I know, again another piece from the biography. Can't help it, great book. It's long, but interesting nonetheless.
[ . . . ]
In return for speaking at the retreat, Jobs got Murdoch to hear him out on Fox News, which he believed was destructive, harmful to the nation, and a blot on Murdoch’s reputation. “You’re blowing it with Fox News,” Jobs told him over dinner. “The axis today is not liberal and conservative, the axis is constructive-destructive, and you’ve cast your lot with the destructive people. Fox has become an incredibly destructive force in our society. You can be better, and this is going to be your legacy if you’re not careful.” Jobs said he thought Murdoch did not really like how far Fox had gone. “Rupert’s a builder, not a tearer-downer,” he said. “I’ve had some meetings with James, and I think he agrees with me. I can just tell.”
Murdoch later said he was used to people like Jobs complaining about Fox. “He’s got sort of a left-wing view on this,” he said. Jobs asked him to have his folks make a reel of a week of Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck shows—he thought that they were more destructive than Bill O’Reilly—and Murdoch agreed to do so. Jobs later told me that he was going to ask Jon Stewart’s team to put together a similar reel for Murdoch to watch. “I’d be happy to see it,” Murdoch said, “but he hasn’t sent it to me.”
Murdoch and Jobs hit it off well enough that Murdoch went to his Palo Alto house for dinner twice more during the next year.
[ . . . ]
Most of the dinner conversation was about education. Murdoch had just hired Joel Klein, the former chancellor of the New York City Department of Education, to start a digital curriculum division. Murdoch recalled that Jobs was somewhat dismissive of the idea that technology could transform education. But Jobs agreed with Murdoch that the paper textbook business would be blown away by digital learning materials.
In fact Jobs had his sights set on textbooks as the next business he wanted to transform. He believed it was an $8 billion a year industry ripe for digital destruction. He was also struck by the fact that many schools, for security reasons, don’t have lockers, so kids have to lug a heavy backpack around. “The iPad would solve that,” he said. His idea was to hire great textbook writers to create digital versions, and make them a feature of the iPad. In addition, he held meetings with the major publishers, such as Pearson Education, about partnering with Apple. “The process by which states certify textbooks is corrupt,” he said. “But if we can make the textbooks free, and they come with the iPad, then they don’t have to be certified. The crappy economy at the state level will last for a decade, and we can give them an opportunity to circumvent that whole process and save money.”
Thanks for quoting these parts where Steve is trying to educate Rupert in how to be constructive rather than destructive. If you want to be a destroyer, aim at obsolete technologies like textbooks, not at society in general.
Edit: The next-to-last paragraph just got my attention. News Corp doing digital textbooks? Lovers of truth had better get busy. Maybe this iText initiative will head them off.
As an academician and long time computer user, I also hope for content delivery tools. However, I don't think they need to be all that glitzy, in terms of functionality. Moving from traditional print media to new media does not require all of the interactivity and things folks are talking about. In fact, it never did really catch on, i.e. when CDROMS first came out, there were all sorts of dictionaries and things with video and interactivity - never took off. Fast forward 20 years, there was this magazine for iPad that was interactive with videos etc. "The Daily" - it has not done well. Simple blogs on the internet (text only for the most part) do well, and they could have more fancy interactive stuff, if the author had enough time, or wanted to do. Almost certainly, it would make those blogs less popular. Folks are not ready, still.
It is a lot of work to create good content, and even without interactive features, it can be great in the digital realm, with just simple things like click on a word to get the definition etc. I also do not see the first iteration being a huge jump into e-learning interactive presentations-like content. That is a huge about of work to create well, and is best as a supplement to a well written concise text.
Currently, it is a pain to publish even simple textbooks digitally (compared to print), and the added cost of porting to a digital realm (incl. Apple's or Amazon's cut) **can be much more expensive** than printing and distribution the old way. And it is not yet the time when the print version can be skipped, maybe soon!?
So, just a great authoring tool that is simple and efficient to use for porting existing and new texts to the digital realm in a way that the content is easily read, highlighted, underlined, and pages dogeared for quick reference, that is what we need (iBook has most of the features, but is not for creation).
I look forward to Thursday, and hope Apple did not bite off more than it can chew, like was done with iAds...
It's going to be interesting to see the scope of the solution for sure.
Once you have an easy-to-use, standards compliant tool for electronic publishing, you are one step away from saving your work as a PDF for print publishing. You are - at the same time - one step away from porting that content to a Wordpress (or other CMS) web site solution.
