Small E-Readers and Media Hype

The New York Times reports on the unsatisfactory experience of attempting to use the much-hyped "eTextbook" iPhone app for CourseSmart's 7,000+ textbooks.
    Click on the image at the left to get the larger image.

This is an update to earlier blog articles on CourseSmart and its e-textbooks:
  . How to Save on College Textbooks
  . CourseSmart offers 7,000 textbooks on iPhone/iPod
  . Textbooks, the iPhone, and the Kindle

The New York Times's Randall Stross does something highly irregular in this fast-paced gloss-over news-scanning Net world -- he actually tries using a product before drawing conclusions in 'killer' headlines based on little.  Too often the articles focus on "the look" of things, the 'sexiness' of a metallic or plastic form, the 'cool' factor -- if you can pocket it, it has to be better.

  As a user of nearly pocketable cameras I understand the feeling, but if the camera doesn't do the basic job for the cost, I'd not be proclaiming the smallness of it the best way to go for producing a good result or saying one doesn't need the larger cameras and they are therefore "killed" - a favorite concept for gadget hounds chasing the latest dragon slayer.

Stross points out that squeezing the contents of an enormous printed textbook -- normally using considerable space for hundreds of words, the occasional illustration and lots of "restful white space" -- into the credit-card sized space of smart-phone displays can cause a painful experience.

CourseSmart has tried, and my guess (since they did not reformat the books for the smaller display size) is that they hoped to get a more attractive deal from Amazon if the textbooks were already on the iPhone.  Otherwise, what sense does it make -- to have to buy the version for iPhone which requires a connection to the Net (even if alternately using a laptop for that e-version) and buy another version to be able to read offline in a more natural way?

Stross describes what it's like to actually use a CourseSmart textbook on the iPhone while connected online as required:

' [CourseSmart's iPhone app] uses a PDF image of each page, as does the browser-based version of its eTextbook. All of the charts, graphs and design elements are intact, but everything — including the text — is indecipherably small without zooming in.  Enlarging the text to legible size introduces the need to scroll left and right for each line, which quickly grows tedious.

  Even when used on a PC monitor or laptop, Stross says,

Generally ... just half or two-thirds of a single page is displayed at once.  Successive clicks take you to the bottom of that page, to the top of the adjacent page, and to the bottom of that page. After every page change, the screen goes blank momentarily before refreshing.

  Frank Lyman, executive vice president of CourseSmart explains that the use of the iPhone for the text can be helpful if
  " you’re standing outside of the classroom, the quiz is in 10 minutes, and you want to go back to that end-of-chapter summary that helped you understand the material.”"

  Stross continues:

' The iPhone doesn’t actually store the image files: a page must be downloaded on-the-fly when requested, which I found to take 9 to 13 seconds, using a Wi-Fi connection.  The downloaded page isn’t saved, so moving to another page, then returning, means downloading it anew.  Rummaging around for a particular passage in a chapter, easily done in a printed book, is an agonizingly long process on the iPhone. '

On August 12, when CourseSmart announced its iPhone launch, I asked this question:

"Does this mean that the students will also need to buy a hard copy text book for the "homework" portion as well as pay half the cost of another textbook in electronic format which they'd need to return to CourseSmart at the end of 180 days?"

 The New York Times reports that:

' At present, a student without a trust fund is probably not going to get both the printed textbook and a subscription that provides access to the eTextbook version; they are now sold separately.  When asked if publishers would be willing to offer both for the price of one, [Ed Stanford, president of McGraw-Hill Higher Education] said his company was considering offering the eTextbook for a “nominal” price to buyers of the print version.

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Larger format e-readers, not mentioned above but available currently:
Kindle 2   Sony Readers   Kindle DX.

Also see:
  . Sony's Upcoming Models vs Amazon Kindle
  . Some points from reports on the new Sony readers

Textbooks, the iPhone, and the Kindle - Update2

This is an UPDATE to yesterday's entry on the 7,000 CourseSmart e-textbooks now made available for the iPhone and iPod.

