Bits For Rent

An amazing thing is happening right now in the world of consumer goods, though I’m sure almost everyone has seen or heard something about it by now. Companies are converging from all sides to fill gaps in product lines, thanks in large part to the creation of a few fantastic portable handheld devices in the past few years.

As I’m sure most of you can recall from just a few weeks ago, Apple was once again in the spotlight as it finally lifted the curtain on its long awaited tablet computer. Unfortunately, the device was not everything it the hype had claimed it would be: the device is large, thick, heavy, and lacks some very useful features such as an internal camera; its entry level price of $499 is also wildly outrageous with only a 16GB internal hard drive, and it does not include the almost-mandatory 3G feature (which will also run you at least $15/month to use). Furthermore, the reliance on the stripped down iPhone OS places the device in a precarious position. Now, it is not feature-rich enough to perform the same tasks as a $200 netbook–streaming Flash-based video, running multiple applications at the same time, using Office, etc.–and it is actually being handicapped by limitations that, on a 3.5″ iPhone or iPod screen, would seem perfectly reasonable.

Basically, by creating what many are simply referring to as a “big-screen iPhone,” Apple has filled a gap in its product line with something that is both easily replaceable (jumping to a MacBook or iPod touch) and utterly lacking in terms of iconic appeal. Whereas the slick aluminum casing of a MacBook or the glossy black shell of an iPhone immediately inform the user of what type of device it is they are handling, the mish-mash of aesthetics in the iPad is a sign of Apple’s own uncertainty as to whether this creation is more of a handheld (big glass screen accompanied by that one little Home button) or portable computer (aluminum casing on the back, keyboard attachments, etc.).

iPad: Digital Readers Face New Threat

Now, let me also say that this device is incredibly important for other reasons. First, it is attempting to unite several unrelated consumer markets under the Apple banner. Just as Apple used the iPod as a Trojan Horse for the iTunes store, so too is it attempting to use the iPad to enter a new market, eBooks. Now, until this point, the eBook market was easily divided into four parts: Google offered a wide selection of free books that have entered the public domain on its website and through other companies’ online stores; Sony, the first to actually enter the market, has its own store which it recently revamped to become more appealing and competitive; Barnes and Noble made a brave foray into the battle with its Nook reader last fall, and is seen as the strongest challenger to Amazon, who has controlled the eBook market with an iron fist thanks to its excellent Kindle reader and the easy-to-use, low-cost, ubiquitous Amazon.com eBook store.

What has occurred now, however, is something quite sinister. Eager to not make the same mistakes as the recording industry (but ultimately ignorant of the fact that all media will soon be digital and commoditization of entertainment is inevitable), the publishing world has, with Apple’s entry into the market, seen fit to give the dedicated eBook reader market the snub. At the same time as Apple was preparing to reveal its new wunderkind, Amazon and Macmillan, one of the largest publishing houses in the book world, were in a very public spat over the future of book prices. Basically, MacMillan wanted to raise the price of new release eBooks to be closer to those of the actual hardcover, since the hardcover book is where the company usually makes its money on a book release. Long story short, Amazon asked MacMillan to kindly go fuck itself (apologies for the language, dears) and pulled all Macmillan books from its store, and then a few days later doubled back on its stance and asked if the two could still be friends.

See, Amazon believed, like Apple once did, that $9.99 is the sweet spot for a new book to be priced at. But most publishers don’t care about that. They want to have discretionary pricing, somewhere between $12-17, to vary between books depending on how popular they are. Now, I know you got to this point and you’re thinking, “Great, dude, but seriously I couldn’t give two shits about book prices and company bickering. What does this have to do with me?” And you’re mostly right to be thinking that. But here’s the thing: while it’s important that we don’t sink the price to fast on the publishing industry and make the paperback the next CD, we also want to be able to sink prices for digital content, because everyone agrees that lack of a physical copy ultimately reduces the value of a good by a considerable margin. Especially since when you buy most things digitally nowadays you’re just buying a license to use that good, not the actually good itself. But that’s a whole different post about digital rights that I am not going to be writing. Let’s finish up with the books and then move on.

