Listing entries tagged with ipod

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design proposal for ipod-based e-book reader   06.18.2007, 2:43 AM

I got an email the other day from the fellow who made this: an interesting proposal and, incidentally, a clever use of Google SketchUp for modeling gadgets.

The central thesis is that, unlike the Sony Librie or other tablets currently available, a dual-screen reader with a dock for the iPod is the most viable design for a) popularizing the use of an ebook reader and b) streamlining the use of an ebook store.

He's interested in getting feedback so leave your two cents.

Posted by ben vershbow at 02:43 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack
tags: apple , design , ebook , ipod , reader , reading , screenreading , sketchup , video

jonas mekas has a plan   11.17.2006, 10:49 AM

Jonas Mekas was mentioned in passing on this blog last week, which seems fortuitous timing. Mekas has just announced (by video, of course) a plan to release a short film every day next year. All will be formatted for the video iPod; however, video formatted this way doesn't need a video iPod for playback.

Some background: Jonas Mekas is primarily an experimental film maker, having used film to document his life for the past fifty years. Along with Michael Apted's 7 Up series, Mekas's As I Was Moving Ahead, Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty is one of the twentieth century's great works of biography. He's one of the most respected Lithuanian poets of the last century. And he's also been a central force for avant-garde film culture in New York. Anthology Film Archives, his current cinema, presents an incredibly wide range of historical and contemporary film. It's one of the great things about living in New York: the vast majority of what's shown there simply isn't distributed, and is inaccessible any other way.

Mekas has been taken in by the Maya Stendhal Gallery, which is currently hosting an exhibit of forty of his recent films ("recent" defined rather loosely). I spent an hour or so at the gallery yesterday; in the darkened space, flat-screen monitors present Mekas's films on repeat. The selection of films at Maya Stendhal is tilted to the celebrity: there's Andy Warhol at work, Salvador Dalí and Gala clowning about with broken-down cars somewhere in Chelsea, John Lennon and Yoko Ono's bed-in in Montréal, Jackie Onassis at home, the elderly Carl Jung carving stones.

It's a nice experience, but it's difficult to actually watch the films there: the monitors are installed in series, so while watching one you can't help but be distracted by what's going on to the left and right. Mekas's private epiphanies (Stan Brakhage making an enormous pile of pancakes for his children, for example) are interrupted by famous faces. But perhaps the most interesting thing about this exhibit isn't actually going on in the gallery itself: the Maya Stendhal gallery is presenting the forty films online for public downloading. Currently, they're available in iPod format – 320 x 240 pixel QuickTime files – but a few are available in high resolution: I downloaded a 665Mb file of the Velvet Underground's first public appearance, at a psychiatrist's convention in 1965. This is DVD quality: 720 x 576 pixels.

Mekas's films aren't free, but they're relatively cheap: $3.99 for iPod quality, $6.99 for high resolution. The money isn't going straight to Mekas: it's going through the gallery. But there's something that feels exciting about this: an artist taking over the reigns of distribution. This isn't work that the general public is interested in; neither the artist nor the audience would be well-served by a regular distributor. Here there's a more direct connection. Mekas curates an enormous library of film at Anthology Film Archives; it would be a tremendous achievement if that could be made available online.

Mekas's upcoming project to make a film a day and present it online is also interesting as an experiment in networked culture. Working online will create a much faster feedback loop for Mekas: there will almost certainly be a much greater role for the audience, not dissimilar to what we've been examining with our Thinking Out Loud series.

Posted by dan visel at 10:49 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
tags: anthology_film_archives , distribution , film , ipod , jonas_mekas , production , video_ipod

an encyclopedia in my pocket   11.03.2006, 6:00 PM

A while back – last March – there was a great deal of excitement over Wikipodia, an open source project to install Wikipedia on an iPod. Wanting a portable Wikipedia, I installed Linux on my brand new video iPod, a necessary prerequisite, but was disappointed to discover that Wikipodia only worked on older iPods with smaller screens. I've waited for an update to Wikipodia since then, but the project seems to have gone dark. Probably Wikipodia wouldn't have been an ideal solution anyway: it requires you to reboot your iPod into Linux whenever you want to look at Wikipedia. You could have an iPod to listen to music or a Wikipedia to read, but not both at the same time.

