Not to denigrate the efforts of any of the fine programmers who have poured their blood, sweat, and tears into creating e-reader apps... but I'm really hoping Apple provides us little fish with some sort of framework for making it easy to make a nice ebook.
How about a new iLife app? Sure, books are a bit retro ; but if the intent is to make them more media rich, the iLife shared library of media would be a way to integrate it all together. iDVD and iWeb are two iLife apps that assemble the content from other iLife apps using supplied templates. Apple's LP and Extras formats are largely based on web standards. So a new app could be similar to iWeb, but instead publish as an eBook that you can share with friends and family.
Let's call the new app iBook, since Apple isn't using that for laptops anymore. The consumer version included in iLife would focus on creating an interactive electronic version of the printed photo albums you can order from iPhoto (ie, less text, more photos and video). A pro version would focus more on text heavy publishing and offer full text layout and format controls instead of being template driven like iBook would be.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Gazoobee
if this is what they are thinking, then they are thinking wrong.
No way is an electronic book, (*any* electronic book), worth more than ten bucks or so. Media companies have to start to realise that electronic products are not worth the same as their real world counterparts.
If they are talking $10+ for a new book, compare to the price of a new hardcover book at typically $20-$30+. Sure, you can buy the paperback for much less later on. But I also expect the price of the eBook would also drop in conjunction with the release of the paperback version.
For less than 1/2 the price of a new hardcover, you are getting all the text of the book (ie, "full quality") plus extra content. Now compare to the pricing on movies. If you purchase the SD version of a movie on iTunes, you get LESS quality than the DVD and NONE of the extras the DVD has. And yet you pay nearly as much for the iTunes version as you do for the DVD. The same goes for music albums. Less quality, less content, for nearly the same price.
By comparison, I'd say eBooks at these suggested prices are a bargin compared to other media.
if this is what they are thinking, then they are thinking wrong.
No way is an electronic book, (*any* electronic book), worth more than ten bucks or so. Media companies have to start to realise that electronic products are not worth the same as their real world counterparts.
Do you know how much time and effort it takes to produce a book? How many people are involved in that production? What the addition of "enhancements" might cost to create and integrate into the product?
You do realize that books are only at the price they are today is that the cost of production has come down because of technological advancements and outsourcing the digital production to other countries like India and the Philippines and printing to China and Mexico? And those outside developers that still exist in the US are a lot smaller with much thinner margins to compete in the market, putting a lot of people out of work.
Personally I think that paperback books at their current price are a good price, and it would still be a reasonable price if it were an e-book. Trade books are a bit steep, but they have a smaller market and a much higher production cost. Text books an even smaller market and typically an even higher production cost.
I do understand the desire for lower cost products, but we still need to pay those people who produce the products what is hopefully a decent wage. We also need jobs here in the US, and to stop chasing them overseas or we will no longer have a job market that can support our labor force, or our consumer driven economy.
Comparing Kindle to the Tablet is like comparing a calculator to a computer.
Tablet=Full computer
The press always has high expectations regarding new apple products but they stick themselves to their limited ideas.... then Apple releases something obvious (spectacular and game-changing perhaps, but nonetheless obvious) like the touchscreen-smartphone iPhone, and they start drooling about how awesomely unexpected it was... just because THEY are blind and couldn't see it coming.
Apple does not release products that follow the market's rule with a pretty design and an eaten apple on the back. There is always something different about then, and that is why Apple is Apple.
iPod=An UI that you'll actually enjoy to use
iPhone=An UI that you'll actually enjoy to use, plus and Internet browser that you'll actually enjoy to use and lots of useful (and not so useful) apps
Tablet= An UI that you'll actually enjoy to use, plus everything you already can do on your computer (OS based on Mac OS X + Cocoa Touch)... with more mobility (try using a notebook without a table), iPhone apps as widgets to give it an initial push until its own apps come into the play.
WHY, I repeat, WHY would someone pay $700-1000 for an EBOOK READER WITH AN APPLE ON THE BACK?
These prices discount authors, editors, and other human resources required to generate publications. A textbook can easily require 10 years to go from an idea to a spot on the shelf of a bookstore. This is a single-author book. Modern freshman textbooks are collaborative efforts that involve 2-3 authors on the binder and 10-15 others named in the foreword. You simply cannot justify that level of effort if the book is priced at 1¢ per page.
IN '98-99 I worked on a two volume automotive text book, which included transparencies teachers support material and student workbooks. They also had to produce a brail version of the book due to regulations on the textbook market. It took about 2 years of design and production. As I recall the staff looked something like this:
8-12 writers
7 editors
18 technical reviewers
2 art researchers
1 designer
4 production artists (and as many as 8 at times to meet deadlines)
2 proof readers (more as needed to meet deadlines)
1 copy editor
Add to that probably 4 technical illustrators to create or clean up over 1500 illustrations, most of that was outsourced to a local company. Then there were photographers contracted off and on throughout the project as well as stock photography expenses for more than 800 photographs used in the books.
