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Advertisements in E-books?

August 21, 2010 By Leave a Comment


AD building
Originally uploaded by Straws pulled at random

OK, thanks to Steve Gibson tweeting an article in ReadWriteWeb, my weekend is ruined. A Wall Street Journal editorial claims that according to a business professor and a former book editor (Ron Adner and William Vincent), ads in E-books are the next big thing.

Sacrilege, right? Ads in books were never done, according to the editorial, because “there is no guarantee of when or whether the book will sell”. But with E-books we can have more timely and more reader-focused ads. Fantastic! Right?

I don’t think so, Skippy.

If I buy a book, I pay anywhere from $10 to over $100 (depending on quality of book, both physically and content-wise). Putting ads in a book that I’m already paying for is comparable to putting an ad in the middle of the movie that I just bought on DVD. Or an ad in the middle of that new CD. They’re annoying, because they distract from the story, music, or other activity I’m engaging in.

One argument used why ads in E-books may succeed is that tech giants like Google are already adding ads to content. But you cannot compare free content (search results) with paid content (books). What works on one platform will not work on another. We live in a world where people pay $0.99 or $1.99 to download an application to their smartphone, just to have no ads. So now we’re going to create a model where I pay for the content and are exposed to ads?

The article in ReadWriteWeb also states that E-books are not a possession, since you cannot share them with friends, or that the seller can make the book disappear from your library. Give me a break.

First of all, the only time E-books cannot be shared with friends is if the book has DRM and has a flag set that specifically prevents that from happening. Apple’s iTunes has DRMed songs that can be copied, but have your signature in them – so mass distribution is not a good idea. On top of that,  there are plenty of DRM-free publishers out there. They allow you to share a book – without any technical barriers. Second of all, the seller that did make a book disappear (Amazon and the books “1984″ and “Animal Farm”) received a storm of critique, no matter how legally justified and compelling the removal was. They vowed never to delete a purchased book again.

Ads in E-books? I think it’s an extremely bad idea. It’s an old  media idea, where you try to get as much money out of a product, instead of trying to make a product that is actually appealing to the customer. Go read “What Would Google Do?” by Jeff Jarvis for some tips on that idea. And no, I didn’t get any money for that “ad”.

Filed Under: Books Tagged With: , , , , ,

iTunes 9.1 authorization and Windows 7

June 23, 2010 By 6 Comments

I recently started working with Windows 7 on my work computer (expect a slew of updates to the old Vista postings :-) ) and ran into some problems with iTunes. First off, it needed the special 64-bit installer to be run (I’m using Windows 7 64-bit), even though after doing that it installed almost everything in C:\Program Files (x86) (the default directory for 32-bit applications).

Then I tried to sync to my iPod. Oops, I forgot to authorize the new computer. So I authorized it. All seemed well, except for the Audible audiobooks… I added the Audible manager, authorized the Audible account in iTunes, and resynchronized. Now it came up with the message Some of the items in the iTunes library, including “…”, were not copied to the iPod “…” because you are not authorized for them on this computer. Yes I am. I just authorized them. Doing the authorization again confirmed that. I even restored my iPod to factory default settings (and forgot that to complete that you have to plug it in to a wall socket… :-( ). None of that helped – I still got the message.

That same message (or similar at least) popped up when I tried to play one of the protected files. And no matter how often I authorized the computer, and iTunes kept telling me that it is already authorized, it didn’t want to stick. Now, since Vista, Microsoft has introduced this new security model, mainly consisting of User Access Control (UAC), but also a change in what is considered an Administrator. In XP, it was sufficient to be part of the local administrator’s group. Under Windows 7 (and Vista), there is a distinct difference between running as a user of the Administrator’s group, and the option Run as Administrator. And apparently iTunes needs that!

After setting iTunes to Run as Administrator, I started it up and tried to play one of the protected songs. iTunes told me the computer wasn’t authorized, so I authorized it (again…). This time it seemed to stick however! The song actually played. And now it seems to actually synchronize all the songs, including the protected ones.

It does seem to take excruciatingly longer to synchronize when running iTunes as Administrator. Also, it makes me feel a little uncomfortable to say the least: it shouldn’t run as Administrator constantly. But it solved the issue for now, and I hope anyone else out there can benefit from this.. :-)

Filed Under: Music, Windows Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Apple iTunes to raise prices on movies

December 5, 2007 By Leave a Comment

According to MacNN, Apple is set to raise the prices on downloadable movies in iTunes to $15, just a couple of dollars below the retail price of a physical DVD. This means that for $3 more, you can order the same movie, without DRM, with extra content, in a nice box, and probably in better quality.

It is suggested in the article that the studios are under pressure from retailers such as Wal-Mart. Which basically means that old-style retail is trying to hold on to their distribution model, and forces the new-style retail to mimic their inefficiencies… I hope Apple will come up with something else, especially now that there are serious indications on the music side that the old model is failing (EMI scaling back funding of the RIAA, more and more DRM-free music).

Filed Under: Miscellaneous Tagged With: , , , , ,

Vista network performance while playing music

September 18, 2007 By Leave a Comment

Yeah, I just got bit by that Vista “feature”… the one where your network slows down when you play music. That one, yeah.

I just added an index to our database, unfortunately from the client side. While I was chastising myself for doing it client-server instead of host-based, I was watching the number of records being updated per second. Hmm, about 400… maybe if I shutdown some programs. First, Sidebar – it displays some RSS feeds and weather information. OK, up to 420-440 records/sec. Not bad…

Then I remembered reading something about the Vista network stack and playing music files. I closed iTunes, and lo and behold: I now was updating about 1800 records/sec! Over 4 times as much??? Me thinks Vista has a problem there. This is on a dual-core 2.4GHz Intel with 2GB RAM.

ZDNet has an article with Microsoft’s response to the Vista network performance issue, and while some of the arguments may be true (only local network operations, two high priority drivers contending for the same resource, etc.), I still think it’s funny that a dual processor system would have its network performance so drastically reduced.

Anyone thinks it’s the DRM…? Anyone…?

Filed Under: Music, Network, Windows Tagged With: , , , , ,