Apple didn’t do what I expected. Yet I still expect them to.

I can either stick around spinning my wheels until then or use my time productively.

Without this blog, I will have time …

Time to read!

And also time to prepare for Apple’s next move.

I haven’t said all that I’ve wanted to say, but so what? Who does?

The Axis of eCrap will die, just like Nokia is dying and Windows Mobile is dying.

Apple knows what it’s doing and is fitting all the pieces together.

All of you puppies yapping over the “monopoly” of the iTunes and App Stores go back and read this post. Those will go away too. Apple would rather eat its own than have someone else do it. That move is inevitable.

I said for over two years that iWork would also be inevitable. If you didn’t believe that, check your head. Your processing is malfunctioning and I can’t help you. Maybe nothing can.

What Apple is up to is something none of you expect and which will ultimately be breathtaking in its scope. It will be the biggest ding in the universe ever.

While Bill Gates maneuvered for the Nobel Prize, Steve Jobs stuck with his passion.

While Bill Gates plotted a grand monopoly position, Steve Jobs saw a vision.

While Bill Gates talked about the future, Steve Jobs created it.

Bob Lefsetz is one of the few people on the Internet who understands what I’ve just written. He writes about it again and again, commenting on music. Dig this:

Tom Scholz [of the band "Boston"] did not go to music business school. Did not study engineering in some extension class. Rather he got a traditional education at M.I.T. and then worked as an engineer at Polaroid. Making music at night. In his basement. For years.

Tom Scholz came from essentially nowhere to owning the largest selling debut album of all time. Because he didn’t believe in rules, he was on his own journey.

Isn’t that why we revered the rock stars of yore? Because they did it their way, beholden to absolutely nobody?

Boldfaced emphasis added by me.

And:

While fat cat businessmen are creating lowest common denominator music, fans are desirous of something different, cutting edge, uncompromised, that will touch their hearts.

And if we ever hear it, we tell everybody we know. Not because we’re being paid, but because of the sheer joy of listening and turning others on to great new music.

Boldfaced emphasis added by me.

Steve Jobs understand those words. They drive him.

They drive me too.

So it’s time for me to go away now and do the work that needs to be done.

If you have any questions about any of this, just read every damned thing I’ve written here.

It’s all there.

This blog is finished.

The End.

This post is a brief guide to building a library of DRM-free and legally-free ePub eBooks.

Some of you might have heard that Google has digitized over a million books and offers them for free. Well, stay away from Google’s One Million eBooks Of Crap! They are virtually unreadable.

You will also quickly find that ePub isn’t the nirvana all the PR would have you believe. See my prior post: The eBook Cover Scandal. In addition, Table of Contents sometimes do not link through to chapters and publishers are providing worthless Indexes. And yes, these are with ePub eBooks that you must pay for.

In addition, iPad owners will likely be locked into Apple’s iBookstore due to the FairPlay DRM. Until Apple convinces book publishers to go DRM-free like music, what you pay for will always be in jeopardy.

So, at the beginning, it’s best to stick with free ePub. They can be moved onto the iPad easily via iTunes or drag and drop to a Shared Folder. And they can be shared with friends easily by emailing them from your Mac or providing a link to them from one of the websites below.

Free doesn’t mean lesser quality (though sometimes it can be). As with pay-for ePub eBooks, you can usually expect a dead Table of Contents (no linking to chapters), no Index, and formatting issues. (It will be interesting to see how the iPad iBooks software handles formatting issues, since Apple has created its own ePub rendering engine. The one used by most eInk devices, from Adobe, is far from being optimal. And the ePub standard has screwed-up something as simple as covers too.)

Free eBooks are usually:

1) Out-of-print orphan works
2) Public domain (fallen out of Copyright)
3) Samples from publishers
4) Samples from writers

Anyone who wants to sample ePub eBooks before owning an iPad can do so by using Stanza on the iPhone or iPod Touch. Those lacking an iPhone might want to hitch a free ride from Sony. Download their Reader Library software. It was recently made Mac OS X compatible.

The Sony software should be used only to view free ePubs. Do not buy ePub eBooks from Sony. They will not be readable on the iPad due to incompatible DRM.

