SDRNews SDR2009-02-04 e-Book Conversion
- Motorola to Focus on Android
- KIndle 2.0 is Coming Early Q1
- People Love WiFi
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Converting to the e-Book
by Andrew McCaskey
e-books or WiFi – It’s Happening
I was surprised by the article that noted that Amazon sold half a million Kindles in 2008. Thanks to Oprah, they could have sold 250,000 more in the Christmas season, in spite of the worst retail economy in decades. I was less surprised by reports that people really, really like WiFi. I get the one technology, I don’t get the other.
The survey that Om Malik reported noted that people totally get WiFi. And, increasingly they are expecting to find it when on the road and they are finding it on their smartphone. In fact, smartphones (led by the iPhone) are the leading access device, even more than the laptop or netbook. We expect to have WiFi when we travel as much as we expect to have running water, air conditioning, and television. Although, the first two are necessities, and good WiFi makes the television irrelevant.
All of this has grown up in less than ten years. A trip to Walmart in even the smallest towns enables you to gather the access points, routers, cables, adapters and bits to keep your bits flowing. Seventy percent of those in the survey were between the ages of 18 and 45, what Om Malik calls ” digital nomads –- sales people, consultants, freelancers, web workers, technical workers and students”. Given the changing workplace dynamics, these are representative of the future working class.
e-Books? Trying to gain traction for ten years, at least. Ars Technica has an excellent, lengthy article on some of the reasons why: Focus on hardware, DRM, strategic mistakes. And a pig-headed insistance on focusing on the reader hardware, and not the text, the content. Just like you focus on the music, not the delivery system (radio, mp3, cassette, CD, or vinyl) unless you are a total geek.
But they do point out that the conversion will happen – the working demographic sees the advantages, and .. the others die off.
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