But a partial fulfillment for my desire to have a portable Wikipedia has come along: Matt Swann has posted a script that puts some of the Wikipedia on an iPod, in iPod Notes format. While it's much simpler than installing a new operating system on your iPod, it's still not for everybody – it requires using the OS X command line, although there's an Automator-based version that's a bit simpler. (PC versions would seem to be available as well, though I don't know anything about them – check the comments here.) If you're willing to take the plunge, you can feed the script a page from Wikipedia and it will start filling up your iPod Notes directory with that page and all the pages linked from it. I started from the entry for book; the script downloaded this, then it downloaded the entries for paper, parchment, page, and so on. When it finished those, it downloads all the pages linked from the linked pages, and it keeps doing this until it runs out of space: regardless of iPod size, you can only have 1000 notes in the Notes directory. This doesn't meant that you get 1000 articles. Because each iPod note can only be 4 kb long, entries that are longer than 4000 characters are split into multiple notes; thus, I wound up with only 216 entries.

Though 216 entries is a tiny subset of Wikipedia, it's still an interesting experience having a chunk of an encyclopedia in your pocket. What I find most captivating about approaching Wikipedia this was is that I found myself browsing interesting sounding articles rather than searching them directly. The iPod doesn't have much input functionality: while you can scroll through the list of entries, you can't search for a subject, as you usually would. (And with only 216 entries, searching would be of limited utility at best. The Wikipodia project promises full text searching, though text entry is a difficult proposition when you only have five keys to type with.) While you can scroll through the list of entries to find something that looks interesting, you're likely to get sidetracked by something along the way. So you browse.

To my mind, browsing is one of the primary virtues of a print encyclopedia: the arbitrary logic of alphabetization makes for a serendipitous reading experience, and you often come away from a print encyclopedia having read something in a nearby article that you didn't intend to read. This is something that's generally lost with online reference works: links between articles are supposed to make logical sense. This is also a reflection of our reading behavior: if I search for "book" in Wikipedia, I'm probably looking for something in particular. If I'm interested in book conservation issues, I might click on the link for slow fires. If I'm interested in some other area related to books – how to make vellum, for example – I almost certainly wouldn't. Instead I'd click on the vellum link and keep looking from there. We tend to be goal-directed when we using Wikipedia online: it's like going to a library and finding the specific book you want. Wandering in a library is an equally valid behavior: that's what happens here.

Because you're not looking for a particular piece of information, you do find yourself reading in a different way. Search-based reading is a different style of reading than browsing, which is slower and more casual. This has a downside when applied to Wikipedia: the often atrocious style is more glaring when you're reading for pleasure rather than reading for information. And an offline Wikipedia inhibits some of the new reading habits Wikipedia encourages. I caught myself wondering how biased the declarations of the Shāhnāma's originality w/r/t other national epics were; without recourse to page histories and talk pages I'm left to wonder until I find myself with an Internet connection.

The experience of reading Wikipedia this way isn't perfect: many links don't work, and some articles seem to arbitrarily end, some in mid-sentence, some in mid-word. You also realize how many links in Wikipedia aren't useful at all. If I'm interested in books as a concept, I'm probably not interested in 1907 as a concept, though that is the year that Marc Aurel Stein found The Diamond Sutra, the oldest known block-printed book. Marc Aurel Stein or The Diamond Sutra might be interesting subjects to a book-inclined browser; 1907 isn't as likely. What you get on your iPod is an arbitrary selection. But there's something very pleasant about this: it's nice to have the chance to learn about both Neferirkare Kakai and the Rule of St. Benedict on the subway.

