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Apple Acquired 'Pandora for Books' Startup BookLamp In April
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I really like iBooks but so far the execution is not flawless: sometimes pages sync between iPad and iPhone, sometimes not.
How is that confirmation if they always say that? I know there was a rumor of them buy some company and MR reported that as confirmation, and the company being bought came out and said it wasn't true.
And you say this based on WHAT?
Last time I checked Apple is making (very successfully) CPUs (based on companies it bought) for multitouch (based on companies it bought) phones whose cameras utilize technology from companies it bought.
It's offering Maps based on companies it bought. iTunes is based on a company it bought, as is iDVD.
The only significant company I know of that they've bought to no apparent purpose is Lala.com, though that may have been to acquire the engineers rather than the company "business model" (eg to acquire datacenter expertise), or it may have been to put together iTunes Radio.
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WTF? Do you have any knowledge of the audiobook world AT ALL?
In the first place abridged audiobooks are now EXTREMELY uncommon. There was a time (for reasons I don't understand) when they were common in, I guess, the eighties and nineties, but not any more. Even large works (eg Neal Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle which is, what, 3000 pages I think, spread over eight books) are available unabridged.
In the second place, an intelligent person is well aware that there are multiple forms of media, all appropriate for different circumstances. Pretty much ALL fiction, and most non-fiction is perfectly adapted to audiobooks. There's nothing I'm "missing out on" if I listen to David Sedaris' latest book, or, to choose a random example, James Gleick's The Information.
Choosing to listen to audiobooks while driving, or exercising, or running errands, doesn't mean one rejects the printed page; it means on wants to use ones time efficiently. Along with audiobooks, I also have a large library of technical PDFs, mostly journal articles in the fields of math, computing and physics. OBVIOUSLY I am not going to try to listen to a math PDF --- that would be idiotic. But this does not tell us that audiobooks are bad; it merely tells us that some material lends itself to the medium, while other material does not.
I think you misunderstand my comment. I was wondering, literally how profitable ebooks are in today's market - specifically for Apple.
I have almost my entire Anesthesia library as hard copy AND ebook which is fantastic especially since many of my books are interactive and include exclusive videos and content I can't get anywhere else (i.e. anatomy relevant to ultrasound guided peripheral nerve blocks). The reason I question Apple's interest is: sure I can get the same ebooks from Apple as I can directly from a publisher, sometimes even at a discounted price...but ALL of my Anesthesia books bought as hard copies came WITH access to the ebook at no extra cost. So I feel like Apple is losing the battle on the academic front.
For other genre's, it seems to me like margins are going to be small and ever shrinking. As I said most of my nonacademic reading is done via Audible and, at least in my circles, that is a growing trend. However, books that really impact my life and beliefs (Crime and Punishment, Orthodoxy, Life of Pi, etc.) I have bought (and worn out) their physical counterparts. I literally don't even consider buying an ebook in MOST situations. The only people I know that read ebooks regularly own a Kindle - or people who read the free/99 cent ebooks on their iPhones to pass the time. I was just saying that personally I don't see how Apple can make money in such a competitive market, especially as publisher's design and improve their own distribution services (many of which are already better than iBooks). These observations, however, are all antidotal and based on the reading habits of myself and those I know, and that's why I asked the question.
As of the end of 2012, Apple was selling about 17 million eBooks a month. If we assume they make $3 on each book (30% of $10 book, which is a guess, but seems reasonable) that gets us over $500 million PROFIT a year, which may not equal iPhone numbers, but is nothing to sneer at. Of course, since 2012 the market has obviously grown.
Beyond that, I expect Apple is
(a) working hard to get school textbooks (a massive market) into the system. (Personally, this strikes me as a terrible idea. eBook readers right now are lousy for the sort of jumping around to aggregate information that represents how I use textbooks, but I'm just reporting here)
(b) working (either with IBM, or independently) to get professional material (medical, legal, building codes, etc) into the system. Most likely not "bought" through the public iBook store, more like the deal we already know about with airlines to put airplane manuals. Obviously the market for this sort of material is not as large as books for the public, but the material costs many many thousands of dollars --- and the deals may even be structured as more "lease-like" than purchase-like --- pay $xx thousand every year to access some entire legal library (plus search engines, and soon enough expert systems and AI assistants) on your firm's iPads, and Apple gets to keep 30% of that.
