A new tablet clamp/arm

I hope the tablet holder arm market will expand a lot, there are still way too few options. A promising new one, though, is this Arkon mount.
I'm trying to find out from the company if it can be used with my bed stand, which only has two centimeters depth of edge. If it can, it might replace my floor stand, which I love, but which takes up a lot of space and looks like something from Frankenstein's laboratory.

Bookle, an EPUB Reader for Mac OS X

Introducing Bookle, an EPUB Reader for Mac OS X, article.

it’s clear that EPUB is the future. Unfortunately, we haven’t been happy with the best-known EPUB readers for the Mac, such as Calibre, which is cross-platform ugly beyond belief; Stanza, the Mac version of which strips all formatting and graphics and is now obsolete; and EPUBReader, which requires Firefox and isn’t Mac-like.
[...] Enter Bookle — a straightforward, elegant EPUB reader for Mac OS X that maintains your library of EPUBs, available now from the Mac App Store for $9.99.

Apple Clarifies iBooks Author EULA, Excludes Claim on Content

Apple Clarifies iBooks Author EULA, Excludes Claim on Content, article.

Perhaps as a reaction to widespread criticism and even anger, Apple has changed the terms which come with their new free software iBooks Author. Previously it appeared that you could only take money for content created with it if you sell through Apple's iBooks store and accept their 30% commision. But the new wording says that this restriction only applies to works in Apple's iBooks format, which is a whole 'nuther picture.
Unfortunately it seems that at the moment the only other formats IA will export are pure text and PDF. Hardly a wealth of options when considering the wealth of multimedia content you can stuff in such a book in iBooks format. Let's hope Apple lets it grow and let it output to more formats, like ePub 3.

Security Update 2012-001 Kills Rosetta Apps

Security Update 2012-001 Kills Rosetta Apps, article.

This issue relates to Macs running Snow Leopard, the next-newest Mac Operating System. Lion is the newest, and in that one "Rosetta" doesn't run at all. Rosetta is software which allows old software to run on present Macs with Intel chips. (The omission of Rosetta is why for the first time ever, I have not quickly updated to the newest OS.)

Digital Lysenkoism

Digital Lysenkoism, article.

Lysenko believed, incorrectly, that you could create heritable characteristics by changing a parent organism—that is, if you cut off one of a frog’s legs, a certain number of its offspring would be born with three legs.
Lysenkoism was a disaster. When it was applied to food cultivation it led to ghastly famines that killed millions. So, when Soviet scientists met their Western counterparts, everyone knew that Lysenkoism was an awful absurdity. But the Soviet scientists had to pretend it wasn’t.

[...] And I’ve recruited enthusiastic contributors from all of the big six publishers for the Humble E-Book Bundle—that is, all except one, which has an all-DRM-all-the-time policy and won’t consider publishing anything without DRM in any of its divisions.
Because of its insistence on DRM, this one publisher is going to miss out—along with its authors—on hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales, and some great exposure. Needless to say, every author I’ve approached from that publisher is now trying to figure out how to get out of their contracts for future books.

Not being able to change you mind in the face of new information is a trait of phychosis, mild or bad.

Why I don't use the iPad for serious writing - Charlie's Diary

Why I don't use the iPad for serious writing - Charlie's Diary, article.

Yes. I've been railing against the lack of arrow keys on the iPad's keyboard since the second I realized it didn't have them. What a Steve-Jobs-decision. "We don't need arrow keys, they are old technology, people are supposed to use the touch screen". While nicely repressing the fact that with fingers, placing a cursor precisely in text is a very clumsy task.

I admit that even if all of Charles Stross' attack points were fixed, I would probably still not use the screen keyboard for more than short emails. It just doesn't work for me. (I've seen people type really fast on it, I wonder how they do it.) I need a touch keyboard for real writing, which limits the iPad, obviously.

And since, for my current big writing project (a book about Domai), exceptionally I do need access to emails and web pages to get snippets, a desktop or airbook will probably be a better deal anyway.

"Amazon's Hit Man"

[Thanks to TKC]

Amazon's Hit Man, long article.
Even more awkwardly for publishers, Amazon is their largest retailer, so they are now in the position of having to compete against an important business partner. On the West Coast people cheerfully call this kind of arrangement coopetition. On the East Coast it’s usually referred to as getting stabbed in the back.