The books has gone through a number of small revisions (probably 3-4 by now) and a major revision in 2005 that I worked on as well, which required a complete overhaul of the layout, updating the text for advances in the field, new photographs and illustrations.
Today the book is still on the market and sells for about $80 a volume, about the same that it did when it was first published in spite of inflation. It sounds like a lot till you consider the obvious investment that it took to produce the book even before you take into account the printing.
Nobody is going to pay near physical prices for media to get eyestrain on an iTab.
200 million plus Internet users...and the dinosaurs are still 'blah, blahing' the old mantras of physical media business plans.
The scale of economics. Direct consumer access. Lack of physical media and retail and distribution costs. Plus the problem of people getting lots of 'print' stuff online for free.
Make it much cheaper than physical media and they will come. I guess it's just hard for people to see the future when you're entrenched in the past.
0 and 1s aren't free. Hosting. Server. Human time (labour costs). I guess that has to cost something, right? But in the internet world. It should be wayyyy cheaper because the potential scale of economic leverage is much greater and the costs are wayyyyy cheaper to make content outside of the labour/time spent.
Print media has been choking on print costs, retail taking their excessive cut for years. I'm surprised there's an industry left.
At least with Apple. They get 70. Apple get 30. Simple. Direct access to consumer. Job done. Apple are offering access to millions of credit card abusers. If the print guys have any sense? They'll make their 'formerly free' stuff so cheap it doesn't matter if I try it.
Apple will sell it at $999 and a subsidized one will cost $799.
They'll launch it as a premium product for cool rich people and monitor how well it does. (They're not in a rush because the iPhone still sells like hot bread and because it doesn't require much for a developer to make it accessible on the bigger screen.)
Meanwhile...
Everyone else in the industry will rush to make a cheaper one, to undercut Apple's hot new product but they will suck and won't compete. When enough hype and demand is created for tablet computing, Apple will cut the price of their tablets by $200 just in time for the launch of the new iPhone 2 months later...
Nobody is going to pay near physical prices for media to get eyestrain on an iTab.
200 million plus Internet users...and the dinosaurs are still 'blah, blahing' the old mantras of physical media business plans.
The scale of economics. Direct consumer access. Lack of physical media and retail and distribution costs. Plus the problem of people getting lots of 'print' stuff online for free.
Make it much cheaper than physical media and they will come. I guess it's just hard for people to see the future when you're entrenched in the past.
0 and 1s aren't free. Hosting. Server. Human time (labour costs). I guess that has to cost something, right? But in the internet world. It should be wayyyy cheaper because the potential scale of economic leverage is much greater and the costs are wayyyyy cheaper to make content outside of the labour/time spent.
Print media has been choking on print costs, retail taking their excessive cut for years. I'm surprised there's an industry left.
At least with Apple. They get 70. Apple get 30. Simple. Direct access to consumer. Job done. Apple are offering access to millions of credit card abusers. If the print guys have any sense? They'll make their 'formerly free' stuff so cheap it doesn't matter if I try it.
Lemon Bon Bon.
Some really good points in this post. You didn't even mention the cost of FREIGHT which is destroying the publishing industry almost singlehandedly. For certain industries to survive the steady march into the future, they are going to have to change with the times, and take opportunities to do so when they are presented with them.
Very basic market analysis dictates that any publishing house would be out of their minds to refuse revenue sharing and appropriate digital pricing with Apple, when it includes the potential number of new customers that Apple brings to them. These magazines and major publishers, they're not Verizon. They cannot afford to turn away Apple, and survive to regret their mistake.
I really, really hope that Apple won't release a $1000 tablet...
i don't see it. the design rumors of this thing are putting it in between the phone and the macbook. i suspect that the price will also fall in between. $700-800 max. maybe a little less if they include 3g and let the carriers buy and subsidize.
the rest of the 'profit' will be in luring folks over to the dark, I mean Mac, side and in cuts of the content. ebooks and mag, music, video, apps etc. and in this whole mobile ads business.\\\\
Quote:
Originally Posted by DocNo42
Enhanced Album's in iTunes. You might want to look at them a little closer
i agree. I suspect that this ereader game will be very similar to the LP and Extras they added last fall
Quote:
Originally Posted by lowededwookie
If they do it will be a feature of iWork.
just like they did with the LP and Extras...