Excellent - exactly what I was wondering. I still have to wonder how Apple will fend off the publishers directly providing such great mediums...but I suppose so many people know iTunes / The App Store that they become repeat customers and are mainly uninterested in changing to a new app. Which is understandable.
I think the key point is that iTunes eBooks help to sell more iPads which is their primary objective. Apple's whole message around the iPhone and iPad is "look at what you can do with it" - which includes music, books, video, games, fitness, etc - the more options the better as that helps broaden the appeal of the hardware to ordinary non technical people.
No they wouldn't. Copyright allows for fair use of portions of a text for research/education purposes.
Quoting a text, with attribution, is not the same as plagerizing
I don't know why you brought up CPUs, which has no bearing on this conversation, as the technologies incorporated into them came from talent acquired over 5 years ago and we are talking software/services here. iTunes? SoundJam was bought over 14 years ago. iDVD is just as old..and dead. Your Maps assertion? Very poor. What do WiFiSlam, Locationary, Hopstop, Embark, & BroadMap have in common? Hint, these are all mapping acquisitions since the initial shipment of Maps. How has Maps changed in the last couple years? I'll admit they got Flyover from C3 Technologies and Siri from Siri, but these are rare examples and illustrate that Apple usually buys companies to directly copy their technology or to kill it altogether (Lala). Chomp was supposed to bring sense to the App Store. That never happened. Matcha? Who knows what happened to that?
Not really since most of the major titles were set at $9.99 or less by the publishers, same as on Amazon.
I think his statement about value in the written word was as weird as your claim that most audio books are abridged. I own more than 200 audio books and none of them are abridged. I can't find a single audio book on Audible that you cannot buy in unabridged form; however, I can find countless audio books that are only available unabridged. Some people may want abridged (although I cannot understand why), but I do not believe your characterization that most audio books are abridged is even remotely accurate.
In fact, I would guess it is almost the complete opposite of the truth...
Do you prefer numbers? Anyone can find out with the advanced search feature on audible. They have about 9000 abridged audio books and about 104,000 unabridged audio books. So instead of your statement: "For one thing most audio books are abridged." is untrue. In fact, it would be more accurate to say 90% of audio books on audible are unabridged.
I actually agree with everything else in your post. Just the one statement was completely wrong...One more thing. Whispersync for voice addresses your last point pretty well. If you happen to buy both the audio and ebook, it is easy to go and read over a particular passage as the audio book and ebook stay in sync.
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Then I stand corrected on this point. I think many of the audible books I have looked up on audible were abridged and that led to my misimpression. However I stand by the substance of my statement which was questioning why an academic would not read printed material or eBooks outside of his studies.
I don't know who started this "Pandora for books" thing, but it is in almost all the stories about this. Since there are essentially no similarities between what Book Lamp does for books and what Pandora does for music, can we please stop. It is stupid. I don't know how it got started, but it makes no sense. Pandora is not a music recommendation service and Book Lamp is not a book streaming service. Do both companies use some algorithms? Sure. Pandora uses some fairly terrible algorithms to try and make radio stations based on your criteria. Ok, not terrible, but bad enough you want to skip most the songs. Apple is no better, I want to skip many more than the 6 songs and hour iTunes Radio allows too.
I hope book lamp is better at predicting what people want or it is completely worthless.
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I think audible May favor abridged books in search results, they may have more margin (just guessing). I always filter them out because I accidentally purchased an abridged nook and it was awful.
I hope book lamp is better at predicting what people want or it is completely worthless.
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I think audible May favor abridged books in search results, they may have more margin (just guessing). I always filter them out because I accidentally purchased an abridged nook and it was awful.
I'd figure Apple to be interested in it more for helping them categorize stuff more accurately in the bookstore. But who knows.
I thought Book Lamp a cool sort of thing, except when wondering whether publishers might use something like that to get editors to get writers to put in more words to swing the book into a trendier category. Then I wanted to jump off a bridge!