About a month ago, I posted my last ever article for the Occidental Weekly, a piece about the then unannounced iPhone 4. However, that wasn’t my original idea for my last college newspaper article ever–I had wanted to go out with a bang. My idea was to write a wide-spanning piece about where consumer technology is heading, and offer some concrete advice that readers could use going forward. Unfortunately, that article wasn’t able to get printed in the paper, but I did ultimately write it, and there’s no better place to publish it than right here. Here it is:

In the last four years, there have been astronomical changes in technology. Back in the stone age–2006–nobody had an iPhone, having a flat screen TV was a big deal, and if you used the word “tweet” people would have thought that you were crazy. The idea that you could browse the internet from your phone–or have your mom friend you on Facebook–seemed like a ridiculous impossibility.

Technology is going to keep on changing in new and hard to predict ways, but it is possible to look ahead at what’s coming down the pipeline, and to be ready to adopt or accommodate things as they come. This is my take on where things are trending, and what these changes will mean for consumers.

Ebooks:

Ebooks are going to become mainstream–there are too many big companies with too much money behind ebook efforts for them to fail. Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Sony, and even Apple have all gotten into the ebook game. Publishers have the opportunity to avoid the printing costs on books, and electronics companies want to get paid to sell something that costs practically nothing to deliver, so the draw of ebooks to these firms is clear.

The advantages of ebooks for consumers seem obvious–readers can carry thousands of books with them on one device, look words up in the dictionary on the spot, and search the text of the book for the phrase they’re looking for. The problem is, no ebook reader experience really matches that of a physical book. Furthermore, the various and companies each have their own ebook stores that don’t work on their competitor’s devices. For instance, if you buy a book from Amazon’s Kindle store, you won’t be able to view it on any non-Kindle software.

Savvy consumers should wait to see how things play out and which ebook formats and readers become dominant. Otherwise, they risk getting locked into a company’s system that may not survive in the long term, and lose their books in the process. Alternatively, consumers can seek out ebooks that are free from copy protection and are in open formats like pdf or epub that most (but not all) ebook readers can display. Websites like Project Gutenburg feature thousands of out of copyright works (such as books by Jane Austen, James Joyce, and H.G. Wells) for free in these formats.

3D:

Now that everybody has upgraded to HDTVs, here comes 3D to get you to buy a new TV all over again. The very first 3D TVs are just starting to come out, and content is coming later this year, including 3D Blu-Rays (which will require a new Blu-Ray player), 3D videogaming on the Playstation 3, a 3D ESPN channel, and 3D movie channels on DirecTV. The problem is nobody seems certain whether people are willing to wear glasses to watch their TV.

Without glasses, 3D content is blurry and unwatchable, which means that users must be willing to wear the glasses, and will need to buy enough glasses for everyone who would possibly need one. Imagine having a movie watching party and needing to worry about having enough pairs of glasses to go around. Different companies use different glasses technology (though fortunately the TVs all take the same 3D inputs), and many of them are expensive (think $150 for a pair). Further, some people have issues with glasses-based 3D, complaining of eye strain or headaches. All this makes me wonder whether 3D will catch on with mainstream buyers in the near term.

If you have a lot of money, there’s no reason not to go 3D now (in the worst case 3D TVs can act like regular HDTVs), but for everyone else the best idea is probably to wait to see if this technology takes off. 3D will only get better as time passes, and prices should drop as it does. The tipping point will come when the TVs can deliver an experience so compelling and immersive that it is worth the tradeoffs of the glasses for most people. I think that day will come, but we’ll have to see how long it takes to get to that point.

Phones as Computers:

Phones today are as powerful as desktop computers were just a few years ago, with gigahertz processors and hundreds of megabytes of RAM. Phones are able to do more and more of the tasks that were previously only the domain of full computers, such as surfing the full internet, creating Excel Spreadsheets, or editing HD video.

Things are only going to keep going further in this direction as the phone moves to being not only the primary communication device, but also the primary computing device in people’s lives. Already, the new iPhone operating system has been revealed with the ability to run multiple programs simultaneously, and the forthcoming Windows 7 phones will have a desktop-like Microsoft Office suite and can play games on Xbox Live.

