I'm clearly a tech junkie. I love new, innovative technology. That may come from being raised in an era where television and radios had these glass tubes in them, I think they were called vacuum tubes, which were eventually replaced by transistors. It was an era where the hot, new, improved telephone was the one in pastel colors with coiled cords. Oh, and the Princess phone which came long after the yellow wall phone that hung in our kitchen.
I used to lose myself in daydreams of tomorrowland's technology. Of ovens that would cook food in an instant, or computers small enough to fit in a house and talk to the occupant. Come to think of it, I still do.
Until I can have the same computer that powered Jean Luc Picard's voyage through space, I find what pleasure I can in all of the incremental steps that will take me to the time when I can simply say "Earl Grey, hot." And enjoy a cup of tea.
The newest innovation in eBooks is the Netflix concept applied to books. Anyone else remember when Netflix started as a DVD lending library with movies mailed in red wrappers? Most of its movies are now watched via streaming, eliminating most of the need for mail service.
Which is a good thing, because if you are going to transition the business model to books, you don't want to start off having to mail a physical book back and forth to the customer.
Currently, the race to become the new Netflix for readers is between a start-up and an established internet company.
Oyster is the startup and hopes to be the eBook Netflix for your Apple mobile device, allowing you to read all of the books you want for $9.95 a month. As long as those books are among the 100,000 titles they offer. Being the aforementioned junkie, I asked for and received an invitation to download and begin using the app on my iPhone for $9.95 a month, just to see if I would like it. That was a month ago. Oyster has just released an iPad version which is better suited to my aging eyes.
Oyster Home Screen
for iPad
The application home screen looks much like the Netflix home screen, with recent books that I have added to my TBR list, those books that are in the Oyster "Spotlight," those "Popular on Oyster," editors picks, recently added and genre listings.
It is attractive and intuitive. If the books that you would like to review are not listed in the categories on the home page, you can either search by keyword, author or title. Or, you can view additional genres.
Oyster also offers a social media connection that allows you to see what your friends are reading or show them your choices. Since no one that I know is using Oyster yet, that is one feature I have no use for, but can see how handy it would be for a book club to share such information.
The feature that I do have use for is the ability to change the fonts. I love playing with fonts, and not just super-sizing them. Oyster's fonts come with their own backgrounds:
Three of the five fonts available on Oyster
Oyster claims a library of 100,000 books in addition to open source works. They have signed up "HarperCollins, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Workman and Rodale (to name a few) as well as indie book distributor Smashwords," according to an article in Wired. They claim that their library will continue to expand. Unfortunately, they only offer an app for Apple mobile devices. If you are an Android user, you are just out of luck.
The other competitor for the Netflix title is a bit older than Oyster, by about six years, and has an audience of 80 million visitors to its website every month. Scribd believes that this positions it well for an entry into the book subscription service market.
Most internet users are familiar with
Scribd as a means to share documents online. In January of this year they quietly moved into the lending trade, and on October 1st announced the signing of HarperCollins, which will provide Scribd subscribers access to its entire backlist (those books over a year old). Scribd is not revealing how many titles are in its library but in addition to HarperCollins, its "
e-book subscription service already includes books from smaller publishers, including Rosetta Books, Workman and Sourcebooks." And while new releases from HarperCollins won't be available to borrow, they will be available for purchase, possibly creating a back-door competitor for Amazon.
And after spending so much time criticizing the Big Five for their head-in-the-sand posture regarding the new reality that includes eBooks, it is nice to be able to praise one publisher that appears to be trying to find new ways to survive and perhaps prosper in that reality. Bravo to HarperCollins for being able to look beyond yesterday into tomorrow.
"I feel we are moving into new uncharted waters, but that's what innovating and reading is all about," HarperCollins CEO Brian Murray said in an interview. "I feel like this is the right deal with the right partner at the right time and we are going to learn."
NewsFactor.com
The Scribd application for the iPad is not terribly different from Oyster's, although the font selection is not as great. Also, I prefer the vertical pagination of Oyster, where you can scroll up or down between pages. Scribd also offers social media connections.
However, Scribd's price is a dollar less a month and it offers more titles from HarperCollins as well as that purchase option. More importantly, it provides apps for use on Android platforms (including Kindle Fire) as well as Apple mobile devices and all internet browsers.
During the month's free trial that both services are offering, I plan on switching back and forth to find which one offers the most books that I want to read. I will report back on what I find. But it isn't only about saving a dollar a month, or rather paying nine or ten dollars a month. Already I have found the services to be a good way to explore books that I might not have otherwise looked at. (I guess it helps if you read as much as I do and cringe whenever the Amazon bill shows up.)
Jeremy Greenfield of Digital Book World asked Trip Adler, the CEO of Scribd, about the pricing in a recent interview:
JG: Most readers in the U.S. probably don’t read enough to validate paying $8.99 a month for unlimited digital reading. Have you gotten blow-back on the price?
TA: The way I see it, we’re charging $8.99 per month for a new type of experience for books. It’s not just about getting more books for a lower price. It’s a new experience around discovering books, more flexibility to switch books, to browse books, to search for information within books. We’re charging for a new experience where people have access to a library. We’re seeing people browse books, read them in parallel — there are a lot of different kind of user behaviors happening.
He is right about that. I don't know how long the effect will last, but it is very like having a large library at your fingertips. I can read more than the first few chapters of a book before giving up on it. And I can take a look at books that are similar, or can provide background to whatever it is that I am reading about.
However, it is when Trip Adler starts talking about the technological innovations of the future, that my heart starts pounding exactly the way it used to when I dreamt about tomorrowland:
"If we're going to build hardware, the thing we want to do is build reading goggles, so you can do hands-free reading," Adler says. "It's a little bit of a crazy idea, and I think it's a long way away for us, but there is already a number of e-readers out there, and I don't think people need yet another device."
In Adler's view, the future of e-readers (eye-readers?) is in hands-free technology. Holding heavy books or tablets is cumbersome, Adler believes, describing the need for a more immersive experience than Google Glass. "Holding a book you're reading is kind of old school," he explains. "You should be able to just read on your back looking at the ceiling, with the reading experience probably projected in front of [your eyes]."
Adler stresses that Scribd is still "years away" from even considering producing such a product. It's moon-shot thinking. The details--how you would scroll, jump to different pages, and so forth--still need to be figured out.
Fast Company
"Earl Grey, hot."
Indeed.
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