Linked List: January 31, 2010

Sunday, 31 January 2010

Amazon ‘Capitulates’ to Macmillan 

Amazon Kindle Team:

We have expressed our strong disagreement and the seriousness of our disagreement by temporarily ceasing the sale of all Macmillan titles. We want you to know that ultimately, however, we will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan’s terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books. Amazon customers will at that point decide for themselves whether they believe it’s reasonable to pay $14.99 for a bestselling e-book.

Just me, or does it seem like an Apple device that won’t ship for another 53 days already upended Amazon’s Kindle business? What kind of sense does it make to accuse a publisher of having a “monopoly” over its own titles?

Andy Ihnatko’s Hands-On iPad Impressions 

There were two types of writers in the iPad demo unit press room. Those who rushed in and rushed out so as to immediately begin filing and publishing coverage of the announcements, and those who stayed in the room soaking up time spelunking with the demo units until the ever-friendly Apple reps started politely suggesting it was time for us to go. Andy and I (and Dan Moren and Glenn Fleishman and Jeff Carlson) were in the latter group.

The Little Boy Who Cried Tablet 

Mike Davidson on Jason Calacanis.

Old World vs. New World Computing 

Steven Frank gets it.

The iPad Is the iPrius 

Jim Stogdill:

The automobile went through a similar evolution. From eminently hackable to hood essentially sealed shut. When the automobile was new, you HAD to be a mechanic to own one. Later, being a mechanic gave you the option of tinkering and adapting it to your specific interests. In fact, that’s how most people up until about 1985 learned to be mechanics. The big changes came with the catalytic converter and electronic ignition (and warranty language to match). Now the automobile has reached the point in its development where you don’t even have to know whether it has a motor or an engine to use it, but to tinker at all requires highly specialized skills.

That’s a better car metaphor than my automatic transmission one.

Second-Hand Reports From Steve Jobs’s All-Hands Town Hall Meeting at Apple Last Week 

Take it with a big grain of salt, because it’s second-hand and illustrated with a goofily menacing photo of Jobs, but Wired has a report on Jobs’s post-iPad all-hands company meeting:

On Google: We did not enter the search business, Jobs said. They entered the phone business. Make no mistake they want to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them, he says. Someone else asks something on a different topic, but there’s no getting Jobs off this rant. I want to go back to that other question first and say one more thing, he says. This don’t be evil mantra: “It’s bullshit.” Audience roars.

About Adobe: They are lazy, Jobs says. They have all this potential to do interesting things but they just refuse to do it. They don’t do anything with the approaches that Apple is taking, like Carbon. Apple does not support Flash because it is so buggy, he says. Whenever a Mac crashes more often than not it’s because of Flash. No one will be using Flash, he says. The world is moving to HTML5.

Sounds about right to me. If anyone who was there disputes Wired’s synopsis, I’m all ears.

Update: Arnold Kim has a few more tidbits. And one DF-reading little birdie emailed to say that while the gist is right, the Wired transcript is clearly paraphrased: “He actually said ‘teams at Google want to kill us.’ He never said it in a way that made it sound like the whole company did. Mostly just the Android team.” Update 2: Another little birdie in attendance tells me, “The quote was actually, ‘Don’t be evil is a load of crap,’” and that Jobs was nostalgic about the kick-ass Adobe of old.

An Outsider’s Guide to the Amazon/Macmillan Fight 

Charlie Stross on the fight between Amazon and book publisher Macmillan. After reading this, I take it back about saying that Amazon might be happy with a popular Kindle app for the iPad.