 Currently, a search at Amazon for textbooks not in the public domain results in about 4,400 titles, although a good number of them are not what you'd expect to see categorized as textbooks.
UPDATE 8/14/09 - Original Update was 8/13/09, 8:19 AM.
  The above "textbook" results (official textbook store not in place yet) were sorted by "relevance" -- here's a listing sorted by "bestselling" titles.

Some more detail is available about the app's functioning and the type of access available, and there are 2nd day assessments by some of the review sites.

1. SmartCourse e-textbooks can be purchased for download to your computer/laptop but are allowed to be used on only one device at a time.  If you buy one for your laptop, it doesn't seem to come with a subscription to access it online at their site.  There is no return on these, no refund.

2. Their e-textbooks can also be purchased for ONLINE access only, and with this subscription type, you can use any computer/laptop or iPod/iPhone to access the e-textbook.  In this mode, you cannot read the book unless you have a connection and are online at their site.  The subscription allows you to copy or print 10 pages at a time.  You can return the book within 14 days if you haven't printed or read more than 20% of the e-book, online.

3. In this first edition of the iPhone app, you can't add or edit notes with the iPhone/iPod, but you can view any notes you've made when using your computer/laptop to access the e-book online.

4. The "half-price" "purchase" is really a subscription rental, in that you must return the book at the end of 180 days (or 360 days if you buy a year's subscription) and then you can't reference the book if needed for your next, more advanced class on the subject.

5. CNet's Rick Broida writes:

' Long bouts of reading might prove cumbersome, as the app doesn't reflow text to fit the screen the way, say, the Kindle app does.  Each page is more or less a static image, much like a PDF. You can zoom in, scroll around, rotate into landscape mode, and so on. '

6. Your 3G cellular reception in class will have to be good.

7. The screen, especially noticed when used for a textbook, is very small.  The image above is from their website's demo and I couldn't find an image with fewer and larger characters on it.  If I were a student using the iPhone with a CourseSmart e-textbook, I'd likely always be in zoom mode.

8. PC World's Todd R. Weiss, with some whimsy, wonders:

' Then there's the potential for cheating at exam time when students can stealthily view their iPod to get information from an e-textbook to answer a tough exam question.  Hey, it could happen.  Maybe you'll have to leave your iPhones and iPod Touches at the door as you enter the exam room to prevent cheating.  Could we eventually see students being patted down by hand for their iPhones or iPod Touches at exam time as they enter the room? '

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Photo credit: This a screen capture from the SmartCourse page at actual size shown there

CourseSmart offers 7,000 textbooks on iPhone/iPod

CourseSmart launches iPhone app that allows access to 7,000 electronic textbooks.

  See earlier article on CourseSmart digital textbook lease terms at "How to save on college textbooks."

  Students will be able to read digital notes and search for specific words and phrases from their iPhone or iPod Touch units.

' Frank Lyman, CourseSmart's executive VP, does not expect students to use their iPhones to do their homework, but explains that "if you're in a study group and you have a question, you can immediately access your text." '

Does this mean that the students will also need to buy a hard copy text book for the "homework" portion as well as pay half the cost of another textbook in electronic format which they'd need to return to CourseSmart at the end of 180 days?

' CourseSmart will offer digital textbooks for around half the physical textbook's retail price.  However, the service operates on a subscription basis which expires after 180 days.  After that point students lose access to the title. '

  Obviously, with battery concerns and a small screen with light going at one's eyes, the e-textbook on an iPhone would not be expected to be used for reading the textbook but, as said, for searches and reading of notes.  The article continues:

' CourseSmart's titles are not yet available on the Kindle, but Lyman hopes to see his books available wherever college students want them... '

  I read elsewhere that there've been no talks with Amazon as of this week.

