of all of the material taught in K-12 and probably 50% of all of the material taught in an non-technology focused undergraduate degree hasn't changed in decades, and a non-trivial chunk of it hasn't changed in centuries. Granted that teaching methodology has improved some, but there's simply no logical reason why we as a society have allowed textbook publishers to bleed us for countless billions the way we have.
It's crazy at the university
Overly dramatic title (Score:2)
Titles like that make for good drama, but we must stand back for a second to see what this means.
The "digital destruction" of textbook publishing has been underway for quite some time. The Internet has made the dissemination of information easy and cheap. Even before the Internet, digital mediums such as DVD and Laserdisc were used by educational institutions for teaching.
Self-published homemade works are now commonplace with music, movies, news (blogs), interactive media such as webpages and software. F
Re:Overly dramatic title (Score:4, Insightful)
One problem with "self-published homemade works" is that there are few areas where these are yet of any quality.
The internet gives everyone a voice, true. This carries many benefits, but it also weeds out the structure that before prevented kooks and cranks from influencing as many as they do today.
The mechanisms by which this was accomplished are not in and of themselves wholly good, but there was good in the fact that most people with influential voices in media, in medicine, etc. were educated and trained. Today bloggers feel they are journalists and rumors/gossip too often pass for news. Fact checking, not just in media but in people's psyches as a whole, is quickly becoming extinct.
You can look at the growth in general public belief in any number of dubious conspiracy theories, in the emoting against vaccines, and armies of the dumb outraged about breastfeeding and any number of other topics which in the past were inane and not considered social advocacy issues. The internet has amplified many times over the voice of the dumb, while the voice of those qualified to speak on a topic is also amplified, it's often being drowned out.
Self-publishing of educational textbooks is not, in my opinion, going to affect this trend in the right direction.
It was said once that evil will always triumph because good is dumb. Well.. stupid triumphs because the internet age hasn't adapted for it, and smart isn't loud enough.
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One problem with "self-published homemade works" is that there are few areas where these are yet of any quality.
Totally untrue. See my sig for a catalog of free books. Many of these are of very high quality. Here are a few examples:
Those are just the first few that came to mind.
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Actually, at least in the case of college textbook, this is really largely irrelevant. It is the professor who selects the textbook, and, hopefully, she knows her subject well enough to be able to distinguish good books from crap.
I wonder if the textbook industry... (Score:4, Insightful)
... will now sue Apple for being similar to their products, taking inspiration from an existing product, and causing marketplace confusion in the textbook market.
Don't we already have that? (Score:4, Insightful)
Aren't most e-readers able to display PDF files? I am sure e-PUB has more features, but creating multi-page PDFs or converting docs using Calibre seems to work well.
BTW, If we get rid of publishers, we lose the editor. Get ready for 1,000 page epics about cats.
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Aren't most e-readers able to display PDF files? I am sure e-PUB has more features, but creating multi-page PDFs or converting docs using Calibre seems to work well.
BTW, If we get rid of publishers, we lose the editor. Get ready for 1,000 page epics about cats.
I'm sure such feline themed tomes exist already, but I'm too lazy to check Amazon to verify.
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Does this count?
http://www.amazon.com/LOLcat-Bible-beginnin-Ceiling-stuffs/dp/1569757348 [amazon.com]
"Oh hai. In teh beginnin Ceiling Cat maded teh skiez An da Urfs, but he did not eated dem. ..."
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Does this count?
http://www.amazon.com/LOLcat-Bible-beginnin-Ceiling-stuffs/dp/1569757348 [amazon.com]
"Oh hai. In teh beginnin Ceiling Cat maded teh skiez An da Urfs, but he did not eated dem. ..."
Bah, Only 176 pages. You can do better than that.
Re:Don't we already have that? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, but PDFs are terrible on them typically. PDFs were designed so that a document would look the same and be printed the same in various places. The problem is that they do reflow the text and options for getting them to fit on the page aren't good. You can either scale them or you can zoom in and scroll around, neither of which is particularly desirable.
