Often I think that Cory goes a bit overboard, but this time I have to say that I agree with everything he has to say in this long and thoughtful editorial on Boing Boing. It has so much good stuff in it that I’m really at a loss as to what to quote. Well, I’ll take this from the end:
Gadgets come and gadgets go. The iPad you buy today will be e-waste in a year or two (less, if you decide not to pay to have the battery changed for you). The real issue isn’t the capabilities of the piece of plastic you unwrap today, but the technical and social infrastructure that accompanies it.
If you want to live in the creative universe where anyone with a cool idea can make it and give it to you to run on your hardware, the iPad isn’t for you.
If you want to live in the fair world where you get to keep (or give away) the stuff you buy, the iPad isn’t for you.
If you want to write code for a platform where the only thing that determines whether you’re going to succeed with it is whether your audience loves it, the iPad isn’t for you.
Cory’s got plenty of good points about the closed nature of the software, but as usual his politics get in the way.
“If you want to write code for a platform where the only thing that determines whether you’re going to succeed with it is whether your audience loves it, the iPad isn’t for you.”
This is just not a realistic proposition that publishers face. I agree that anyone whose business model makes selling products on the iPad their main source of revenue is not making the right decision. However, if you want to be taken seriously as a publisher that can sell content in every channel (which creators/authors definitely care about and consumers care about even if they won’t admit it), you have to create content that can be consumed on the iPad. It will be interesting to see how long it takes BoingBoing to create an iPad app.
Talk about jumping to conclusions with no regard to actual real world practices.
Has Cory ever heard the term Jail Breaking?
As in, Cory quit your ignorant hissy fit and just Jail Break your stupid iPad if you want to run that untested and possibly trojaned stupid code some stranger gave you off the internet.
In other words… Cory needs to sit down stop playing talking head till this plays itself out just like the iPhone did. People run unauthorized code on their iPhones all the time and lots of people find out real quick they have gotten powned!! doing it.
But they can do it if they want too no one not even Apple stops them.
What will be interesting to me are book sales figures on the iPad and the iBookstore as compared to other outlets and the wholesale distribution model. There’s a lot of reasonable speculation that most iPad sales will occur early to techies and Applers (that is, people who will buy anything that says Apple on it) and then fizzle. Add to that the speculation that fewer than 20% of iPad buyers will buy even 1 book may mean that publishers are killing themselves.
Also of interest will be Amazon, Sony, B&N, Fictionwise, and other ebookseller sales data that compares the following:
1. The number of agency publisher books sold pre-agency vs. the number sold post-agency.
2. Whether sales through the iBookstore are sufficient to raise sales (and income) of the agency publishers.
3. Whether there is an overall decline or increase in ebook sales when comparing pre-agency with post-agency.
Also of interest is whether the iPad becomes a Newton and if it does, how much of a cause of that fizzle will the agency model and Apple’s Fairplay DRM have contributed.
IMHO Doctorow’s completely misunderstood what Jef Raskin was talking about with his concept of the information appliance.
— C
I admire Cory. I think his politics are spot-on. But he’s just gone off the deep end here. Does he really think we all want circuit board diagrams for the iPad? Does he really think we all want to get out our soldering irons, and dump out a bag of integrated circuits onto our workbench, and whip up a mainboard, then mill an oak case for it, then hand code our own personal operating system, then write C or even Assembly, for cripe’s sake, to create programs for it?
And then what publisher, what movie studio, is going to offer us open-standard, no-DRM content to read and watch on our personal device?
— asotir
OMG!! My Mouse is glued, not screwed. So is my Wacom tablet.
THEY ARE OUT TO GET US ALL!!!