A bad-apple decision and other news

The Net is abuzz with Apple's strange iPhone App Censorship of a reader app (Eucalyptus) because people can search the Project Gutenberg and find (gasp) the Kama Sutra and even download and read it.  The Wired article by Brian Chen includes Apple's explanation in its rejection letter, and a later email from Apple requested that access to the Kama Sutra be removed, despite its actually being a part of the Project Gutenberg and not the app.  So the beleaguered author, Jamie Montgomerie, has installed a filter to block that particular search.  Will Apple approve it?  Why not?  And Montgomerie couldn't have bought that kind of advertising.

  In the meantime, Technologizer's Harry McCracken writes, "Judging from its Web site, it’s more or less comparable to Amazon’s Kindle application–except all the content is free, and the interface looks to be prettier. The asking price is $9.99–steep for an iPhone program, but I’m tempted."

Well, actually, the Project Gutenberg books are available to all Kindle owners, free, direct to their Kindle, since the catalog can be placed on the Kindle, and the Kindle search feature within that book/catalog for the author or title plus a click on the found title will download the book to the device, though that might cost 15c with Amazon's new Whispernet charge for "personal documents" (meaning documents that don't come from Amazon).  These primarily-text books are usually less than one megabyte each, but if a stray one is 2 megabytes then it's 30c for the wireless delivery.
  There is always the option to instead download it to your computer from the Project Gutenberg site and transfer it to the Kindle with the included usb cable if 15c is a problem.

See the earlier entry on this blog for instructions on how to get that catalog onto the Kindle, thanks to James Adcock.

OTHER NEWS:
. Those awaiting an Apple announcement in June '09 about a Kindle-challenging Apple Tablet will have to wait until the "first half of 2010" for whatever it is that'll use a 10" screen and cost between $500 to $700.  If the product includes wireless access it'll certainly also cost at least another $30/month for that, judging from Apple's history.
  Thoughtful article at ITworld.

. Kindle owners who have iPhones and like to sync their reading between the two will be happy to see that Amazon has put the Stanza team to work already, improving Amazon's Kindle app for the iPhone and iPod so that the Kindle books can be read in landscape mode; you can tap on either side of the device to NextPage or PrevPage; and change the colors of the background and text.  The latter's especially useful for dimmer light.  A look at the black against white example made me realize it looks very nice but I was surprised to have to squint my eyes after a bit because of the energy of the white while the gray is easier for a longer period of time.  It's been documented that a gray background is easier on the eyes, but that of course is dependent on how dark the foreground text is.

. Will Kindle sales crash Nielsen Bookscan?.  In an earlier entry here, it was noted that Jeff Bezos claimed that when Kindle titles are available, they now represent 35% of those books' sales.  Bookscan can't include those sales, for reasons given in the article, and this would have a rather large impact on their reports.

. And if Amazon hasn't given publishers enough to worry about lately, they now have Amazon Encore:

'AmazonEncore is a new program whereby Amazon will use information such as customer reviews on Amazon.com to identify exceptional, overlooked books and authors with more potential than their sales may indicate. Amazon will then partner with the authors to re-introduce their books to readers through marketing support and distribution into multiple channels and formats, such as the Amazon.com Books Store, Amazon Kindle Store, Audible.com, and national and independent bookstores via third-party wholesalers.'

. Is the Kindle hurting Barnes and Noble sales?

UPDATE - 5/27/09: Apple relents and allows sales of Eucalyptus app. (Surprise)

iPhone 3G upgrade reactions and the Kindle

I just read some interesting stories about 1) the new iPhone 3G's features and pricing and the free upgrading of older iPhones at the same time (some companies do this for even large changes in system capability; and 2) the server-chaos that resulted from up to 6 million iPhone users attempting upgrades at the same time that first-time buyers were trying to get one.

  This did remind me of reactions from the Amazon Kindle community when Amazon said Wednesday, in response to reporters' questions, that there was no upgrade path for early Kindle users to the Kindle DX.

Two Kindle-owner requests I've read, in response:
  1) a question as to why the native pdf support for the DX is not made a firmware update for the Kindle 2 released late February so that inaccurate conversions don't have to be accepted (the small screen viewing affects conversions also) when Sony's 6" models can do this already (including even DRM-protected ones form the library, along with reading ePub files).