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BTW, If we get rid of publishers, we lose the editor. Get ready for 1,000 page epics about cats.
The rise of the freelance editor!
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Re:Don't we already have that? (Score:5, Informative)
Aren't most e-readers able to display PDF files?
Yes, but the experience sucks. For example, if the pdf was formatted with lines of text 18 cm wide, but you're viewing it on a reader with a 10 cm-wide screen, you're going to have to scroll back and forth with every line you read -- or resize it so small that the font becomes illegible.
converting docs using Calibre seems to work well.
Calibre works fine on some things, but not others. For example, it has no math support (basically because none of the output formats it supports, such as epub 2, have any math support).
I don't buy the claim in the Ars article that the big thing standing in the way of digital textbooks is that the tools for creating them are nonexistent, not good enough, or too hard to use. First off, textbook publishers have paid professionals who do this sort of thing. And in any case, the real barrier is that the ebook formats are extremely limited. The big issue for math and science textbooks is that the kindle and epub 2 formats don't support math properly. (You can display equations as bitmaps, but only if they're placed on a line by themselves in the middle of the page. Bitmapped equations won't scale properly when the user selects a different font, and they aren't accessible to blind people.) Epub 3 includes mathml, which is great, but there are currently zero readers on the market that support epub 3+mathml. Amazon has recently come out with the latest version of the kindle format, and it does not include math, so it seems unlikely that there will be math on the kindle in the foreseeable future. If and when readers start to support epub 3+mathml, there is no major technical barrier to creating textbooks with math in them. If you have tools to create xhtml+mathml (which are very easy to find), then it's trivial to create epub 3+mathml, because epub is basically just a set of html files packaged together in a zip file. Some OSS, such as epubcheck, already supports epub 3. I'm sure that tools such as Calibre will provide the necessary support (which will not be hard to do) once there is support from readers, although there is little motivation for the developers to do it right now, since there will no device that can actually do anything with the resulting file.
In any case, let's be realistic about what all this means. These books will have DRM, just like all commercial ebooks have already. The books will be priced just as exploitatively as current textbooks are, because the publishers know that that's what college students are currently paying.
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"there are currently zero readers on the market that support epub 3+mathml."
Fixing that would take a simple software update for the iPad or any other tablet manufacturer who wanted to get into the textbook business.
"let's be realistic about what all this means. These books will have DRM, just like all commercial ebooks have already. The books will be priced just as exploitatively as current textbooks are, because the publishers know that that's what college students are currently paying."
Remember the music
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BTW, If we get rid of publishers, we lose the editor.
No, the prof becomes the editor. I had a microwave RF class where the prof gave us a page of this, a page of that, etc etc.
Probably did add up to 1000 pages by the end of class. He did extort a $20 bill from each of us to pay for the photocopier, but it was better than buying a textbook.
I would like to see a mashup app where the textbook could be created out of little sources. Here's a 10 page article about smith charts that'll be 50 cents. Click here to add the free 3 page wikipedia article about basic
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I have been waiting for work of a art to be released for years!!
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PDF is intended for printing, and it shows.
I've just published an e-book, and epub is the vastly superior format. Since it is basically HTML, it will re-flow your text, you can change font sizes and fonts, it will work in both landscape and portrait and so on and so forth.
You don't want PDF for e-books. Download a few ebooks and a few PDF-books to an iPad or something and compare them.
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Editors frequently freelance as it is. It's mostly just small and medium sized publishing houses that employ their own editors.
Houghton Mifflin responds "Not so fast" (Score:2)
I'm pretty sure some of the bigger textbooks companies pay significant kickbacks to colleges and departments to require the latest editions their overpriced crap. Unless Apple is going to be offering similar kickbacks, I'm not holding my breath.