This is probably the most fast moving area in tech right now, and phones are going to keep doing more and more astounding things. One of the most cutting edge of these is something called augmented reality. Augmented reality applications use the phone’s camera and GPS to present a live view of the things around you with a layer of information on top of it. For instance, it can show you what the buildings around you are, or the subway lines beneath your feet. They have the potential to provide literally anything you would want to know about the things around you.

The rapid innovation in phones means that they are becoming obsolete more and more quickly, which is frustrating since most cell phone buyers are only eligible for an upgrade every two years (you can buy a phone when not eligible, but it typically costs hundreds of dollars more). But, all this innovation does mean that we’ll soon be carrying devices in our pockets that will be able to do pretty much anything we can think of, and that is really exciting.

Related Posts:

• Apple’s Long Term Strategy for the Ipad
• Article: How Publishers Can Make Electronic Textbooks Successful
• The iPhone 3GS: My Impressions

Are students soon going to be carrying around all their textbooks on devices like the Kindle? In an article I wrote this week for the Occidental Weekly, I discuss the implications of textbooks as ebooks, and why I think e-textbooks aren’t yet ready for prime time.

Click here to read the whole story >>

Also check out what I’ve written about the pros and cons of electronic textbooks, and how publishers can make electronic textbooks successful.

A complete archive of all my writing for The Occidental Weekly, including past Tyler the Tech Guy articles, can be found here.

A few weeks ago, I gave my initial impressions of the iPad. To quickly sum up my view, I said that the iPad doesn’t make sense in its current incarnation — that it does less than an iPhone, costs more, and definitely can’t fit in a pocket. If you’re going to be carrying around a bag anyway, you might as well throw a netbook in there, since they are less expensive, more capable, and get equal (or better) battery life.

What I didn’t qualify in the article however was that “in its current incarnation” part. You see, I think that this first generation iPad is just the tip of the iceberg. Apple has some big, big plans for the iPad. Remember, they’re trying to create a whole new third category of computing. This is what I actually think is going to happen with the iPad over the long-term:

1. Early adopters are going to pay up front in order for Apple to get the price down and make improvements.
This isn’t saying anything new or revolutionary. Apple always lowers the prices of its products after a while. However, I think that this could be a situation more akin to the price drop of the first generation iPhone, when Apple slashed $200 dollars off the price after only two months (though they wouldn’t be as quick and drastic about it this time, to avoid a repeat of the customer backlash from that move).

Apple knows that they have a number of die-hard customers who will buy whatever they put out right away, and because of this they can charge a premium for their products at launch. In a way, it’s a form of price discrimination, and the revenue from the early adopters helps them achieve greater economies of scale to bring down their costs.

Apple has to realize that it will be hard for them to sell a lot of iPads to price-sensitive people when there are so many competitors and that netbooks appear to be a better value. Because of this, it can’t be too long until they drop the price down to netbook levels (but they can never bring it down to iPhone or iPod Touch levels, because they need to keep the iPad distinct as a third category between phones and laptops).

2. Apple left a lot of features off the iPad both to keep the price low and to save things for future iterations of the product. Wait a generation or two, and the iPad will have all the things that people have been clamoring for.
That 9.7 inch capacitive touch screen is an expensive component. There’s a reason we haven’t really seen large capacitive screens on devices before now — capacitive touch technology gets really pricey as screen sizes go up. The technology will obviously get cheaper over time, but Apple needed the iPad to come in at a reasonable price point now, so that meant cutting costs where possible.

As part of this, Apple is producing the chips for the iPad themselves, which will save a lot of money in the long run (and also makes sense since they can build the chip specifically for the device). Apple also left off a lot of basic features, such as a camera.

Macs, the iPhone, and even the iPod Nano all have cameras — it almost seems weird for an Apple product not to have one these days. The iPhone OS obviously already supports cameras and, if they can engineer a camera into the Nano, they can definitely find a place to put one (or more) on the iPad. This is especially perplexing, because there are so many compelling uses for a camera on the iPad, first among them video calling.