Bottom line: Amazon was trying to be the only game in town for publishers and consumers, much like Apple. It wanted exclusive or highly restrictive control of digital publishing rights to books, and it wanted to set the prices for the publishers. In other words, it was taking the pie and telling the publishers how many slices they could have. Now, thanks to the new agency model almost every major book publisher will be switching to (and that is being endorsed by Barnes & Noble as well as Apple), publishers can set prices wherever they want, and the seller will get a flat 30 or 35% cut from that selling price. This means that while prices may start high, we will actually be able to see classic economic theory play out here: the price will fall for a book and as it does the sales will increase. This gives maximum profitability to the book industry, and ultimately everyone wins. Sure, we consumers don’t profit as easily from it as before now that Amazon has lost its death grip on the market, but in the long run, provided you and I can wait a bit after a book comes out, you will still get a good price on that digital copy. Better yet, now it won’t come at the cost of bankrupting the businesses and authors you’re trying to support.

That’s it for me on eBooks for now. I actually don’t own one, but am very interested in the prospect. If you have one or know someone who does, I’d love to hear about it. Send me a line and tell me what your thoughts are. For now, though, if you’d like to read more on how pricing is hurting the book industry, I suggest this blog post as a good place to start.

What Lies in Between

I mentioned earlier that the iPad is important not for what it does well or does poorly, and there are certainly plenty of things that can be listed for both categories, but for what its affect will be on other devices. In the run up to the device’s announcement, we say several new tablet computers be revealed by Dell and HP. These are quite similar to the tablet in that they are touch-only slates, but where they actually surpass the iPad in terms of usability is that they run a fully functioning Windows OS. That means multitasking, Flash video (hello, Hulu!), Office, the works. Just as the iPhone brought out the heavy competition from Sony (Xperia), Google (Android OS and Nexus One phone), HTC (Windows and Android-based phones), Palm (Pre), and even BlackBerry (Storm and Storm 2), so too will the iPad bring with it a flurry of imitators and also-rans. Only this time, the also-rans have a chance to surpass the mighty Mac: they do not operate under the same self-imposed restrictions as Apple, who consciously limits the utility of its devices by denying certain features or applications from being run on it. This race for that middle market is actually the most competitive of all. For once, Apple’s prices and willful indifference may be its undoing. Which is all well and good.

See, as much as I love my MacBook Pro and my iPhone, I do believe that they’re too expensive and I do believe they could be better devices. If Apple wasn’t so concerned with preserving its brand value as well as its insane, 40% profit margins on everything it sells, it could be the most crushing company in the world. Instead, it opts to play the niche, exclusive supplier card, letting consumer interest and fervor boil up and over until we’re all champing at the bit, white froth foaming from our mouths, begging to given a chance to buy their product, no matter the price. Lucky us, eh?

I’ll leave with one more thought. The only reason any of the above things have occurred is because of the creation of the netbook market. These devices, little 8-10″ laptops that originally ran off of Linux or Windows XP and sell from $200-500, are now the biggest growth category in computer sales. In the late 1990s, we saw the rise and peak of the desktop PC. Nowadays, people don’t want to buy a big old box system that often because there are so many parts and its not portable; to use it, you become rooted to one spot. (Actually, this is why the iMac is such a brilliant device, but I won’t rant about Apple anymore today.) So then we moved down: desktop-replacement laptops with big old 15″ or 17″ screens came into vogue. They weren’t big on portability, but they did just about everything a desktop could do (other than play video games well, which is slowly changing). Then, about three years ago, the laptop market started to get saturated with cheap computers. Suddenly, a nice 13″ or 14″ laptop, perfect for web browsing, video viewing, and word processing, cost somewhere between $400 and $800. A 15″ MacBook Pro at that time still cost $2000, but it was eventually lowered to $1699. This was a critical time for computers. Dual core processors, cheap RAM, ever-increasing hard drive sizes… we were really hitting our stride back then and shifting the course of computer development from the push for making everything as fast as possible to making two or four or six of everything as fast as possible and as small as possible. Which is why we have the netbook. Using a small, energy efficient Intel chip called the Atom, these devices became the student’s and professional’s choice for on-the-go computing. With a USB 3G modem to gain access to AT&T, Sprint, or Verizon networks, a netbook transforms into exactly what an iPad is attempting to be: a large smartphone which enough screen space to actually get productive work done on it.