Re:Houghton Mifflin responds "Not so fast" (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm pretty sure some of the bigger textbooks companies pay significant kickbacks to colleges and departments to require the latest editions their overpriced crap.
No. Every time there's a textbook story on slashdot, someone posts this nonsense about "kickbacks." Every time I see it, I post a reply and ask for evidence. None is ever forthcoming.
I teach physics at a community college. I have been approached by many, many textbook reps. None has ever offered me a kickback.
Publishers do not need to offer kickbacks to get instructors to switch to the latest edition. The publisher simply stops selling the older edition, and the prof has no choice but to switch.
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Is it that hard to find a decent textbook that's either in the public domain or sold cheap?
Thanks to the entertainment industry, any textbook that is PD will be close on a century old. Across a huge proportion of human knowledge there's been a lot discovered and worked out in that time; the PD textbooks are of historical interest, but you can't teach from them. (There are very few that are current and PD; it takes a lot of work to write a textbook and authors mostly like to be reasonably compensated.)
Sold off cheap is much more of a sane option, except that it is hard to ensure that a whole class
Steve's Right (Score:5, Interesting)
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They've literally got students (and to a smaller sense, professors) by the balls.
You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.
the lack of simple digital publishing tools? (Score:3)
Any text editor.
Any word processor.
Any desktop publisher.
Any web page editor.
Any wiki page.
Any blog.
i.e. WTF?
Is this like when they branded lemonade as "Sprite" to increase the margin?
Re:the lack of simple digital publishing tools? (Score:5, Insightful)
And by "Apple propaganda" you mean "editorialising and guesswork by the summary writer"
All Apple has done is named a place and date and mentioned it's to do with education.
The "lack of publishing tools" thing is not from Apple.
But still, easier just to bash them based on things they didn't actually say. Carry on.
The problem with college textbooks (Score:3)
The problem with college textbooks is that you have to find someone who is
A) Willing to write a book
B) An expert in the subject who is able to take their knowledge and lay it out in such a way that it is useful to the student and the professor.
And what really makes them expensive is that there might be three or four thousand copies printed total, so that everything that went into writing that book has to be recouped off of just three or four thousand copies, instead of the millions of copies for pulp fiction titles.
The problems you speak of... (Score:2)
B) An expert in the subject who is able to take their knowledge and lay it out in such a way that it is useful to the student and the professor.
That doesn't seem to stop them.
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Re:The problem with college textbooks (Score:4, Informative)
Do you know how most textbooks are written?
One or more professors get together and say "hey, how about making a textbook about this?" Quite often this is because they have to teach a class on that topic and don't like any of the existing textbooks. These are the editors.
The editors pitch their idea to a publisher. If the publisher likes it, they say, sure, go for it. Now the editors ask their colleagues to contribute to the textbook. Chapters get written.
Finally, when the book is all put together (and I do mean all put together - the last chapter I wrote for a textbook had to be formatted just so, by me) it goes off to the publisher. Oh, and by the way, if anybody in that chain gets paid (other than the publisher), it's the editors, and it's not very much. But everybody gets to put it on their CV, which for an academic is supposed to be MUCH better than money. Or so we tell ourselves.
Now, I'm sure the publisher does more than just print off the book and market it, but it's not a whole lot more, and it's certainly not something that a big company like Apple couldn't do.
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The company I work for does produce among other things, college textbooks, but the colleges don't get a dime. We charge everyone the same amount, whether you are an individual, or a huge bookstore chain like B&N.
Cool title for an executive . . . (Score:2)
Interviewer: "So, Dr. Shiva, what are your responsibilities at Apple?"
Executive: "Well, as 'Director of Digital Destruction' at Apple . . . "
I'm surprised they didn't give it some schmaltzy name, like, "Re-birthing of New Education, for the Age of Aquarius Epoch" . . .
"Digital Destruction" is bound to get the attention of the DHS, TSA and their pals . . . "Hey, they're planning to destroy our Homeland Industry!"