Apple has been running away from the Pro market, but it's still fascinating to think they could end up in direct competition (partially anyway) with Dreamweaver and InDesign.
As an academician and long time computer user, I also hope for content delivery tools. However, I don't think they need to be all that glitzy.... Simple blogs on the internet (text only for the most part) do well, and they could have more fancy interactive stuff, if the author had enough time, or wanted to do. Almost certainly, it would make those blogs less popular. Folks are not ready, still....
+1
The (F)lash gets in the way of absorbing the content
“The process by which states certify textbooks is corrupt,” he said. “But if we can make the textbooks free, and they come with the iPad, then they don’t have to be certified. The crappy economy at the state level will last for a decade, and we can give them an opportunity to circumvent that whole process and save money.”
- It's not "certify", it's "adoption".
- Only half the states are Adoption States, mostly in the south and west, but it includes California, Texas and Florida which are the three biggest buyers of textbooks, so in traditional el-hi textbook publishing, whatever those states want (or don't want), the whole country gets.
- Adoption is only at the K-12 level and only public schools - it has nothing to do with college texts.
- I'm not sure that making the textbooks free would get around the adoption process. The adoption committees are highly political and they're not going to give up that power easily.
- I don't know how Apple would produce free textbooks. That's not in the interest of either the educatonal publishers or even textbook authors.
- The rumors seem to indicate this is about college publishing, not el-hi publishing.
- A Garage Band type tool to produce interactive textbooks would be great, but I don't believe it's going to be enough for the academic publishers - it seems to me they would need a more professional tool tied to an asset management system, since much of the business they now find themselves in is the development of custom textbooks, where professor want a chapter from one textbook, another chapter from another, etc.
Too not funny. It tells my iPad that I need to update my Flash Player.
Not funny at all, no. Strange; I thought if It reads HTML over the video it would work, well, with HTML. Apparently not so with Facebook. I really don't like Facebook, but to each his own. Did smile when I tapped on the Install Flash button over at Adobe:
Thank you for your interest in Adobe Flash Player. Unfortunately Apple does not allow Flash Player to be installed on iPhone or iPad.
Comments
I know, again another piece from the biography. Can't help it, great book. It's long, but interesting nonetheless.
[ . . . ]
In return for speaking at the retreat, Jobs got Murdoch to hear him out on Fox News, which he believed was destructive, harmful to the nation, and a blot on Murdoch’s reputation. “You’re blowing it with Fox News,” Jobs told him over dinner. “The axis today is not liberal and conservative, the axis is constructive-destructive, and you’ve cast your lot with the destructive people. Fox has become an incredibly destructive force in our society. You can be better, and this is going to be your legacy if you’re not careful.” Jobs said he thought Murdoch did not really like how far Fox had gone. “Rupert’s a builder, not a tearer-downer,” he said. “I’ve had some meetings with James, and I think he agrees with me. I can just tell.”
Murdoch later said he was used to people like Jobs complaining about Fox. “He’s got sort of a left-wing view on this,” he said. Jobs asked him to have his folks make a reel of a week of Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck shows—he thought that they were more destructive than Bill O’Reilly—and Murdoch agreed to do so. Jobs later told me that he was going to ask Jon Stewart’s team to put together a similar reel for Murdoch to watch. “I’d be happy to see it,” Murdoch said, “but he hasn’t sent it to me.”
Murdoch and Jobs hit it off well enough that Murdoch went to his Palo Alto house for dinner twice more during the next year.
[ . . . ]
Most of the dinner conversation was about education. Murdoch had just hired Joel Klein, the former chancellor of the New York City Department of Education, to start a digital curriculum division. Murdoch recalled that Jobs was somewhat dismissive of the idea that technology could transform education. But Jobs agreed with Murdoch that the paper textbook business would be blown away by digital learning materials.
In fact Jobs had his sights set on textbooks as the next business he wanted to transform. He believed it was an $8 billion a year industry ripe for digital destruction. He was also struck by the fact that many schools, for security reasons, don’t have lockers, so kids have to lug a heavy backpack around. “The iPad would solve that,” he said. His idea was to hire great textbook writers to create digital versions, and make them a feature of the iPad. In addition, he held meetings with the major publishers, such as Pearson Education, about partnering with Apple. “The process by which states certify textbooks is corrupt,” he said. “But if we can make the textbooks free, and they come with the iPad, then they don’t have to be certified. The crappy economy at the state level will last for a decade, and we can give them an opportunity to circumvent that whole process and save money.”