So while Steve Jobs is convinced that the netbook is a piece of garbage and that Apple will never make anything so small and uncomfortable and ugly, let the others sit back and laugh. The iPad has attempted to define where there in between actually lies, but that space is a dangerous one. Pressure from both sides may soon see the middle market flooded with an odd array of laptops and tablets and super netbook hybrids. As history has shown us, the computer world is never as cut and dry as it originally may seem, and I suspect that this market is where a great deal of innovation will soon be found. And as a consumer, I’ll be right there waiting to see what’s next.

There was a series of ads run when I was just entering grade school, all of which tried to drive home this one zany idea: reading is good for you. The ads, paid for by Reading is Fundamental, one of the oldest if not the oldest non-profit organizations in the country, usually featured a celebrity or athlete giving a short PSA about how important it is to read, and some other words of encouragement. While the impact of the campaign is hard to judge in retrospect, thinking back on it now makes me question just how much time children, teenagers, and even college students, spend reading.

Reading is Fundamental featuring Shaq

Granted, I come at this topic from a very biased perspective. Among my close friends, I can only name perhaps a handful that read at their own leisure. The rest will only pick up a book if it has a name like Dan Brown or Harry Potter on the cover. (Those I know reading this that are fans of Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight books, you don’t count because you are sparkly non-humans. Sorry.)

I, on the other hand, read voraciously. Not that I can crush a book in a few hours — I’m actually slow as hell — but I just find it to be an enjoyable experience. A good novel can be just as exciting to me as the latest LOST or Breaking Bad. Plus, I’m sort of a sponge when it comes to information; I’m willing to learn about almost anything, and a lot of the fun in reading a book or watching, say, the Discovery channel is learning about cool shit you would normally never have noticed.

So why is it that the newspaper industry is withering into a frail, forgotten relic of the past and that this new online-enabled generation is so averse to paperbacks? Have Americans finally shucked the last remnants of tradition from their lives or is this part of something larger? I can think of three pretty good reasons for why paper is out, and everything else — movies, TV, gaming, music, youtube, et al — is in:

1. The Move to Online Has Made Reading More Difficult

This is something that a lot of people addressing the fall of print tend to overlook. When reading text online over a long period of time, our eyes feel far more strained than they do when we read printed text. A lot of this has to do with the nature of the display. When we were using CRT monitors, information was being spit out onto the screen in much the same way tube-based televisions work: a line of colors was sprayed onto the glass one line at a time, filling in vertically from top to bottom. This process normally takes place at a rate of 60 or 75 Hz, which means that each line would be “refreshed” every 1/60 or 1/75 of a second. So, when you see footage of a monitor flickering in the background or when your monitor actually begins to flicker, what you’re seeing is actually the switching of the image from the old data to new data. The faster this switch occurs, the more it seems like it was one image. Think of it like spinning fan blades: the fast the fan goes, the harder it is to distinguish the individual blades. By speeding up a refresh rate, we fool our eyes into thinking they’re seeing a solid object, rather than flashes of data.

Still with me? Good.

What this all boils down to is that monitors, since they cannot display solid images, make reading difficult. They are much better suited to displaying video, like a television set, because the motion inherent in that medium masks the constantly refreshing lines of data. Thus, if we are sitting in front of a computer, our brains are naturally going to push us towards watching something on Hulu or Youtube than towards an article from the New York Times. With technology pushing us more and more into a world full of electronic displays and digital data, it makes perfect sense that reading has begun to fall off. It is simply not conducive to the lifestyle we are all adopting.