WikiBooks and other sources (Score:3)
Wikibooks has been around for a while, it just lacks collaboration from real experts. MIT open courseware has some textbooks. Scientific papers are becoming openly available in many cases. The evolution is just not complete. But take it from someone who has written technical reports and is working on a space propulsion online textbook ( http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Space_Transport_and_Engineering_Methods [wikibooks.org] ), the hard part is the human writing and editing, not which software you do it on. Apple could have a slick program with a "make pretty" button, and people like me would still have to do all the same work to create the content.
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Yes, the layout tool isn't the biggest problem. What's missing is a "publisher" with a motive for making electronic textbooks cheap and easy.
Wikibooks is having trouble not because it doesn't have experts but because it doesn't have any quality control. Who wants to spend time writing a textbook that's going to get lost amongst a sea of crap? MIT open courseware is fine, but small. Scientific papers are in no way an acceptable replacement for textbooks.
What's needed is a company that will put a small am
Bookboon.com (Score:3, Informative)
www.bookboon.com are doing a good job providing free textbooks, written by Profs
Interesting, but still probably doomed. (Score:2, Informative)
This could be interesting. The biggest problem with this is the way the market works. Okay, so we make a book. The physical cost of the book (your college chemistry book) was $3.65. Once you included in the author, the editor, salesperson's salary, MY salary in IT, etc, it was $45. We sold it to the bookstores for that, then they sold it for $65. Which means that we could theoretically sell it for $42. Not a huge saving... except when you include that middleman charging $20 more.
So, if we were to sel
So we're to trust apple with publishing ? (Score:4, Insightful)
The very company which is going on suing spree in madness to prevent competitors ? and also famous for walled gardens and overcharging for anything ?
and why havent any of you brought this up until this comment ?
Ripped from the hands of Texas (Score:2)
the future (Score:2, Funny)
Re:the future (Score:5, Insightful)
Amazingly enough, "Apple fans" tend not to claim those things. The'll usually claim that Apple made a particular niche popular - portable music players, all in one computers, tablet computers, online music stores etc. Rarely do they ever claim that Apple "invented" them - because they obviously didn't.
Apple haters, however, will claim that's what Apple fans believe and say, and then "righteously" yell at them for "being wrong".
It's getting old.
Re:the future (Score:4, Informative)
Tablets were "wildly popular" before Apple came along?
Smartphones *maybe* - since Blackberry certainly had a good following, but it was nowhere near the market penetration that came when iPhone and Android were selling the "classic" touchscreen phone.
The mp3 player was certainly not "wildly popular" with the general public. Not even close. There were certainly portable mp3 players, but they were a niche product - if the iPod killed anything it was MiniDisc (in all countries except the US), the discman and the walkman. At the time, the concept of music as files on your computer was the realm of the extremely tech-savvy computer geek. Apple just took it mainstream.
You were doing well right up until claiming that "image" is Apple's only real product - to do so is a gross underestimation and, given that many other manufacturers seem to think as you do, why they have such problems creating products that compete favourably with Apple ones. Android manufacturers cottoned on to this pretty quickly and as a result have made some very good phones after listening to what their customers want (note: you don't need to copy Apple for Apple's model to work - Apple's method is to make something that people want to buy, so as long as you do that, you'll sell).
If Apple was "all image" then they might manage a large number of sales to start with, then they would quickly fall off as word of the product spread. This is also known as the "box office turd" effect, where the opening weekend is huge but then drops off like a rock. Apple's product sales are much more like the box office hit - big opening weekend, strong sales long into the run. If the products were not delivering on expectations (and not necessarily those of the slashdot geek who wants to compile Linux on his phone every 3 days) then they would not continue to sell in ever increasing numbers - marketing will not do that for you in the presence of a terrible product.
text book scumbags. (Score:2)
When my wife was a prof, the textbook industry was her biggest peeve. Every year, a new textbook comes out, many with websites that contain supplementary and additional information. The websites become invalid at the end of the school year thereby eroding the used textbook market. With each coming year, faced with a new textbook, course instructors have to run through the book to update their curriculum where necessary..