There can only be two reasons for its omission — either it pushed the cost too high, or they want to save it for the next generation to differentiate it and get people to upgrade. Chances are that both are true.

What this means is that all those features people have been clamoring for are likely coming in future generations of the iPad. Remember the first-gen iPhone? It had a camera that couldn’t shoot video, no 3G, no GPS chip, no app store, no MMS, and no copy and paste, to name just a few things. It gained all these features incrementally. People were disappointed with the iPhone at first, and now they call it revolutionary.

The same thing is going to happen with the iPad. A front facing camera, a proper GPS chip, and yes, multitasking will all eventually show up on the iPad (and possibly on the iPhone as well). Apple will just space out its rollout of these features to provide a compelling upgrade path for its customers.

(That said, I’m not sure if and when Adobe Flash will ever make its way onto the iPhone or iPad. Apple really seems to hate Flash. However, once Flash starts making its way onto all the other smartphone platforms, it may be hard for Apple to holdout.)

3. To quote Walt Mossberg: “It’s all about the software, stupid.” Once the iPad gets some really unique, compelling software — and it will — it can transform into the must-have third device that Apple’s hoping it can be.
Apple already reworked some of their standard iPhone OS software for the larger screen, but it’s arguable if any of these changes are providing a new and unique experience. Sure, it’s nice to be able to view the list of your emails alongside the messages or browse the web on a screen that can display the entire webpage, but using the email app or the browser is really not that different from using it on the iPhone. Both email and web are still going to be better on a full blown computer, especially with the lack of Flash on the iPad. The reworked app that comes closest to providing a radically new experience is the photo app, which looks a lot more like iPhoto than the iPhone photo app, and seems to utilize pinching and zooming really well.

It’s only a matter of time until some really compelling software is coded specifically for the iPad to take advantage of what it has to offer. Apple already announced its first attempts at this, iBooks and the with the iWork suite for the iPad.

There’s not much to say about iBooks. Apple recognizes that the iPad is the right size for an ebook reader, and has coded a fancy app to take advantage of that fact. The question will come down how the ebook experience on the iPad stacks up against other ebook readers, especially dedicated ones like the Kindle or the Nook. Really, iBooks is less about creating a new unique experience with the iPad as it is trying to match and surpass the ebook experience found elsewhere.

Of all the things announced recently by Apple, iWork for the iPad baffles me the most. The iPad is clearly a device meant for consuming content, not creating it. It’s portable, has a high-res screen, and has great media software, but what it doesn’t have is easy ways to enter information. The virtual keyboard looks problematic, especially since it apparently requires that the user use two hands, and it will be hard to see the screen if you’re putting the iPad down flat on a table to type on it. Sure, Apple will sell a dock with a built-in keyboard, but I don’t know how many people are going to want to carry that around, and it defeats the purpose of having the iPad as a portable take-anywhere device. So, for Apple’s first real software for the iPad to be focused on creating documents, spreadsheets, and presentations doesn’t make any sense. These uses play to the iPad’s weak suits. Perhaps Apple thought that the software would allow business users to talk themselves into getting iPads, or would sway the person who needs to create the occasional document away from a netbook.

Still, even with Apple’s seeming misstep of focusing on iWork instead of more compelling software, it has an ace in the hole — it’s app developer community. Any iPhone app can be used on the iPad already, but once developers start coding specifically for the iPad, it’ll only be a matter of time until they come up with some really exciting and original software. There are so many possibilities, and I’m sure the best haven’t even been thought up yet. Ideas I’ve heard include medical apps that doctors and patients can use to run tests and access patient histories, remote desktop apps that allow users to log in and run their home computers from the iPad, and magazine reader apps so good they’ll save the industry. This unique software experience is what will make the iPad a “must-have” device.

Apple has laid the groundwork — they’ve built great-looking hardware and created the fundamentals that users and developers needed. Now, it’s up to Apple’s developer community to create the software that will ultimately get mainstream people to accept a third device. Apple has so many great iPhone developers — and so many people hoping to become rich off the app store — that I have no doubt they’ll do it. I’m just excited to see what they come up with.