Thanks for quoting these parts where Steve is trying to educate Rupert in how to be constructive rather than destructive. If you want to be a destroyer, aim at obsolete technologies like textbooks, not at society in general.
Edit: The next-to-last paragraph just got my attention. News Corp doing digital textbooks? Lovers of truth had better get busy. Maybe this iText initiative will head them off.
I agree interaction is key. Here's a perfect example: https://www.facebook.com/#!/photo.php?v=336268213050627
Flash is required? They gotta be kidding. I thought you were more stelligent than that. : )
It is a lot of work to create good content, and even without interactive features, it can be great in the digital realm, with just simple things like click on a word to get the definition etc. I also do not see the first iteration being a huge jump into e-learning interactive presentations-like content. That is a huge about of work to create well, and is best as a supplement to a well written concise text.
Currently, it is a pain to publish even simple textbooks digitally (compared to print), and the added cost of porting to a digital realm (incl. Apple's or Amazon's cut) **can be much more expensive** than printing and distribution the old way. And it is not yet the time when the print version can be skipped, maybe soon!?
So, just a great authoring tool that is simple and efficient to use for porting existing and new texts to the digital realm in a way that the content is easily read, highlighted, underlined, and pages dogeared for quick reference, that is what we need (iBook has most of the features, but is not for creation).
I look forward to Thursday, and hope Apple did not bite off more than it can chew, like was done with iAds...
Once you have an easy-to-use, standards compliant tool for electronic publishing, you are one step away from saving your work as a PDF for print publishing. You are - at the same time - one step away from porting that content to a Wordpress (or other CMS) web site solution.
Apple has been running away from the Pro market, but it's still fascinating to think they could end up in direct competition (partially anyway) with Dreamweaver and InDesign.
As an academician and long time computer user, I also hope for content delivery tools. However, I don't think they need to be all that glitzy.... Simple blogs on the internet (text only for the most part) do well, and they could have more fancy interactive stuff, if the author had enough time, or wanted to do. Almost certainly, it would make those blogs less popular. Folks are not ready, still....
+1
The (F)lash gets in the way of absorbing the content
“The process by which states certify textbooks is corrupt,” he said. “But if we can make the textbooks free, and they come with the iPad, then they don’t have to be certified. The crappy economy at the state level will last for a decade, and we can give them an opportunity to circumvent that whole process and save money.”
- It's not "certify", it's "adoption".
- Only half the states are Adoption States, mostly in the south and west, but it includes California, Texas and Florida which are the three biggest buyers of textbooks, so in traditional el-hi textbook publishing, whatever those states want (or don't want), the whole country gets.
- Adoption is only at the K-12 level and only public schools - it has nothing to do with college texts.
- I'm not sure that making the textbooks free would get around the adoption process. The adoption committees are highly political and they're not going to give up that power easily.
- I don't know how Apple would produce free textbooks. That's not in the interest of either the educatonal publishers or even textbook authors.
- The rumors seem to indicate this is about college publishing, not el-hi publishing.
- A Garage Band type tool to produce interactive textbooks would be great, but I don't believe it's going to be enough for the academic publishers - it seems to me they would need a more professional tool tied to an asset management system, since much of the business they now find themselves in is the development of custom textbooks, where professor want a chapter from one textbook, another chapter from another, etc.
I agree interaction is key. Here's a perfect example: https://www.facebook.com/#!/photo.php?v=336268213050627
To funny! And took only 26 seconds
Flash is required? They gotta be kidding. I thought you were more stelligent than that. : )
My Safari says html5, and worked flawlessly...
To funny! And took only 26 seconds
My Safari says html5, and worked flawlessly...
Too not funny. It tells my iPad that I need to update my Flash Player.
Too not funny. It tells my iPad that I need to update my Flash Player.
Not funny at all, no. Strange; I thought if It reads HTML over the video it would work, well, with HTML. Apparently not so with Facebook. I really don't like Facebook, but to each his own. Did smile when I tapped on the Install Flash button over at Adobe:
Thank you for your interest in Adobe Flash Player. Unfortunately Apple does not allow Flash Player to be installed on iPhone or iPad.
Try this YouTube link instead:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fl4dh...e_gdata_player