Posted by dan visel at 06:00 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
tags: browsing , ipod , reading , wikipedia

phony reader 2: the ipod fallacy   10.04.2006, 11:13 AM

Since the release of the Sony Reader, I've been thinking a lot about the difference between digital text and digital music, and why an ebook device is not, as much as publishers would like it to be, an iPod. This is not an argument over the complexity of literature versus the complexity of music, rather it is a question of interfaces. It seems to me that reading interfaces are much more complicated than listening ones.

The iPod is, as skeptics initially complained, little more than a hard drive with earphones. But this is precisely its genius: the simplicity of its interface, the sleekness of its form, the radical smallness of its immense storage capacity. All these allow us to spend less time sorting through our music -- lugging around stacks of albums, ejecting and inserting tapes or discs -- and more time listening to it.

A sequence of smooth thumb gestures leads to the desired track. Once the track has commenced, the device is tucked away into a pocket or knapsack, and the music takes over. That's the simplicity of the iPod. Reading devices, on the other hand -- whether paperback, web page or specialized ebook hardware -- are felt and perceived throughout the reading experience. The text, the visual design, and the reader's movement through them are all in constant interaction. So the device necessarily must be more complex.

In other words, a book -- even a digital one -- is something you have to "handle" in order to process its contents. The question Sony should be asking is what handling a book should mean in a digital, networked context? Obviously, it's something very different than in print.

Another thing about portable music players from Walkmen to iPods is that music, in its infinite variety, can be delivered to the senses through a uniform channel: from the player, through the wire, to the ear. Again, with books it's not so simple. Different books have different looks, and with good reason: they are visual media. This is something we tend to forget because we so strongly associate books with intangible things like stories and abstract ideas. But writing is a manipulation of visual symbols, and reading is something we do with our eyes. So well-considered visual design, of both documents and devices, is crucial -- as much for electronic documents as for print ones.

Publishers want their ipod, a simple gadget locked into a content channel (like iTunes), but they're going to have to do a lot better than the Sony Reader. To date, the web has done a much better job at fostering a wide variety of reading forms, primitive as they may still be, than any specialized ebook device or ebook format. A hard drive with ear phones may work for music, but a hard drive (and a pitifully small one at that) with an e-ink screen won't be sufficient for books.

Posted by ben vershbow at 11:13 AM | Comments (8) | TrackBack
tags: books , design , ebook , ipod , music , reading , sonyreader

phony reader   09.27.2006, 3:53 PM

What to say about this thing? After multiple delays, it's finally out, and in time for the holidays. David Rothman, as usual, has provided exhaustive and entertaining coverage over at Teleread (here, here and here), and points to noteworthy reviews elsewhere.

It's no secret that our focus here at the Institute isn't on the kind of ebooks that simply transfer printed texts to the screen. We're much more interested in the new kinds of reading and writing that become possible in a digital, network environment. But even measuring Sony's new device against its own rather pedestrian goals -- replicating the print reading experience for the screen with digital enhancements -- I still have to say that the Reader fails. Here are the main reasons why:

1) Replicating the print reading experience?

E-ink is definitely different than reading off of an LCD screen. The page looks much more organic and is very gentle on the eyes, though the resolution is still nowhere near that of ink on paper. Still, e-ink is undeniably an advance and it's exciting to imagine where it might lead.

Other elements of print reading are conjured less successfully, most significantly, the book as a "random access" medium. Random access means that the reader has control over their place in the book, and over the rate and direction at which they move through it. The Sony Reader greatly diminishes this control. Though it does allow you to leave bookmarks, it's very difficult to jump from place to place unless those places have been intentionally marked. The numbered buttons (1 through 10) directly below the screen offer offer only the crudest browsing capability, allowing you to jump 10, 20, 30 percent etc. through the text.

