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.
Amazon has introduced another new Kindle model, and this time the prices are starting to get low enough that this device may, indeed, become a commonplace appliance. The 3G version – which lets you get books almost anywhere, over the 3G network, is $189. But the real news is the wi-fi only model, which, for most people, is more than sufficient. Since Amazon has to pay for the 3G access, this allows them to offer a much cheaper wi-fi model: only $139. I’ll predict that there will be a $99 Kindle by Christmas, and the future of these devices will begin. At less than $100, people will easily buy ebook readers.
However, the iPad is still going to keep on selling like gangbusters, because of the many things it does. Will Apple release a smaller iPad designed more for ebook reading, at a lower price point? Time will tell.
I’m a big fan of the Library of America, a non-profit organization that publishes excellent volumes of works by America’s great authors. Just for the many volumes of Henry James, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and William James alone, this would be a great enterprise. But they publish great authors from the founding fathers to contemporaries, such as Philip K. Dick and Philip Roth.
Their new blog, Reader’s Almanac, will feature posts related to the authors and volumes in their collection. I’m looking forward to their posts, as a way of learning more about the many great authors I’ve discovered as a subscriber to their series. (I have more than 100 volumes from the Library of America already.) If you are interested in American literature, you should check it out.
Amazon has announced a new version of its ebook reader, the Kindle, which touts, among other things, “50% better contrast” than the current models. I’ve written about my experience with the Kindle, which was a second-generation model, and which suffered from headache-inducingly poor contrast. Amazon has clearly had enough complaints about this issue – even if many people don’t find the contrast to be a problem – to come up with this new model.
However, at $379, this is only $120 less than an iPad, which does so much more. I’m convinced that the Kindle won’t last, unless it eventually ends up costing less than $100, or unless it’s given free with a certain number of book purchases. While it has some advantages over the iPad – better in-the-sun readability, lighter weight, longer battery life – the iPad clearly has a thousand other advantages. Amazon is fighting a tough battle, and competition is good for everyone. At least for those who buy Kindles, they’ll know they can read their books on other devices when the Kindle dies – Amazon has Kindle apps for the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch; for the Android phone; and for Macs and PCs.
On this week’s all-star episode, veteran Mac commentator Ted Landau explains why Apple hasn’t changed the basic look of new Macs in recent years.
Columnist Kirk McElhearn, a fan of mystery and science fiction novels, explains why he likes Apple’s iBooks ebook reading app and speculates about some of the issues involved in electronic publishing.
Macworld Senior Editor Dan Moren has examined Apple’s iOS 4 inside and out, and, along with his verdict on the new mobile OS, gives you some sage insights on some of the features Apple might improve in future versions.
NOW PLAYING! June 24, 2010 — Ted Landau, Kirk McElhearn and Dan Moren
With the release of iOS 4 yesterday – the latest version of Apple’s operating system for the iPhone and iPod touch – Apple has also released an update to the iBooks app for iPad, and a version of that app for the smaller iDevices.
While the addition of iBooks to the iPhone and iPod touch is important – it levels the playing field with the Kindle, which has apps for such devices – there are a couple of interesting features in the new version of this app.
Apple added some new display options: First, you can choose to have text displayed justified (aligned on both the left and right of the column) or not. (To change this, go to the Settings app, tap on iBooks and make your choice.)
Next, the Georgia font is now available (I still prefer Palatino; Georgia is too cramped). Finally, there is a “sepia” display option. I’ve never liked this in practice, though I like the idea. The principle is that the background is beige (something I see as I type this in BBEdit; I’ve long used beige backgrounds for my text editors and terminal apps), but the fonts are reddish-brown. If the fonts were black, I’d be all for it; there’s less contrast, and in low-light situations, it would be easier to read. But the lack of contrast between the font and the background makes it pretty hard to read, defeating any advantage you get by the softer background.
The biggest change, however, is one of syncing your current location as you read. When you close a book, your device sends the location to a server, and the next time you open the book – on the same device, or on a different one – iBooks checks to find all your books’ locations. This bookmarking was, of course, the way you kept your place on one device before, but now you can switch devices and keep your place (as long as you have network access when you close a book). This matches what Amazon offers with its Kindle app and device.
Finally, the iBookstore now more clearly shows you that you can re-download books you’ve already purchased. Before, you’d see, in the Purchases section, a list of books, but the links would suggest that you had to buy the books again if you wanted to re-download them. Now they are marked Redownload (if they’re not on your device). Again, this aligns with the Kindle, which manages your library on its servers; you can now easily get to all the books you’ve bought, even if you don’t save them on your computer in iTunes.
