The Great Debate UK

from Reuters Investigates:

When will the tipping point come for printed books?

Mark Egan's special report "Dumping print, NY publisher bets the ranch on apps" focuses on one man who believes the end has come for printed books.

Since 1980, Nicholas Callaway has made the finest of design-driven books, building a publishing house and his fortune on memorable children's stories and on volumes known for the fidelity of their reproductions of great art. But the quality of paper, ink and binding mean nothing to him now.

For Callaway, it's all about apps -- small applications sold in Apple's App Store where books are enhanced beyond the mere text of e-books. In this cutting-edge new medium, cooks can clap hands to turn pages of an interactive recipe, a book about Richard Nixon can include footage of him sweating during presidential debates, a Sesame Street character can read a story out loud and, should your child get bored, the app can turn the tale into a jigsaw puzzle or a computerized finger-painting set. 

As tablet sales soar in the coming years -- experts are saying 82 million Americans will have one by 2015 -- publishers face a tough decision. Margins are a lot higher on traditional hard cover printed books, even with the high cost of printing, shipping and dealing with returns. But as sales of e-books overtake print and consumers get used to books that feature more than just words, will it be possible to keep doing both?

Tell us what you think. Will the print book disappear in your lifetime?

(Read the full special report in PDF format here)

from Breakingviews:

E-book market will be hot, flat and crowded

The electronic book market is looking increasingly hot, flat and crowded. A vicious price war has broken out among producers of digital readers thanks to Apple's success with the iPad. Companies such as Amazon hope that selling tomes across multiple devices will fill the profit gap. But competition in e-book distribution is heating up and could pressure margins there, too.

Apple has sold more than 3 million iPads in about two-and-a-half months. While Amazon doesn't give figures, analysts think it has sold a similar number of its Kindle e-readers in two-and-a-half years.

Investors haven't missed the implications. Amazon's stock has fallen 10 percent since the iPad was rolled out. That's about the same as the market as a whole. The stock of Barnes & Noble, another e-reader seller, has fallen more sharply, losing almost a quarter of its value. Yet both are still richly priced compared with the market -- Amazon trades at 40 times estimated earnings this financial year and Barnes & Noble at 20 times.

Meanwhile, Apple's shares have risen 15 percent since the beginning of April, adding more than $30 billion to the company's market capitalization. Of course, booming iPhone sales account for a large chunk of this rise. There's a three-week waiting list for the latest version when you buy it online. But the iPad figures as well. Analysts' expectations seem to be rising weekly. Several now predict Apple could sell more than 10 million this year.

Devices like the Kindle, Barnes & Noble's Nook and Sony's Daily Edition e-reader are made specifically for reading, so they have gray screens that are easy on the eyes and batteries that last for days. The iPad, by contrast, has a bright color screen and a battery that drains far more quickly. Its success suggests the perceived advantages of e-readers may turn out not to matter too much to consumers.

After all, iPad users have already downloaded more than 5 million e-books. It may be that many people prefer a more versatile device that allows them to surf the web, watch videos, read email and download games and other applications -- and act as an e-reader as well. That's a potential nightmare for Amazon and other purveyors of e-readers. Think how jack-of-all-trades mobile phones have pushed out initially successful dedicated personal digital organizers.

Pricing trends seems to support the thesis. E-reader sellers slashed their prices this week -- some by a quarter. But even corporate clients with giant orders for iPads can't expect to score any discount from Apple. Basic e-readers now go for well under $200 and will almost certainly be offered for less than $100 by the time the holiday season comes around, according to research outfit Gartner.

from Commentaries:

Twitter backlash foretold

Technology market research firm Gartner Inc has published the 2009 "Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies," its effort to chart out what's hot or not at the cutting edge of hi-tech jargon. It's just one of an annual phalanx of reports that handicap some 1,650 technologies or trends in 79 different categories for how likely the terms are to make it into mainstream corporate parlance.

Jackie Fenn, the report's lead analyst and author of the 2008 book "Mastering the Hype Cycle," delivers the main verdict:

Technologies at the Peak of Inflated Expectations during 2009 include cloud computing, e-books (such as from Amazon and Sony) and internet TV (for example, Hulu), while social software and microblogging sites (such as Twitter) have tipped over the peak and will soon experience disillusionment among corporate users.

Click to enlarge

What's most interesting in the report, now in its 14th year, is what the corporate research firm says is a long way off from the mainstream.

It will take up to five years for many of today's trendy technologies to become mainstream, including Web 2.0, cloud computing, Internet TV, virtual worlds, and a true corporate mouthful, service-oriented architecture (SOA).

Funny how long hype cycles take to pay out. Three years ago, in its 2006 Hype Cycle Report, Gartner predicted Web 2.0 would go mainstream within just two years.

Apple – stop defacing dictionaries and reread Orwell

- Mic Wright is Online News Editor at Stuff. The views expressed are his own -

When Amazon got rightly torn to shreds for remotely killing copies of 1984 on the Kindle, I thought it would be the most idiotic tech story of the year. But I was wrong. Apple’s just upped the ante by banning rude words from a dictionary application – stripping us of the virtual equivalent of looking up obscenities in French class.

Ninjawords Dictionary, a dictionary app from the creators of the excellent website of the same name, is available from the iTunes Store for £1.19. When you go to download it you will be faced with a warning that it “might contain material objectionable to children under 17″. Based on conversations I overhear on the train daily, I think that’s unlikely.

That warning is just the start of Apple’s interference with the dictionary. It’s also made the creators omit words it considers objectionable, such as the “c-word”, as my nan would put it. That’s right app fans, Apple just censored a dictionary.

Go in to any school and you’ll find English dictionaries on the shelf, accessible to children and absolutely chock full of “objectionable” words. Best start burning them because Apple’s made us realise that words can definitely hurt you. Or at least, your sales in the iTunes App Store.

Initially Apple refused to approved the app because it contained rude words, so the developers made it possible only to find them if you explicitly (pun intended) searched for them. That wasn’t enough – Apple wanted them removed completely.