I love that. Whether or not it's more common in some geographical areas or not, it's a great difference in outlook on life and business: you can see it as a cheerful game, you-loose-some-you-win-some kind of thing, or you can see it as a deadly competition, only the last to stand is the winner, and everybody is an enemy unless they're a temporary ally...

It must be a very joyless life to have the latter kind of outlook. I mean, how can you possibly win? Even if you get to be King of the Hill like Microsoft once was, suddenly a new platform is the big new thing, and they jog past you. How much more fun to not care if you're the biggest and baddest, and instead just enjoy making good stuff which makes your customers happy. If you have that and it keeps bread on the table, that's the good part. Grinding the faces of competitors into the cold mud on the way seems a bit of a cheerless game.

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Of course the fears can be understandable:
Book publishing, an inefficient industry if there ever was one, seems ripe for reimagining. According to a recent report by the Association of American Publishers, sales of adult paperbacks and hardcovers fell 18 percent between 2010 and 2011.

Ouch! Eighteen percent! That should give pause for thought amongst believers that paper will never go away. (Well, it probably won't, but it'll be marginalized dramatically, like music on vinyl. The upshot is that we may see some really beautiful works of art in future paper books, because they have to make most of the medium.)

But trying to stop your little ice floe from melting won't help. Sooner or later you have to set out for a different life support. You may find one, or not, but the ocean doesn't care, sad at that may be.

"History Won’t be Kind to Apple & Textbooks"

History Won’t be Kind to Apple & Textbooks, article.

When Phil Schiller came on stage last Thursday, he was a serious man. He said, “Education is deep in our DNA.” His somber and thoughtful approach suggested that Apple intended to make things different and better in education. Apple is in a position to call some shots in the industry, and that kind of power should not be taken lightly. Mr. Schiller behaved, on stage, in accordance with shouldering that burden.
Only later did we find out that it was going to be the same old line; Apple gets its not inconsiderable piece of the action, 30 percent. And, as we know, the lock in with iBooks Author to the iBookstore.

I kind of agree. Apple could make a huge difference in education with the news software et al. But loosening up the licence and easing off significantly on the profit cut (especially when they set a price limit of $15 for everything) would look much better and be much more in accordance in the strong "we want to help" vibes.

"Here's some free software to help children, please give us 10% if you sell through our store" sounds better than "Here's some free software to help the children, you're not allowed to charge for your books outside our store, and inside we'll take 30% and we will ooooowwwn the textbook market in five years, bwaah-haaahaahhh!"

Heck they could even charge for the software if people want to sell outside the iBook store, I'm sure nobody would mind that. But the thirty percent always sounded pretty high to me, and for economically priced textbooks it's just squeezing the lemon too hard.

E-Book fast-page-flip Prototype Demo

To be frank, I don't know if this will be a huge step forward, since in ebooks you have search and usually a scroll bar, and in any case you can only really see about two pages at a time, so how many you can flip back and forth at a time is how valuable?

But it looks nice and quite intuitive, so it might work for some books and users.
It's only a prototype yet, though, and doesn't even use Apple's own software bits, so don't expect it this year.

Tablet ownership doubled over Christmas

US Tablet ownership doubled over the 2011 holiday season, article.

Surely the Kindle Fire is responsible for a lot of that, with a million sold per week, but it's generally agreed that the iPad is still holding its top of the hill position. And of course they are hardly interchangeable. [Update: Apple says they sold 15M iPads in the holiday quarter.)

But anyhoo, from zero to 19 percent in two years... And from 10 to 19 percent in two months!  That's gotta be the fastest adoption rate of a new technology ever.
Oh, and by the way, according to other studies, the number one use of the Kindle Fire is: reading! I admit I would have hesitated to guess this. I think this is a good score for abstract thinking version sensual "thinking".

I am interested to see how reading will look in a mere ten years. What with thinner, lighter, cheaper ereaders, small and hopefully some bigger too for graphics-rich reading, and probably no turn of the rising trend of printing and distribution costs of paper publications, surely tablets and readers will by then have taken over a huge lump of reading duties in developed countries. And then (or well before), like with mobile phones, it may go even faster in less-developed countries, due to poor traditional infrastructure.