Knock-on Effect (Score:3)
The Chiropractor's Guild will likely come out strongly against this too, because people won't be throwing their backs out carrying around chemistry and physics textbooks.
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Are you sure that's the right comic for this story?
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Is it ever?
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If every text book is an internet connected device, where will the addresses come from?
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People love to quote this $400... I've never seen an undergraduate textbook that costs more than $200.
Donaldson and Dunfee, Ethics in Business and Economics, is $680 on Amazon. (But it ships for FREE with Super Saver Shipping!) Gotta love the combination of price and title.
In any case, even $200 is totally unacceptable.
Now, that's still a lot, but the same book can often be had for very cheap used from a previous student or off Amazon.
The publishers have gotten very good at killing off the used book market. They bring out a new edition every couple of years, making just enough superficial changes to discourage people from using an old edition. For example, in a math textbook they'll rearrange all the homework problems so t
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I know you're being tongue-in-cheek, but Apple's ability to make normal people excited about technology is one of their most important assets. I'm glad they're around to get non-techies hyped up about things like "ePub" and "digital distribution."
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I'll just be glad if they succeed in destroying the textbook publishing business. There are few greater hives of scum and villainy than that one; putting out a new "revised edition" every 2 years for an ancient subject like calculus just so they can keep you from selling your textbook or buying a cheaper used one. I hope they die just like the video rental business.
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putting out a new "revised edition" every 2 years for an ancient subject like calculus just so they can keep you from selling your textbook or buying a cheaper used one
... As opposed to complete inability to resell a license?
Hopefully, we'll get it either cheap enough to compensate or - in an ideal world - DRM free.
Worst case scenario would be publishers catching up and starting to sell them on their own, overpriced, some fucked up proprietary format and DRM'd up to the ears.
Re:Magic (Score:5, Insightful)
Someone made computers cool for the general public. The horror.
I think some of the Apple hatred stems from the fact that many techies absorb themselves in computers because it gives them a feeling of control that they lack in their daily lives. Mastering a system is gratifying on many levels. When a company offers a platform that doesn't allow or require that kind of micro-management and control, it's really like an attack on the person directly, especially when the product is popular among non-techies--many of the same people who alienated that person in the first place. And so there's resentment.
The only reason I say all this is that concerns like yours don't exist in the general populace; it doesn't even cross their minds that it would be a problem. They see the lack of open-endedness as simplification and refinement that makes the devices easier to use. As Steve Jobs use to say, something "mere mortals" could use. So I say again, I think it's awesome that the public is allowed to be excited about things like "ePub" and "digital distribution" rather than rely on nerds like us to trickle it down to the rest of the population.
Re:Magic (Score:5, Insightful)
many techies absorb themselves in computers because it gives them a feeling of control that they lack in their daily lives
I don't believe you think more than skin-deep about the dangers of the "walled garden" approach. The problem with Apple is very simple -- they have delegated themselves a right to approve how do you use "their" device and a right to charge you a tithe for everything that comes to you on "their" hardware. In effect, you've relinquished ownership, and, unlike some other platforms, you have no legal way out.
Also, software freedom is only a small part of it. Think of other possibilities that the Apple approach prevents. Even if an independent business and an owner of an Apple device both think there is a business mode they both can benefit from, which mode does not go through the Apple-approved system, they cannot achieve it easily, and hence cannot exploit the full potential of the hardware platform to their advantage. This is especially bad for the person who has paid the price for the Apple device.
Re:Magic (Score:5, Insightful)
many techies absorb themselves in computers because it gives them a feeling of control that they lack in their daily lives
I don't believe you think more than skin-deep about the dangers of the "walled garden" approach. The problem with Apple is very simple -- they have delegated themselves a right to approve how do you use "their" device and a right to charge you a tithe for everything that comes to you on "their" hardware. In effect, you've relinquished ownership, and, unlike some other platforms, you have no legal way out.
