How Apple could make ebooks work
Since the iPhone App Store opened, a nonnegotiable part of my day is devoted to safely guiding cartoon animals around a go-kart track. And I've yet to encounter someone who finds PhoneSaber as funny as I do, but every new person I meet is a new opportunity to prove every last friend and family member wrong.
Yes, these new iPhone apps have finally delivered on a promise only hinted at when the iPhone arrived a year ago. Today, the ability to evade productive work and avoid rational, linear sequences of thought during those idle moments in line at the post office is no farther away than your shirt pocket.
But what about e-books?
Still, as much as I like burning brain cells ... I like to read. And I wonder why Apple hasn't done for electronic books what it has done for other creative arts such as music, movies, and TV shows. Why hasn't Apple crafted a top-notch shopping and viewing experience for books, and then slapped the greatest works of our most honored writers in copy-protected chains? Why is it that the basic concept of reading hasn't been perverted into yet another massive, glorious, fire-belching engine that makes money for Apple?
"Because I hate e-books," you protest. "And so does everybody else."
OK, I hear you. But this dislike of e-books probably exists for the same reason that so many people hated digital music before the iPod and the iTunes Store came along. While the concept itself is good, the problem is that, to date, nobody has implemented it in a way that doesn't suck.
The closest we've come to nonsuckage so far is Amazon.com's Kindle. And even there, plenty of work remains to be done. When the Kindle was released last year, I was pretty skeptical about the thing. If you presented hardware this ugly to Steve Jobs as a proposed Apple product design, you'd be lucky if he only threw it at you, instead of inserting it into you. And for a bunch of reasons related to its physical shortcomings, I felt that reading a book on the Kindle wasn't any better than reading one on an iPhone.
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What are you talking about?,
What are you talking about?, I downloaded eReader and will probably never read a book in any other format than the iphone. So what that iTunes was't able to capitalize on the sale of books, you can download them directly from your eReader account anytime you can connect to the Internet.