Related Posts:

• The Apple iPad: Impressions and Analysis
• The iPhone 3GS: My Impressions
• Article: Kindle Textbooks — Are Universities Going to Lead the Way to a ‘Paperless Society’?

It seems that the Kindle has moved far beyond merely being the bestselling “wireless reading device” on Amazon — it is now the bestselling device on Amazon.com, period. (Yes, it is even a better seller than the Playmobil Airport Security Checkpoint.) According to Amazon’s press release (and their front page), the Kindle is also the #1 most wished for and gifted item on their site. It seems that keeping the Kindle as the featured item on Amazon’s front page for the last several months has really helped increase mindshare and generate sales. The buzz over ebook readers that Amazon is trying to create should help their competitor’s ebook reader sales as well. Too bad their main rival — the Nook — is already sold out.

…over on Amazon.com, they’re touting that the Kindle is the bestselling “wireless reading device” on Amazon. What are the odds?
But, then again, Barnes and Noble says they’re already sold out of Nooks for the holidays.

I’ve written about how the Kindle and other ebook readers might replace traditional textbooks, and what the companies can do to make electronic textbooks successful. But, those articles assumed that the technology would be totally dependable. If people worry — even for a second — that their notes might just disappear if they start using the Kindle for schoolwork, then the Kindle will be shunned by students.

Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened.

Here’s the story: A few weeks ago, Amazon made copies of certain books disappear off people’s Kindles. The books were purchased legally, but those selling the books didn’t have the rights to them, so the books were pulled and people’s accounts refunded for the purchase. Problem is, Amazon didn’t notify anyone, and people didn’t know that Amazon could even do that. There were a lot of unhappy surprises the next time people went to pick up their Kindles. Eventually, Amazon did apologize, promise never to do it again, and restore everyone’s books.

But, when one student got his copy of 1984 back on his Kindle (isn’t that book choice ironic?), he discovered that all his notes and annotations for his class were gone. That’s a big problem when you’re relying on those notes for essays and tests. Yes, the Kindle ate his homework.

Now the student is bringing a class-action lawsuit against Amazon. That might be a little excessive, but it emphasizes the importance of notes to students — losing them could mean losing an entire semester or year’s worth of work. Amazon needs to settle the suit quickly and quietly.

If anything like this ever happens again, it will be a gigantic setback for ebooks in education. Amazon better hope that people forget this episode. If this story crosses students’ minds when it’s time to decide on textbooks, they will find that suddenly all anybody wants is a good old paper book.

Related Posts:

• Article: Kindle Textbooks — Are Universities Going to Lead the Way to a ‘Paperless Society’?
• Article: How Publishers Can Make Electronic Textbooks Successful
• The iPhone 3GS: My Impressions

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As it currently stands, electronic textbooks will never take off. Last month I wrote an article about this, discussing the pros and cons of using e-book readers such as the Amazon Kindle DX for college textbooks. There are many advantages to e-textbooks – read the article for a list – but there is one big, overwhelming con that will prevent widespread adoption – price.

Electronic textbooks might be cheaper than their traditional counterparts, but as long as they are more expensive than a used physical textbook less its resell value, which is what most students actually pay for textbooks, they can never become mainstream.

However, all this assumes that electronic textbooks will be a replacement for bound textbooks – but what if they actually become a supplement to them? As I pointed out in the article:

“With the drawbacks of Kindle textbooks, at this point they seem to be better suited as companions for regular textbooks than as replacements. The Kindle can go in the backpack to be carried around for quick reading and reference, but the regular hard-bound textbook can be still be used for serious studying and note taking.”

I believe that if publishers want electronic textbooks to take off, they need to start viewing them as a supplement to the paper version. More then that, they need to include them with the electronic version. What I’m suggesting is that publishers give away the electronic version of a textbook when a student buys the hard copy – for free.

Maybe this seems radical, but let me explain.