Quote:
I've been searching everywhere for a Mac ebook creator software and so far come up with NOTHING.
well they aren't going to release the SDK before the product is at least announced or that would ruin the whole secrecy thing.
Comments
Not to denigrate the efforts of any of the fine programmers who have poured their blood, sweat, and tears into creating e-reader apps... but I'm really hoping Apple provides us little fish with some sort of framework for making it easy to make a nice ebook.
How about a new iLife app? Sure, books are a bit retro
Let's call the new app iBook, since Apple isn't using that for laptops anymore. The consumer version included in iLife would focus on creating an interactive electronic version of the printed photo albums you can order from iPhoto (ie, less text, more photos and video). A pro version would focus more on text heavy publishing and offer full text layout and format controls instead of being template driven like iBook would be.
if this is what they are thinking, then they are thinking wrong.
No way is an electronic book, (*any* electronic book), worth more than ten bucks or so. Media companies have to start to realise that electronic products are not worth the same as their real world counterparts.
If they are talking $10+ for a new book, compare to the price of a new hardcover book at typically $20-$30+. Sure, you can buy the paperback for much less later on. But I also expect the price of the eBook would also drop in conjunction with the release of the paperback version.
For less than 1/2 the price of a new hardcover, you are getting all the text of the book (ie, "full quality") plus extra content. Now compare to the pricing on movies. If you purchase the SD version of a movie on iTunes, you get LESS quality than the DVD and NONE of the extras the DVD has. And yet you pay nearly as much for the iTunes version as you do for the DVD. The same goes for music albums. Less quality, less content, for nearly the same price.
By comparison, I'd say eBooks at these suggested prices are a bargin compared to other media.
if this is what they are thinking, then they are thinking wrong.
No way is an electronic book, (*any* electronic book), worth more than ten bucks or so. Media companies have to start to realise that electronic products are not worth the same as their real world counterparts.
Do you know how much time and effort it takes to produce a book? How many people are involved in that production? What the addition of "enhancements" might cost to create and integrate into the product?
You do realize that books are only at the price they are today is that the cost of production has come down because of technological advancements and outsourcing the digital production to other countries like India and the Philippines and printing to China and Mexico? And those outside developers that still exist in the US are a lot smaller with much thinner margins to compete in the market, putting a lot of people out of work.
Personally I think that paperback books at their current price are a good price, and it would still be a reasonable price if it were an e-book. Trade books are a bit steep, but they have a smaller market and a much higher production cost. Text books an even smaller market and typically an even higher production cost.
I do understand the desire for lower cost products, but we still need to pay those people who produce the products what is hopefully a decent wage. We also need jobs here in the US, and to stop chasing them overseas or we will no longer have a job market that can support our labor force, or our consumer driven economy.
Tablet=Full computer
The press always has high expectations regarding new apple products but they stick themselves to their limited ideas.... then Apple releases something obvious (spectacular and game-changing perhaps, but nonetheless obvious) like the touchscreen-smartphone iPhone, and they start drooling about how awesomely unexpected it was... just because THEY are blind and couldn't see it coming.
Apple does not release products that follow the market's rule with a pretty design and an eaten apple on the back. There is always something different about then, and that is why Apple is Apple.
iPod=An UI that you'll actually enjoy to use
iPhone=An UI that you'll actually enjoy to use, plus and Internet browser that you'll actually enjoy to use and lots of useful (and not so useful) apps
Tablet= An UI that you'll actually enjoy to use, plus everything you already can do on your computer (OS based on Mac OS X + Cocoa Touch)... with more mobility (try using a notebook without a table), iPhone apps as widgets to give it an initial push until its own apps come into the play.
WHY, I repeat, WHY would someone pay $700-1000 for an EBOOK READER WITH AN APPLE ON THE BACK?
Or for a GIANT IPHONE?
These anal-ysts are really clueless
These prices discount authors, editors, and other human resources required to generate publications. A textbook can easily require 10 years to go from an idea to a spot on the shelf of a bookstore. This is a single-author book. Modern freshman textbooks are collaborative efforts that involve 2-3 authors on the binder and 10-15 others named in the foreword. You simply cannot justify that level of effort if the book is priced at 1¢ per page.
IN '98-99 I worked on a two volume automotive text book, which included transparencies teachers support material and student workbooks. They also had to produce a brail version of the book due to regulations on the textbook market. It took about 2 years of design and production. As I recall the staff looked something like this:
8-12 writers
7 editors
18 technical reviewers
2 art researchers
1 designer
4 production artists (and as many as 8 at times to meet deadlines)
2 proof readers (more as needed to meet deadlines)
1 copy editor
Add to that probably 4 technical illustrators to create or clean up over 1500 illustrations, most of that was outsourced to a local company. Then there were photographers contracted off and on throughout the project as well as stock photography expenses for more than 800 photographs used in the books.
