Tech Press Clueless about Sony Reader Rejection

I’m a bit stunned to see articles like this, which are spreading across the web today, about Apple’s refusal of the Sony Reader iOS app. Started by the New York Times, the story claims that, “The company has told some applications developers, including Sony, that they can no longer sell content, like e-books, within their apps, or let customers have access to purchases they have made outside the App Store.”

But Apple has never let other apps sell such content directly. If you use the Kindle app, there’s a Shop in Kindle Store button that takes you to the Amazon web site via your web browser. While I can understand that the New York Times may blindly reproduce Sony’s comments without researching the story, I’m surprised that Mac web sites don’t open up their iPhones and see exactly how the Kindle and Nook apps work.

Update: So it turns out that it was not, indeed, that Apple was prohibiting in-app sales. They want to get everyone to do in-app sales, but take a cut. Follow-up from Macworld. I have to say, it’s really not clear what Apple wants to do here. I don’t see how they can expect publishers to be on board with an additional 30% cut, let alone the many other types of apps that let users access content they have paid for elsewhere.

This Week’s (or Month’s) Read: Herman Melville, by Hershel Parker

I have a certain fondness for 19th century American authors: Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Poe, and Herman Melville. A couple of years ago, I did a marathon reading of Melville’s fiction, along with a brief biography of him. At the time, I said, “The two-volume biography by Hershel Parker seemed a bit much at this stage.” But literary biographies are one of my favorite sub-genres, so I’m finally getting around to reading Parker’s massive work on Melville’s life.

Volume 1 is a bit over 900 pages (880 pages of text, the rest of indexes and bibliography), and I’ve started reading it now. (I’m surprised to find that there are no detailed notes, as I would expect in such a work; a glance at volume 2 on Google Books shows that there are only a few dozen pages of notes.) The second volume is more than 1,000 pages. So this is a big work, but Parker is recognized as the leading Melville scholar in the world, and I’m looking forward to the time it takes to read these books.

I’m sure that not many of the readers of my blog are interested in such works, but if you are, feel free to add a comment. What literary biographies have you read that you’ve liked?

Take Control Books 50% Off Sale

To celebrate its 7th year, Take Control books is running a 50% off sale on all its books, including my recent Take Control of iTunes 10: The FAQ.

Take this opportunity to stock up on the many great books that Take Control has published. Get some for yourself, or for friends or relatives for Christmas. Make sure to use this link to take advantage of this great offer.

Robert B. Parker’s Spenser Novels

Since he died in January of this year, I’ve been reading all of Robert B. Parker’s Spenser novels. I had read about half of them oven the past few years, but I started from the beginning, and have been buying all the ones I hadn’t gotten to. If you’re not familiar with this mystery series, it features Spenser (no first name), a tough private eye in Boston, along with his co-characters, ranging from his heartthrob, Susan Silverman, a shrink, to Hawk, the tall, tough, black enforcer who helps him out.

Parker was a wizard of wit, providing some of the finest dialog in contemporary mystery fiction, and some of the oddest situations. His books aren’t wacky like Carl Hiaasen’s, but they feature a combination of typical and atypical cases where Spenser investigates, sometimes even when he has been fired by his clients. He’s a chivalric type, a lug of a guy, but with honor. And many of the other characters in the stories have that same kind of old-fashioned honor that make these books different from the typical serial-killer mysteries and police procedurals.

Parker was a master wordsmith, and his books have exactly as many words as they need, but no more. They’re not very long – I can read one in a longish evening – but they are a great pleasure to read.

So if you want to discover one of the classic tough-guy mystery series, which is witty and creative, check out some of the Spenser novels.

Book Review: Excelsior, You Fathead! The Art and Enigma of Jean Shepherd

Excelsior, You Fathead! The Art and Enigma of Jean Shepherd
Eugene B. Bergmann
495 pages. Applause, 2004, $28.

Buy from Amazon.com | Amazon UK | Amazon FR

When I was around 10 or 12 years old – back in the late 60s and early 70s – I discovered Jean Shepherd’s nightly radio show on WOR AM in New York. Every evening at 10:15, Shep would come on the air, following his theme music (Strauss’ Bahn Frei), and talk for 45 minutes. He would just talk – there was no script, though people who knew him have suggested that he spent hours preparing for his shows – seemingly improvising, riffing on current events, his pet peeves, and telling stories. When listening to Shep, it always sounded like he was talking to me; like there was no one else listening to the radio. It was the stories that got me hooked, especially those about him growing up in Hammond, Indiana, a small town near Chicago. Shep talked about his time in the Army, and about the events of his childhood, which occurred between the age of about 7 and 17, events that happened to him and a few of his friends, such as Flick and Schwartz.

Shep and his friends were average kids, with the usual preoccupations of kids that age – my age – and the stories were bittersweet memories of their growing up in the Depression. Some of them were funny, others poignant, but Shep brought to these oft simple stories the true art of the storyteller. He always managed to make them last up until the final theme music, weaving threads and events until his time was up. I would be held in a spell for those 45 minutes, just before I went to sleep, as I entered his world.