Another thing affecting readability is that action of flipping pages is slowed down significantly by the rearrangement of the e-ink particles, producing a brief but disorienting flash every time you change your place. Another important element of print reading is the ability to make annotations, and on the Sony Reader this is disabled entirely. In fact, there are no inputs on the device at all -- no keyboard, no stylus -- apart from the basic navigation buttons. So, to sum up, the Sony Reader is really only intended for straight-ahead reading. Browsing, flipping and note-taking, which, if you ask me, are pretty important parts of reading a book, are disadvantaged.

2) Digital enhancements?

Ok, so the Sony Reader doesn't do such a great job at replicating print reading, but the benefits of having your books in digital form more than make up for that, right? Sadly, wrong. The most obvious advantage of going digital is storage capacity, the ability to store an entire library on a single device. But the Sony Reader comes with a piddling 64 megabytes of memory. 64! It seems a manufacturer would have to go out of its way these days to make a card that small. The new iPod Shuffle is barely bigger than a quarter and they start at one gigabyte. Sony says that 64 MB will store approximately 80 books, but throw a few images and audio files in there, and this will dramatically decrease.

So, storage stinks, but electronic text has other advantages. Searchability, for example. True! But the Sony Reader software doesn't allow you to search texts (!!!). I'd guess that this is due to the afore-mentioned time lags of turning pages in e-ink, and how that would slow down browsing through search results. And again, there's the matter of no inputs -- keyboard or stylus -- to enter the search queries in the first place.

Fine. Then how about internet connectivity? Sorry. There's none. Well then what about pulling syndicated content from the web for offline reading, i.e. RSS? You can do this, but only barely. Right now on the Sony Connect store, there are feeds available from about ten popular blogs and news sources. Why so few? Well, they plan to expand that soon, but apparently there are tricky issues with reformatting the feeds for the Reader, so they're building up this service piecemeal, without letting web publishers post their feeds directly. Last night, I attended a press event that Sony held at the W Hotel at Union Square, NYC, where I got to play around with one of the devices hooked up to the online store. I loaded a couple of news feeds onto my Reader and took a look. Pretty ghastly. Everything is dumped into one big, barely formatted file, where it's not terribly clear where one entry ends and another begins. Unrendered characters float here and there. They've got a long way to go on this one.

Which leads us to the fundamental problem with the Sony Reader, or with any roughly equivalent specialized e-reading device: the system is proprietary. Read David Rothman's post for the technical nuances of this, but the basic fact is that the Sony Reader will only allow you to read ebooks that have been formatted and DRMed specifically for the Sony Reader. To be fair, it will let you upload Microsoft Word documents and unencrypted PDFs, but for any more complex, consciously designed electronic book, you've got to go through Sony via the Sony Connect store. Sony not only thinks that it can get away with this lock-in strategy but that, taking its cue from the iPod/iTunes dynamo, this is precisely the formula for success. But the iPod analogy is wrong for a number of reasons, biggest among them that books and music are very different things. I'll address this in another post shortly.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: ebooks are a dead end. Will it be convenient some day to be able to read print books digitally? Certainly. Will the Sony Reader find a niche? Maybe (but Sony Ericsson's phones look far more dynamic than this feeble device). Is this the future of reading and writing? I don't think so. Ebooks and their specialized hardware are a red herring in a much bigger and more mysterious plot that is still unfolding.

See also:

- phony reader 2: the ipod fallacy
- phony bookstore
- an open letter to claire israel

Posted by ben vershbow at 03:53 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
tags: DRM , e-ink , ebook , ipod , publishing , reading , sony , sonyreader

"i photograph to remember" moves to the ipod   09.13.2006, 12:38 PM

Pedro Meyer, founder of ZoneZero, the pioneering photography site, just wrote to say that he's working on an Ipod version of I Photograph to Remember, the cdrom he made in the early 90s. It's a deeply moving portrait documenting the last years of his parents' life. Pedro invites readers of if:book to download a beta version HERE. He's hoping for feedback so please send comments.