The books has gone through a number of small revisions (probably 3-4 by now) and a major revision in 2005 that I worked on as well, which required a complete overhaul of the layout, updating the text for advances in the field, new photographs and illustrations.
Today the book is still on the market and sells for about $80 a volume, about the same that it did when it was first published in spite of inflation. It sounds like a lot till you consider the obvious investment that it took to produce the book even before you take into account the printing.
Nobody is going to pay near physical prices for media to get eyestrain on an iTab.
200 million plus Internet users...and the dinosaurs are still 'blah, blahing' the old mantras of physical media business plans.
The scale of economics. Direct consumer access. Lack of physical media and retail and distribution costs. Plus the problem of people getting lots of 'print' stuff online for free.
Make it much cheaper than physical media and they will come. I guess it's just hard for people to see the future when you're entrenched in the past.
0 and 1s aren't free. Hosting. Server. Human time (labour costs). I guess that has to cost something, right? But in the internet world. It should be wayyyy cheaper because the potential scale of economic leverage is much greater and the costs are wayyyyy cheaper to make content outside of the labour/time spent.
Print media has been choking on print costs, retail taking their excessive cut for years. I'm surprised there's an industry left.
At least with Apple. They get 70. Apple get 30. Simple. Direct access to consumer. Job done. Apple are offering access to millions of credit card abusers. If the print guys have any sense? They'll make their 'formerly free' stuff so cheap it doesn't matter if I try it.
Lemon Bon Bon.
They'll launch it as a premium product for cool rich people and monitor how well it does. (They're not in a rush because the iPhone still sells like hot bread and because it doesn't require much for a developer to make it accessible on the bigger screen.)
Meanwhile...
Everyone else in the industry will rush to make a cheaper one, to undercut Apple's hot new product but they will suck and won't compete. When enough hype and demand is created for tablet computing, Apple will cut the price of their tablets by $200 just in time for the launch of the new iPhone 2 months later...
http://harpercollins.com/book/ebookBuy.aspx
I went there, and didn't find any Harper Collins application (not yet, at least). But this must have a very simple and mundane explanation.
Yeah. Blah, blah.
Nobody is going to pay near physical prices for media to get eyestrain on an iTab.
200 million plus Internet users...and the dinosaurs are still 'blah, blahing' the old mantras of physical media business plans.
The scale of economics. Direct consumer access. Lack of physical media and retail and distribution costs. Plus the problem of people getting lots of 'print' stuff online for free.
Make it much cheaper than physical media and they will come. I guess it's just hard for people to see the future when you're entrenched in the past.
0 and 1s aren't free. Hosting. Server. Human time (labour costs). I guess that has to cost something, right? But in the internet world. It should be wayyyy cheaper because the potential scale of economic leverage is much greater and the costs are wayyyyy cheaper to make content outside of the labour/time spent.
Print media has been choking on print costs, retail taking their excessive cut for years. I'm surprised there's an industry left.
At least with Apple. They get 70. Apple get 30. Simple. Direct access to consumer. Job done. Apple are offering access to millions of credit card abusers. If the print guys have any sense? They'll make their 'formerly free' stuff so cheap it doesn't matter if I try it.
Lemon Bon Bon.
Some really good points in this post. You didn't even mention the cost of FREIGHT which is destroying the publishing industry almost singlehandedly. For certain industries to survive the steady march into the future, they are going to have to change with the times, and take opportunities to do so when they are presented with them.
Very basic market analysis dictates that any publishing house would be out of their minds to refuse revenue sharing and appropriate digital pricing with Apple, when it includes the potential number of new customers that Apple brings to them. These magazines and major publishers, they're not Verizon. They cannot afford to turn away Apple, and survive to regret their mistake.
I really, really hope that Apple won't release a $1000 tablet...
i don't see it. the design rumors of this thing are putting it in between the phone and the macbook. i suspect that the price will also fall in between. $700-800 max. maybe a little less if they include 3g and let the carriers buy and subsidize.
the rest of the 'profit' will be in luring folks over to the dark, I mean Mac, side and in cuts of the content. ebooks and mag, music, video, apps etc. and in this whole mobile ads business.\\\\
Enhanced Album's in iTunes. You might want to look at them a little closer
i agree. I suspect that this ereader game will be very similar to the LP and Extras they added last fall
If they do it will be a feature of iWork.
just like they did with the LP and Extras...
I've been searching everywhere for a Mac ebook creator software and so far come up with NOTHING.
well they aren't going to release the SDK before the product is at least announced or that would ruin the whole secrecy thing.