Thankfully, however, technology works like a pendulum, always coming back to its point of origin before proceeding onward again. New display technologies such as e-ink and OLED (organic light-emitting diodes, for the nerds) promise to make staring at a screen far easier on our eyes. The former, used in e-book readers such as Amazon’s Kindle, displays a static page of text, thereby mimicking the look of printed text. It feels incredibly natural to look at, and serves as a solid replacement for carrying a book or newspaper around with you. Plus, the ability to have thousands of books on one device is a convenience all in of itself. So long as we continue to push for development of these kind of replacement products, reading may still have a shot. “Books” as we know them may not continue to exist outside the world of academia for much longer, but the ideas carried within the will always have a home somewhere.

2. A Surplus of Entertainment

This one is pretty straightforward. Simply put, the internet is a vast ocean of content. There are websites hosting video, only bit players in the online world, that have enough content to let you watch something new every hour for years. Most of them, you haven’t heard of. Others, such as Hulu, Crackle, and youtube, upload so much new material that it would take dedication and a large helping of omnipotence on the viewer’s part to try and consume it all. And that’s just video. We also have audio websites, such as Last.fm and Pandora, that let us find new artists, listen to our favorites, and create our very own personalized radio stations. Plus, there’s a whole world of free web games out there. Kongregate, for example, hosts thousands of titles, has multiplayer and community features, tracks achievements for registered users, and charges nary a penny to do it. And this is just some of the stuff online that I happen to know offhand. We also have iPods, Nintendo DSes, PSPs, smartphones and other handheld devices to carry with us in our back pockets, ready to entertain us at a moments notice, with no need for a light so that you can read at night or a place to sit, since you can’t really walk around reading without running the risk of crashing into someone or something.

The world is, quite literally, at our fingertips. Knowing that, do we really still have time to see if Professor Langdon finds the next clue?

3. The Fickle Consumer

The title is rather self-explanatory. As devourers — because at the rate at which we receive information, be it from twitter, facebook, youtube, whathaveyou, it really is devouring — of media content, we like the flexibility of being able to choose what we’re going to entertain ourselves with in our free time. I can go on Hulu right now and pick from watching an episode of Fringe, or maybe Family Guy, or maybe The Daily Show, or maybe I’ll watch a movie. But nothing is forcing me to watch any of these, or even watch something at all.

Compare that to reading a book. When you crack open the cover on a novel, you feel an obligation to continue reading that damn stack of paper until you’ve reached the end. Most likely that wouldn’t occur in one sitting. But as that book lies on your nightstand, or your desk, you look at it with a sense of foreboding — it must be finished. It isn’t right to stop reading it after three chapters. You’ll never know what happens if you stop now. With TV or film, the commitment is hardly ever more than a few hours. With a book, it could take you months before you reach the last page. That bothers us, a lot.

And so, reading is not beloved, but begrudged. We know that it can be fun — the success of Harry Potter proves it — but yet we also know it can be very tiring, even boring. Hell, “textbook” is practically slang for “bore you to death.” Reading has failed because the nature of the process is unforgiving. A TV show can have a bad episode or scene, but still be worth watching. (Heroes somehow keeps getting renewed, after all.) A book, if its bad, has no fallback. There are no hidden pages glued together; the entire package is there, before your eyes, irreparable for all eternity. So we divest ourselves of reading, of going to the bookstore and picking up a random novel on the shelf, of sitting back on a rainy day and transporting ourselves into the mind of great storyteller. We turn on the TV instead, and tune out.

If you’ve stayed with me this far, did you tune out while you were reading some of this? Did you want to go check someone’s status updates, or just wish I’d get to the damn point already? Did that youtube link just send you off on a tangent of viewing that you never recovered from? Perhaps one of the above is true for some of you. Even so, don’t let the irony of the moment be lost on you. As you just read 1600 words on the slow death of reading, you were in fact preserving that very enterprise. So thank you, for reading, and for valuing words just a little bit more than something else that could have kept you busy for as long as this took to finish. Even if it was just this once.