Having both types of textbook adds value and utility to each type. Not only do you have a ‘best of both worlds’ scenario where you can have both the portability and search ability of one with the color and ease of note-taking of the other, but they also directly compliment one another. For example, a student could use an e-book reader’s ability to search text to help them find something in the physical copy.

This extra value provides an incentive for students to buy new textbooks. Textbook publishers have always had to battle the used textbook market. The publisher is a monopolist – if you require a specific textbook you must get it from him – and so a markup is applied to textbook prices. The used textbook market helps subvert this markup, and in so doing cuts into the publisher’s profits.

In the past, publishers have attempted to stay ahead of the used textbook market by making periodic changes to the book and releasing new editions. However, including electronic textbooks would give them a new and permanent differentiator – if a student wants the extra utility that the electronic textbooks provide, they have to buy new.

Once a textbook is in electronic format, it costs the publisher practically nothing to distribute. There is a huge discrepancy between the cost to the publisher and the value for the consumer. For the price of a few cents of bandwidth, a publisher can entice a several hundred dollar textbook purchase.

Now, there are a few potential snags. The main one involves publishing rights – authors and institutions will likely demand an additional premium for their work to be published electronically.

This is a bullet that publishers are just going to have to bite. They should be able to work out a pretty good deal for themselves though, just like they do for traditional textbook publishing. After all, most Professors must publish with a certain frequency in order to keep their jobs, and usually the only way to get published is to go through these textbook companies. This gives the publishers all the power in the negotiation.

The second snag has to do with the maturity of e-books themselves. While the Kindle is the most successful e-book reader, it is far from ubiquitous and there are many competing formats.

Textbook publishers are going to have to decide which e-book platforms they want to publish on to reach the most students. If an electronic textbook is in a format that a student can’t access, then it is of no value to them. Eventually the market should start to converge around a few preferred formats, but until then the best strategy is to offer a version of an electronic textbook in as many formats as possible.

Electronic textbooks have the promise to be a huge boon to the profits of the textbook industry. They just need to pick up the pace and embrace this new publishing technology. And, they need to realize that the best price for these textbooks in this new medium is free.

More Posts About E-Books:

• Article: Kindle Textbooks – Are Universities Going to Lead the Way to a ‘Paperless Society’?

Tyler the Tech Guy is now on Twitter. http://www.twitter.com/TylertheTechGuy.

Sometimes, an idea will seem great on first glance, but the more you think about it the less sense it seems to make. I call it the “wait a minute…” factor, and it can’t be avoided when talking about bringing college textbooks to the Kindle.

Recently, Amazon announced a new, larger version of their Kindle device, the Kindle DX. More importantly, along with the product introduction, they announced a pilot program with certain schools to use the Kindle to replace traditional hard-bound textbooks.

This actually isn’t the first time college textbooks have been made available on the Kindle. In fact, in July 2008 I did a story for KGO Radio AM-810 in San Francisco about how Berkeley (the University of California press more specifically) was offering a very small number of textbooks in the Kindle format. That story can be found here.

However, in that case, students needed to buy their own Kindles, and very few books were available. With this program, Amazon will be supplying the Kindles, and the institutions can distribute them to the students who can best make use of them.

The schools on board with Amazon are Arizona State, Case Western Reserve, Princeton, Pace, Reed, and the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, and with this initial program, Amazon will only provide 50 Kindles per school, or 300 Kindles in total.

This is a very small number, but it hasn’t stopped people from getting excited at the possibilities that come with electronic textbooks. It’s easy to see why.

Probably the most appealing thing about putting textbooks on the Kindle is the device’s size and portability. Regular textbooks are almost always large and heavy, and for this reason they are rarely carried from place to place. The Kindle is small and light enough to throw in a bag and carry around everywhere, so students can have access to all their textbooks anytime. That is a big convenience, and will definitely prove useful to a lot of students.

Having books in an electronic format also allows for things that just can’t happen with paper textbooks, such as searching the full book text (which will make it much easier to find things than poking around the index) and immediate word/item lookup using the built-in dictionary or wikipedia. These are fantastic capabilities, and give students ways to study that they haven’t had in the past.