I thought it might be interesting to describe the debut of IPTR at the Digital World Conference in Beverly Hills in 1991. To appreciate this you have to understand that at that time no one had ever really seen anything on a computer screen with emotional content. The audience consisted of hyperactive, mostly male, senior executives who normally couldn't sit still or be quiet for five minutes. But for thirty-two minutes, from the moment the lights went down till the closing credits, there wasn't even the sound of breathing. People were literally stunned as they suddenly realized that the number-crunching, text processing machine on their desk could convey complex, profound feelings.

Posted by bob stein at 12:38 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack
tags: ipod , pedro_meyer , photography , video , voyager

ebook ipod rumored   07.26.2006, 12:02 AM

Engadget has it from inside sources at Apple that a next-generation iPod is in the works with a larger screen and a full-fledged text reader:

...two bits from separate, trustworthy insiders that Apple's not satisfied merely vending Audible's books-on-digital-audio solution. With the iRex iLiad and Sony PRS-500 Portable Reader both right around the corner, is it possible the next iPod might catch the eBook bug? We'd say the possibility is very real, since according to a source at a major publishing house, they were just ordered to archive all their manuscripts -- every single one -- and send them over to Apple's Cupertino HQ.

So Audible, huh? Interesting. They got a toehold in the market with audiobooks, and may now be making the transition to ebooks.

A separate trusted source let us know that the next iPod will have a substantial amount of screen real estate (as we'd all suspected), as well as a book reading mode that pumps up the contrast and drops into monochrome for easy reading. It's no e-ink, sure, but a widescreen iPod would be well suited for the purpose, and according to our source, the books you'd buy (presumably through iTunes) won't have an expiration...

I'd hope that such a device would have wifi, a web browser and an RSS reader that could be taken offline. I think that books will only be a part of the equation.

Teleread has the ebook standards angle.

Posted by ben vershbow at 12:02 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
tags: RSS , apple , ebooks , ipod , the_ideal_device

vive le interoperability!   03.24.2006, 1:49 AM

A smart column in Wired by Leander Kahney explains why France's new legislation prying open the proprietary file format lock on iPods and other entertainment devices is an important stand taken for the public good:

French legislators aren't just looking at Apple. They're looking ahead to a time when most entertainment is online, a shift with profound consequences for consumers and culture in general. French lawmakers want to protect the consumer from one or two companies holding the keys to all of its culture, just as Microsoft holds the keys to today's desktop computers.

Apple, by legitimizing music downloading with iTunes and the iPod, has been widely credited with making the internet safe for the culture industries after years of hysteria about online piracy. But what do we lose in the bargain? Proprietary formats lock us into specific vendors and specific devices, putting our media in cages. By cornering the market early, Apple is creating a generation of dependent customers who are becoming increasingly shackled to what one company offers them, even if better alternatives come along. France, on the other hand, says let everything be playable on everything. Common sense says they're right.

Now Apple is the one crying piracy, calling France the great enabler. While I agree that piracy is a problem if we're to have a functioning cultural economy online, I'm certain that proprietary controls and DRM are not the solution. In the long run, they do for culture what Microsoft did for software, creating unbreakable monopolies and placing unreasonable restrictions on listeners, readers and viewers. They also restrict our minds. Just think of the cumulative cognitive effect of decades of bad software Microsoft has cornered us into using. Then look at the current ipod fetishism. The latter may be more hip, but they both reveal the same narrowed thinking.

One thing I think the paranoid culture industries fail to consider is that piracy is a pain in the ass. Amassing a well ordered music collection through illicit means is by no means easy -- on the contrary, it can be a tedious, messy affair. Far preferable is a good online store selling mp3s at reasonable prices. There you can find stuff quickly, be confident that what you're getting is good and complete, and get it fast. Apple understood this early on and they're still making a killing. But locking things down in a proprietary format takes it a step too far. Keep things open and may the best store/device win. I'm pretty confident that piracy will remain marginal.

Posted by ben vershbow at 01:49 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
tags: DRM , The Ideal Device? , apple , copyright , france , interoperability , ipod , mp3 , music , piracy