Behringer iPad docking mixers

Behringer iPad docking mixers.
The iPad is used for screen and storage.
Sounds pretty neato. Though they keep it a deep secret what this thing actually costs, so I can't share that, sorry. I can well understand why they will hide the price so well, it's so the competitors don't find out, of course. (Oh, there goes my finely tuned sarcasm again, golly.)

Apple education event

Apple has posted the video of their big Education Event today 19.1.2011. They introduced iBooks 2, which is centered around rich, advanced textbooks for schools.

There is a new Apple app, iBooks Author, to help people create these multimedia books (not only for textbooks). And it's free, but the books will only work with the iBooks store, where Apple gets 30% of sales. It's a pity it's one-store-only, particularly since iBooks only has a minority bite of the market. It's a Mac app and requires the Lion (10.7) OS. (Unfortunately. I still have not replace all my non-Lion-compatible apps.)

And a new iTunes U expands the often-free iTunes-delivered education programs.

TidBITS has an article with an overview of these things.
A more speculative question is what will happen — particularly in certain subjects where collaborative scenarios or access to specialized equipment aren’t important — to higher education n general if it becomes possible to take most courses online in this fashion. Will the intangibles of a college education — maturation, networking, exposure to opportunities — and the eventual diploma be seen as worth the skyrocketing tuition costs?
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3rd generation cameras are the future?

DSLRs are a dying breed – 3rd gen cameras are the future, article.

Look, I hate to say it! I’ve spent loads of money on DSLRs and lenses for my Nikon. I’m not going to be using any of it in five years.
This is why the first decision is always a big one.  Canon or Nikon.  I don’t really get into that argument.  But, I do agree that once you commit to one, you’ll be buying a lot of lenses and just swapping out the body.  That’s why that first decision is so key — and it is the reason that I won’t buy any more Nikon bodies or lenses — because I won’t be using any of them in the future.

I think he has a lot of good arguments, even if, as he admits, generally the "mirrorless" cameras are not quite up to pro standards in some respects yet. (The Fuji X-Pro1 is a strong move in this direction though.) And it will take some time before such cameras, for example, has the richness of lenses available to them that traditional (D)SLRs have, it's very expensive to develop new lenses, obviously.

It hurts to think of the wonderful and expensive Canon glass I have becoming obsolote at some point. But times and technology march on, and actually Canon L lenses are no longer as exceptional as they used to be, in image quality terms. And they and the cameras are awful chunks to transport.

"Filesharing bugs me"

The Other Side of SOPA and PIPA, TidBITS article.

Similarly, “stealing” doesn’t precisely fit the act of making a digital copy — no one loses anything other than the opportunity to make a sale when digital content is copied, if the party who made a copy would have otherwise purchased it.
All that said, I hate it when I see our ebooks show up on file sharing sites for anyone to download in their entirety. I can’t measure whether it hurts our business and thus our authors. Nor can I say that it helps in any way. But I can say that it bugs the hell out of me...

I find that very interesting. Most people, when something bugs them, justify it immediately and forever. For example: if filesharing scares them, it must be because it hurts their business, and so they will go to alarming lengths (like trying to change laws) to stop it. Mr. Engst here has an exceptionally big perspective: he can see that rationally, it probably neither hurts nor helps his business any when their books are shared for free, but he just hates to see it. That is sound and honest.

One might say, if he could just handle his emotions on the thing, it would save him much time and aggravation with no downside. But that's all speculation, it's not trivial to change emotions, though it is sometimes done successfully. What's important here is that we all gain when we can separate emotional responses from facts. Which also is a surprisingly difficult matter, as witnessed by soooo many things, for instance that public nudity is illegal in most of the world, with no evidence whatever that it has ever hurt anybody.

diFeltro Fold, Italian handcrafted bag for iPad

diFeltro Fold, Italian handcrafted bag for iPad. (And one for iPhone.)

This is clearly a luxury item, but I think it's tasteful and nice looking. Simple design. Felt and leather, nice materials. Four colors.