All in all, these are nice improvements for an app that’s already changing the market: both the Nook and Kindle announced lower prices yesterday, in part, I believed, because the iPad and now Apple’s other devices are providing stiff competition to them.
Once again it’s Bloomsday, the 16th of June, the day on which James Joyce’s Ulysses takes place. If you aren’t familiar with this great work of the early twentieth century, it tells the tale of a modern-day Ulysses (Leopold Bloom) as he wanders the streets of Dublin on June 16, 1904. Closely modeled on the Odyssey, Ulysses is a landmark in modernist literature.
Every year on this day, around the world, people read Ulysses alone or in groups, to themselves or out loud, in performance or simply in sitting on a couch. For this year’s Bloomsday, allow me to recommend a novel way to experience the book. The recently released unabridged audiobook of Ulysses, from Naxos, is a gem. With musical interludes and sound effects, and excellent reading by Jim Norton (and Marcella Riordan for the final chapter, the soliloquy by Molly Bloom), this reading brings the work to life in unexpected ways. At over 27 hours, you won’t be able to listen to the entire book in one day (the novel takes place over a period of “only” 18 hours), but you’ll be drawn into the story in ways you did not expect.For those interested in penetrating this work more deeply, Ulysses Annotated gives you detailed information on the pullulating allusions that fill the novel. And The New Bloomsday Book gives a plot summary that can help you follow some of the more intricate chapters of the work. Hugh Kenner’s Ulysses gives a critical view of the book, and allows you to approach it with greater understanding of the broader scope of Joyce’s vision. Finally, Richard Ellman’s biography of Joyce sets the standard for literary biograhy. You’ll learn more from reading this book than from any book about Ulysses itself.
But most readers can eschew all the extra layers of complexity that such critical approaches add to the novel. The best way to experience Ulysses is to hear it read out loud. If you can, get the audiobook; if not, read the book. It’s long, it’s not beach reading, but it’s one of the greatest novels written in English.
I’ve been wanting to re-read Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, and decided to buy the books to read on my iPad (I already have paperback versions), to benefit from the larger font size. I’m currently near the end of the third book, when I noticed that something was missing. At the end of part III, there’s a section that seemed to not be there. I looked it up in my paperback, and, indeed, pages 459-548 are missing from the ebook edition.
I’m writing to Apple to get a refund (which I’m sure they’ll issue right away; they are pretty good about doing so for any music problems), but I’m somewhat worried about the overall integrity of these ebooks. If I hadn’t read the book before, I might not have noticed the missing part. Sure, there’s a hiccup, but one could assume that it was just glossed over.
So can one assume that ebooks purchased from Apple – or from any other vendor, for that matter – are complete? I’ve seen comments that many of them have editing issues, and I indeed found this to be the case for a Penguin ebook I bought from Amazon.
This is disturbing; are publishers really not performing quality checks for ebooks? In this case, nearly 1/6 of the book is missing; the length of the file should have been checked.
It’s worth noting that this particular book has been the object of several “reviews” in the iBookstore mentioning the glitch (I bought the book before these reviews were posted), some of which mention having contacted Apple. That Apple is still selling the book is at a minimum disturbing.
UPDATE: Apple customer service had me re-download the book. It’s the same. They didn’t seem to understand that it wasn’t a faulty download, but rather a problem with the actual book file that they are peddling. This leads to a problem: since customer service reps probably can’t escalate this type of problem to those who can take care of it, these issues may take a long time to be resolved.
UDATE 2: Apple has replied (much more quickly this time) to my follow-up e-mail, saying:
“I’m sorry to hear that the new copy of “The Waste Lands” is also missing the same section as the first copy. I am sure you were looking forward to reading the entire book and I would be more than happy to assist you with your refund request.
“I have reversed the charge for this iBook. In three to five business days, a credit of $6.99 should be posted to the credit card that appears on the receipt for that purchase.
“I have also submitted this item for investigation. Apple takes the quality of the items offered on the iTunes Store seriously and will investigate the issue with this item, but I can’t say when or if the issue will be resolved. Please try again in a few weeks if you would like.”
Note the “when and if” part, which suggests that this will never be fixed…
Kirk McElhearn writes about Macs, iPods, iPads, iTunes, books, music and more. He's written a dozen books, is a Senior Contributor to Macworld, where he is The iTunes Guy, and writes for several other web sites and magazines. He reviews classical CDs for MusicWeb and audiobooks for Audiofile, and is a French-English translator.
Become an iTunes expert with Take Control of iTunes 10: The FAQ, Second Edition.
Also, discover the word processor for writers, Scrivener, in Take Control of Scrivener 2.