Game consoles have had "walled gardens" (ugh, that term) for decades, approving all software that appears on their devices, and the world hasn't fallen apart. To the contrary, consoles surpassed PCs as the primary gaming platforms several years ago. The world also hasn't fallen apart since Apple began approving software on its devices; in fact, iOS remains #1 in customer satisfaction surveys.
Clearly, non-techies prefer these kinds of platforms. Like I said before, the issues you raise are not even considered a problem outside of tech forums. Normal people don't care if they can't install absolutely everything under the sun, because they wouldn't want to even if they could. Nobody is putting a gun to anyone's head and forcing them to buy an iPad, so the victim angle doesn't work either.
You need to understand that it's not a black-and-white situation. Apple platforms may be perfect for other people but not for you. Just because you don't like Apple doesn't mean nobody else should use their platforms and that the world should be rid of their evil. It just means other people use those platforms and you use whatever you use, and the world keeps on turning.
Also, software freedom is only a small part of it. Think of other possibilities that the Apple approach prevents. Even if an independent business and an owner of an Apple device both think there is a business mode they both can benefit from, which mode does not go through the Apple-approved system, they cannot achieve it easily, and hence cannot exploit the full potential of the hardware platform to their advantage. This is especially bad for the person who has paid the price for the Apple device.
If Apple isn't meeting their needs, the independent business can choose to use a different platform. Nobody is forced to use an Apple device, so again, the "freedom" argument is silly and really comes down to techies trying to maintain control in order to feel a sense of mastery over something, in my opinion.
Re:Magic (Score:4, Informative)
The vast majority of cell phones (including all the popular ones) before the iPhone and Android were the ultimate in walled gardens. Remember paying your carrier if you wanted to get your pictures off your RAZR?
Re:Magic (Score:4, Informative)
No, I don't remember ever having to pay to get pictures off my phone, and my "walled garden" phones have had "app" markets and "music" markets since about 2000 for prices that were comparable to the iTunes and the Android markets.
That's simply not true. I used to be a Symbian developer. Around 2002-2005, I charged $10 for an image warping app, that seemed to be about the right price from looking around at what other apps were out there. The same kind of thing goes for 99c on the iPhone.
And the app used to be sold in a zip file, which the user had to download, unzip and then install from their PC. Again, standard practice for the time. There weren't any platforms that had the automated purchase-download-install workflow that the Apple App Store has.
In another post you asked me what a freetard is. This is a good demonstration. Not only are they fans of "open", "free", GPL etc. (the free bit) They also say things that aren't true in their trying to persuade everyone of their point of view (the tard bit).
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There were no mobile platforms before the Apple App Store that offered automated purchase-download-install workflow,
You're obviously unfamiliar with i-mode and i-appli and Bree/Java development for Japanese carriers. These were exactly automated purchase-download-install workflows.
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Your hands must be very strong moving the goalposts like that. I will quote you again:
There were no mobile platforms before the Apple App Store that offered automated purchase-download-install workflow, and there were no mobile platforms that offered 99c as a common price point.
I don't see you limiting the discussion to "smartphones". If you choose to do so now, would you care to specify a definition of a "smartphone" first, so that I'm sure I'm not wasting time arguing with a fat troll?
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"Verizon has also blocked the transfer of most data over USB, such as ringtones." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_RAZR)
It doesn't specifically mention pictures, but they certainly did fall under "most data," at least for part of the RAZR's life cycle. But ringtones will do just fine. You don't suppose Verizon blocked transferring ringtones because they were giving them away free, do you? And yet Apple, champion of the walled garden, not only lets you put your own ringtones on iPhones but provides
Re:Magic (Score:5, Insightful)
Quoth siddesu: "In effect, you've relinquished ownership, and, unlike some other platforms, you have no legal way out."