I was a real Jean Shepherd fan back then. Not only did I buy his books (two books of stories, In God We Trust – All Others Pay Cash, and Wanda Hickey’s Night of Golden Memories and Other Great Disasters), his records (LPs of him reading from the books, or more scripted versions of the stories), and I even took up the instruments that he played on the show: the kazoo and the Jew’s harp.

Shep contributed greatly to my worldview, teaching me the power of stories and how the true storyteller could take control of the listeners’ minds, but also through the seemingly simple profundity of some of his observations.

Over the years, I had forgotten about Jean Shepherd – his stories were still someplace in that mushroom soup of memories that dated back to those pre-teen years, but they didn’t surface often. But recently, thanks to the Internet and a group of fanatics, I’ve been able to rediscover the joys of listening to this great artist.

And now (to finally get to the meat of this review), a new book examines Jean Shepherd, his art, his legacy, and his philosophy: Excelsior, You Fathead! The Art and Enigma of Jean Shepherd, by Eugene Bergmann. This book, written by a true Shep fan and fanatic, is a compendium of thoughts about Jean Shepherd, his work, his life, and, as the title suggests, his enigma.

Because Shep was an enigma. Having created his own radio genre, he eventually got tired of all the advertising that the radio stations tried to squeeze into his show and left, gave up, walked away from more than two decades of radio. He was a trendsetter – and, in a way, a minor cultural icon in the early days – but he hated trends, and hated following them even more. He was a unique friendly voice, but could be, at times, arrogant and opinionated.

Bergmann’s book is not a biography; instead, it is a collection of chapters that examine different periods of Shep’s life and work. There is no attempt to rationalize the complex relationships he had with his family, nor his personal life, beyond some basic anecdotes. However, this book, with its many excerpts from Shep’s radio shows, gives the best overview of what Shep was like, and what his shows were about. While the book is a bit disjointed, so was its subject.

If you’re familiar with Jean Shepherd, you’ll know why you should buy this book; if not, you may want to buy it to discover one of America’s most unique comic voices (though comic is by far too simplistic a word to describe Shep). And if you want to hear him at work, some 1,500 shows are available for download at the Jean Shepherd Archive, or, to hear a few random shows, check out the Jean Shepherd Podcast, or check out the Brass Figlagee podcast on iTunes.

Kindle Ad Shows Better Reading in Sun: But What About in Darkness?

The new Kindle ad is clearly taking on the iPad, showing two people sitting by a pool, one with a reflective device (which isn’t actually an iPad), and the other with a Kindle. The latter, a curvacious young woman, is happy with her Kindle in the sun, but pool-dude-in-a-t-shirt isn’t so happy with his reflective device. So be it.

What they don’t say, though, is that if you’re not in the sun, reading a Kindle is much more difficult than reading an iPad. I’ll grant that the Kindle has some advantages: you can read in the sun, or under a bright light (in fact, you had better have very good lighting), and it’s lighter. But for all-around reading, unless you’re going to read by a pool or on the beach, the iPad wins out.

Here’s the Kindle ad:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGmRKSds9OY

Take Control of iTunes 10: The FAQ

Hot off the digital presses, the first book about iTunes that’s up-to-date for the recently released iTunes 10: Take Control of iTunes 10: The FAQ.

Find answers to all your questions about iTunes 10

Join iTunes expert Kirk McElhearn as he helps you think like an iTunes power user so you can get the most out of your audio, video, and book collections in iTunes 10. You’ll also learn the best way for you to transfer media to your iPad, iPhone, or iPod.

In question-and-answer format, Kirk helps you appreciate and understand the process of bringing media into iTunes, tagging it, adding album artwork, and organizing it into playlists. With that setup completed, you can enjoy your music, movies, audiobooks, ebooks, and more without hassles on your Mac or Windows computer, and on all your Apple devices.

Questions answered include:

• How do I use the new Album List View in iTunes 10?
• What can I do with Ping, the new musical social network in iTunes 10?
• How do I control the sound quality when I import (rip) a music CD?
• What should I consider before I rip an audiobook CD?
• How do I turn on Genius?
• Where are good places to shop for digital music besides the iTunes Store?
• Which tags should I worry about?
• How do I add lyrics to my tracks?
• How can I locate music that I haven’t listed to in a while?
• What special things can I do with smart playlists?
• How do I share my iTunes library over a network?
• What can I print with iTunes?
• What’s the best way to deal with my huge music library?
• What are Kirk’s favorite AppleScripts to extend iTunes’ functionality?

This 146-page ebook is only $10. Available now in PDF, epub and .mobi (Kindle) formats from Take Control Books. Also available in epub format from Apple’s iBookstore and Kindle format from Amazon.com.

Buy iPods from Amazon.com

Take Control Books 50% Off Sale

Now through August 3, all Take Control books are 50% off (including mine). If you don’t know the great Take Control book series, it’s a set of ebooks about using the Mac and related software and hardware. Check out the sale now.

And if you’re interested, I’ve got a new Take Control book coming out at the end of August… I’ll be posting more here soon.