Unfortunately, it’s right about here that the pros start turning into cons and the “wait a minute…” factor kicks in. For all of the advantages to electronic textbooks, there are as many disadvantages.

Color is one of the most obvious ones. As of now, e-ink screens (the type used on most ebook readers, including the Kindle and the Kindle DX) are only available in black and white. This can be a huge downside when it comes to many types of textbooks, especially science textbooks with many diagrams or art textbooks which include numerous examples of artwork. Color e-ink screens should become available eventually, but it might be a long time before they do, and it is uncertain how much cost they will add to the devices that feature them.

There are disadvantages when it comes to notetaking as well. With the Kindle, it is not possible to highlight your notes in 30 different colors, or to underline passages, or to quickly write notes in the margins, or to do any of the hundred different little things students like to do with their textbooks to help them absorb the information. The Kindle does allow for students to highlight sections (in one color only), to add notes with the little keyboard, and to digitally earmark pages, but these don’t come close to the speed, ease, and functionality that comes with marking up your book by hand.

Additionally, having all the books on one device like the Kindle makes it impossible to have two (or, if you’re unlucky, more) textbooks open side by side, which is unfortunately sometimes necessary. It also means that a student would be unable to loan a textbook to another student without loaning out all their textbooks.

However, what is going to be the biggest obstacle to widespread adoption of Kindle textbooks is price. College students usually have little money and so are very price sensitive. While the $489 dollar price point for the Kindle DX is a drop the bucket relative to most students’ tuition payments, it is still a lot of money out of pocket. But, the real price factor with the Kindle will be the costs of the textbooks themselves.

Theoretically, Kindle textbooks should be cheaper than regular textbooks – after all, they are eliminating the publishing costs of the textbook, so some of that will be passed on to the consumer. However, the high prices of textbooks are only in part to do with the cost of actually producing the textbook. Most of the cost of textbooks comes from the markups that come from the market that the publishing companies have to themselves.

In order to be published, college professors need to go through one of a limited number of companies that publish academic journals or textbooks. Being published is a necessity of the profession and usually a requirement of employment at most colleges and universities, so professors are willing to sign contracts with these companies that grant them exclusivity rights to the publishing and award the professors relatively little in royalties. At this point, these companies have a monopoly, as they have customers who must have a specific textbook for their classes, and therefore must buy it from the one company that publishes it. Thus, monopoly pricing ensues and a markup is applied to textbook prices as these firms look to maximize profits.

While electronic textbooks will eliminate the publication costs, they will not affect the monopoly that these companies have or the pricing that goes with it. What this means is that textbooks for the Kindle would likely be slightly less expensive than their physical counterparts, but not enormously so. Whether this discount will even justify the upfront cost of the Kindle device remains to be seen.

In real life though, Kindle textbooks will never be cheaper for students, because they would have to be less expensive than second hand textbooks, less the price of reselling them at the end of the year. Because textbooks are so expensive, most students buy them used from other students, and then resell them to the students who will need them when the course is over. As long as new editions of the textbook don’t come out, this method helps students acquire textbooks for dramatically less than buying them new.

With electronic textbooks, there is no such thing as buying a “used” copy, and they are impossible to resell. It is doubtful that textbook publishers will want or be able to undercut the second hand textbook market with their e-book textbooks, but if they don’t it is hard to see Kindle textbooks becoming widespread.

With the drawbacks of Kindle textbooks, at this point they seem to be better suited as companions for regular textbooks than as replacements. The Kindle can go in the backpack to be carried around for quick reading and reference, but the regular hard-bound textbook can be still be used for serious studying and note taking. However, no one would want to pay twice for a textbook, so this scenario is not conceivable anytime soon.

At this point, it’s impossible to see Kindle textbooks catching on with most students. The convenience that they provide is great, but there are too many drawbacks, and the cost is too high. We’ll have to see if future versions of the Kindle, or competitors from other companies, can make e-textbooks more compelling, and get them to make sense financially.