So, you don't think there's any connotation of "freedom" even remotely attached to the above sentence, written by you 40 minutes before your subsequent response ? 'Cos I do; and contrary to your subsequent claim, it seems to me that you're very much making the argument that the user is not free to use the device how (s)he wants to.
So, either you're poorly expressing yourself, you're a bare-faced liar, or you have an agenda. Which is it ?
Simon.
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Re:Magic (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't believe you think more than skin-deep about the dangers of the "walled garden" approach. The problem with Apple is very simple -- they have delegated themselves a right to approve how do you use "their" device and a right to charge you a tithe for everything that comes to you on "their" hardware. In effect, you've relinquished ownership, and, unlike some other platforms, you have no legal way out.
Oh don't be such a drama queen. There have been walled garden computers since at least the games consoles of the 1980s. And still the consumers are quite happy with them. There have been open consoles, and they've all failed. Given the choice of gaming on the "walled garden" consoles and open PCs, in the end the walled garden won majority share.
This "open" good; "walled garden" bad thing is ideology. And like all ideologies, it's wrong.
This is especially bad for the person who has paid the price for the Apple device.
Funnily enough the iPhone owner doesn't agree. He's more than happy with his virus free platform where he gets an enormous choice of quality apps in the 99c - $9.99 range.
Freetards amount to about 0.01% of the population. And they're the only ones that have negative views of a "walled garden".
Re:Magic (Score:5, Insightful)
I disagree. I learnt to install Solaris before I have ever installed Dos/Windows. My computer throughout college was my trusty Apple //gs and the OSF/1 box with the huge black and white 21" monochrome monitor - damn, it was a fine monitor. I learnt to manage VMS, UNIX, installed Slackware Linux from 50+ floppies. I am one of the few rare people to have actually bought a copy of WordPerfect for Linux :) Used Gentoo for years and years, building from stage 1 when that was all that was available.
I still run OpenBSD at home as my outside facing server.
And I find Macs easy to use. For the stuff I need to do, it's easy. For the technical stuff, I can get right into the innards of it for the most part. Opensource stuff is downright easy. MacPorts if available. Otherwise, ./configure and make. Built a couple of hackintoshes for fun.
The OP was just being stupid. MP3s have been un-DRM"ed for quite a few years now - Apple was the one pushing for it, but of course, OP conveniently forgets that.
Apple also contributes back - they made so much improvements into KDE's browser that KDE just basically re-absorbed back in the entire webkit, among other things.
Re:Magic (Score:4, Insightful)
I think some of the Apple hatred stems from the fact that many techies absorb themselves in computers because it gives them a feeling of control that they lack in their daily lives.
The iPhone was loved around here until it became a mass-market product. Once it reached that point a new underdog had to be found. The 'hatred', in many cases, is really just a form of hipsterism.
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Yeah, let me give you a hint: it wasn't apple.
Re:Magic (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not just that. The reason Apple took off in consumer electronics was the iPod, and the reason it took off was not the device itself, but because Apple hammered out distribution rights with major music publishers. Paid downloads of music were an obvious idea by then, but so what? Nobody else had made it happen (not with major labels most people wanted). Digital textbooks are the same deal - the hardware is almost a given, the content is already there - it's all about distribution rights. And, yes, DRM is part and parcel with distribution rights, because most content producers DO want to get paid. (That said, if a huge customer like the UC system wants to pay for their own content development and then allow free redistribution, I agree that would be even better.)
Re:hammered out distribution rights (Score:5, Interesting)
Odd that this article is specifically about "Textbooks". It should be about "books".
No one yet has really served up the Amazon Killer. But it's lurking. Without going all TinFoil Hat, it's Print On Demand.
Let's get it out in the open. Let's thrash it out. Ebooks kinda suk. They're stuck there on your device, and they're all digitally-slimy. You can't (easily!) draw notes and fold down pages and get pizza grease all over them. I'm not even going to get into Formats and DRM and Backups etc.