  2) some new Kindle-2 owners just past their 30-day trial period have requested the ability to update to the DX for the difference in price.  Many owners using their Kindle-2s since March (we are talking mainly April as an interval) are requesting some kind of upgrade-path at all, but Amazon's customer service responses are that Amazon's policy is that the Kindle-2 owner sell the unit, used, and then buy a new one.  Doable but some customers feel uneasy about the response.

 A key factor, as I've said before, is that with Kindles, as with cable-tv-program providers and their receivers, there is an ongoing $$ relationship with the vendor that involves the customer regularly buying (even eager to buy) the vendor's main products to use on that vendor's receiver.  So there is a disconnect there when Amazon shows no interest in upgrade paths.

Native PDF support
  I can understand the resistance based on publishers' concerns re DRM situations, but the Kindle 2 (with a faster processor than the Kindle 1) really should have the native pdf support for non-DRM'd PDFs as a feature when Sony was able to do this in 2008.
  Kindle users should also bear in mind though that some PDFs made for 8x11 pages will not be particularly readable on 6" screens,  and in some cases a conversion to a MOBI or prc file could work better for readability on text-based PDFs - which is still an option even when a unit has built-in Adobe support for PDFs.

  The Sonys have their drawbacks and lack of features though: no 24/7 wireless, an unclear PRS-700 screen and, on the PRS-505, no search feature whatsoever, no inline-dictionary, and no highlighting and annotation functions.

iPhone 3G rollout problems
With up to 6 million owners wanting to upgrade while new customers were in lines overnight for the new unit, and a new certification process put into place before the 3G capabilities could be accessed, many old phones stopped working and new phones could not be activated, to the degree that there are many stories about this.
  I'm surprised that Apple didn't foresee this though.  Their servers were hammered.  The best scenario for luckier users was not being able to update the old phone though it still worked otherwise.  iPod users can upgrade also, for $10.

iPhone 3G Pricing
  A plus for new iPhone users would be the drop in price.  Barely a year ago, the 8-gigabyte iPhone would have cost $600; the new 8-gigabyte 3G is $200. However, as David Pogue points out:

"The basic AT&T plan — unlimited Internet and 450 minutes of calling — now costs $70 a month instead of $60 (plus taxes and fees), and comes with no text messages instead of 200. (Adding text messaging costs at least $5 a month more.)"

Well, those who complain about the Kindle's price should note that the actual one-year cost of the iPhone with Internet (before taxes and without text messaging) is:

  $70/month x 12 months = $840 + $200, or a total of $1,040.00 for that first year.

Kindle-2 pricing
  The Kindle 2 with its 24/7 wireless access to the web is $360, and after you add up the Internet charges, the total cost the first year is ... $360.
  And in the 2nd year, no cost for Kindle use, while the iPhone would cost $840+ for the 2nd year.

  While some may not want a clear and good-sized e-reader with 24/7 wireless access to the Net, it's foolhardy to say, when understanding the costs of wireless and an e-ink screen, that a total cost of $359 is "too expensive."

Kindle-DX pricing
  And now an extra $130 total cost for the Kindle DX gets you a reading screen that is 2.5 times the surface area of the Kindle 2.

Kindle and the iPhone
Many have both the iPhone and one of the Kindles.  Makes sense to me, as long as you can afford it.  Especially with the KindleApp on the iPhone now and sync'd access to the Kindle library.

I do like the iPhone but AT&T's reception is not good here and and there are features I prize in my own cellphone (video recording with 3.2Mpixels that is quite good, voice dialing, business-card info-autoread, phone-to-phone photo-sending, and a memory card slot which I do use as the main space), which aren't included with the iPhone.  Apple's iPhone App Store has a terrific set of apps though that don't require transfers from the PC and no 'hacking' of the unit to run them.  I'll be interested to see what Apple and Verizon (my cellphone servicer) have in mind in June.