Sometimes you just want an Honest to Goodness Book. But we were so wowed with Amazon's selection we drank something REALLY worse than kool-aid. (Boilermaker? Skullgrinder? NecroAtomic ZombieMaker? Oh sorry, Kids, don't read that last sentence.) The crushing future is in Print On Demand.
There are a couple of legit tech hurdles - but big picture they're cake. (Glue quality, page shear, assembly speed, blah blah.) But I have in my hand, complete with generic non-SOPA-offensive blue and white covers, three paperbacks on religious theory that are at least 75% of "Professional Quality". The binding is still intact after about 2 years, the pages are the same size within X milimeters, the ink is solid, etc.
ANY book - in one hour. (I'm being generous counting for stuff like lines, staff, etc.) Screw that wait 3 days for ship junk.
But - what is this mysterious silence? The machines are "not that expensive" (topside $100,000, peanuts for a 70,000 SF retail outlet).
So mighty Slashdot, how have the Book people managed to TOTALLY elude entire chains like Borders? Was it REALLY that much fun to go bankrupt??? Was there NO-ONE among all 19,500 employees that bothered to try to get digital rights to POD? Not a single title? Not a single attempt at getting a machine in the store? Really???
Talk about an Elephant in the Room. I am annoyed because I cannot be smarter than 100 Borders Senior Managers.
Re:hammered out distribution rights (Score:4, Interesting)
Meanwhile, we got a new phonebook dropped on our porch last night and my wife and I both said in unison, "what? What are we supposed to do with this big lump? Why waste all those trees?" Granted, reference materials are an especially weak application for paper books.
But e-books just aren't that bad anymore.
Re:hammered out distribution rights (Score:5, Insightful)
Odd that this article is specifically about "Textbooks". It should be about "books".
No one yet has really served up the Amazon Killer. But it's lurking. Without going all TinFoil Hat, it's Print On Demand.
Sorry, the reason people want e- text books is for the size and weight savings. I would have killed to be able to carry around my entire semester's reading in one hand.
Re:Magic (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple is "exciting" people about "technology" the same way Louis Vuitton is "exciting" people about, you know, apparel design and textile technology. Both companies sell an image and the fashion accessories to build it, and most people buy their products exactly as a fashion accessory.
I am periodically reminded why headhunters don't lurk on Slashdot to find the next generation of innovating CEOs.
Re:Magic (Score:4, Informative)
They sell out of WWDC tickets pretty fast.
Re:Magic (Score:4, Insightful)
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I'm cool with ink printing on sustainable plant matter, and my little library *looks* awesome.
You'll be less happy when you've reached middle age and you've had to move all that dead tree pulp through 10 different house moves.
I've thrown away all my classics of literature on paper now, and replaced them with ebooks. It's made me very happy. I'd switch the rest too, if it wasn't for the cost. I wish I was at the start of my library creating life and could build a library of ebooks instead of a mountain of bound paper.
Re:Doesn't Matter (Score:5, Insightful)
They will still get deals where required books are overpriced and rereleased.
And DRMed so they self-destruct at the end of the semester.
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Schools frown on complaints about transgressions that the GP made up.
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What I wouldn't give for a mod point right now...
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If you can read a dead-tree book sloooowly, you can read an e-reader slooowly too. It doesn't even use any extra power to do so (unless you bought one of those stupid color e-readers, but they'll have color e-ink technology pretty soon).
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I think that Khan Academy is a good indicator that digital education can work when implemented properly. Arithmetic, Algebra, and Calculus instruction shouldn't need to be updated every year. They come out with new editions with the same crap rearranged and reformatted slightly. Not to mention all that information is available for free on Wikipedia. Also, interactive exercises are exactly what those types of books are missing. Textbooks are a sham - they screw K-12 out of taxpayer money and they screw stude