The Reader Library software borrowed its design from iTunes, so I won’t offer any tutorial in using it. Anyone who has used iTunes will be familiar with most of its aspects.

These are the major sites to hit to find free ePub eBooks:

ePubBooks.com
Feedbooks (multiple formats)
Manybooks (multiple formats)
Planet eBook
Web Books — not all are ePub
Project Gutenberg*
Adobe Sample eBook Library — full eBooks and sample chapters
Baen Free Library — SF & fantasy
Finding Free eBooks — not all are ePub
eBooks Just Published — not all are free or ePub
Smashwords — not all are free or ePub
Finding Free eBooks
Mobileread ePub downloads
Online Novels: Free Novels Available On The Internet

*Note: Project Gutenberg ePubs too often have a lot of frontmatter to page through before getting to the story!

At my prior blog, I consolidated a bunch of links to free eBooks into one post too:

FREE eBooks, Excerpts, Stories!

Some of those will be in PDF format only, not ePub.

A word about PDF. Since the iPad has a 9.7-inch screen, reading PDFs on it should be a very good experience.

For PDFs, it’s OK to use Google Books. The pages are straight book scans (however, be forewarned there still might be errors). And then there is also Scribd. In addition, some of the sites listed above also offer PDF as a download format in addition to ePub. The main disadvantages of PDF are that the file is considerably larger than an ePub file and sometimes paging through a PDF can be slow.

Don’t wait for your iPad! Start searching for eBooks today and build a library to have ready!

Additional:

Reference: Voluminous, eBooks For Mac OS X
You Will Want To BUY eBooks

By others:
My take on the iPad
Left Out
A New Angle on the iPad
Why the iPad Matters
Future Shock
Same Ol’ Same Ol’…
iPad
The invisible e-book
I need to talk to you about computers
The iPad isn’t what you think it is

And thanks to @fakebaldur on Twitter for these wonderful ones:
Hate the Name, Want the iPad
iPad is a Big Deal Guys
iPad is the web made physical
On the iPad
iPad will help us most when it disappears
iPad – Inspirational Hardware

Additional, previously here:
Web Designers: Wake Up And Smell The Touchscreen Coffee!
The INEVITABLE Changes The iSlate Will Create
The Fine Print = Apple iTablet WIN!
Touch Will Change Everything

I agree, Steve. Completely.

HARLAN ELLISON
- Saturday, January 23 2010 14:3:4

IMPORTANT !!!!!!!!! please read & REPOST HERE DAILY!!
I’ve been reading your posts since Thursday, and I know you mean well, but if you TRULY wish to do me any financial good, stop going to buy my books for hefty prices, in crap condition, on Amazon and elsewhere…

IF YOU CANNOT FIND THE TITLE YOU WANT IN A SIGNED MINT EDITION HERE AT THE ELLISON WEBDERLAND BOOKSTORE…WHICH MONEY COMES DIRECTLY TO ME AND SUSAN…

Then just go to E.READS!!! They have 33 of my books in handsome downloadable editions with a nifty Dillon cover! They are, in most cases, Preferred Texts. And I get a decent part of the minuscule price.

PLEASE!

Keep passing this on, or perhaps Rick can pull down the AOL banner, now long out of currency, and plug in the above.

Spreading ANY kind of word will be useful.

But this ongoing ignorance of how to PAY THE WRITER and not Google or Amazon or any other server doddering under the weight and onus of stealing from the primary creator…requires some shucking-off of the perpetual naivete and ignorance!

E.READS is my agent for books, after this board’s well-run (by Susan)booksearch as your first stop!

Whatever is convenient for you to do….but do stop wasting your money on my work as appropriated by smoothyguts entrepreneurs!

Quietly, I thank you.

Harlan Ellison

I sympathize with his desire, but his Internet presence is rather primitive. It’s all volunteer labor, as I understand it, so I can’t criticize. But others have pointed out on his message board (where the above is from, and which doesn’t link to individual posts at all), the lack of a direct transactional link at his site is an ongoing frustration to all the people — especially internationally — who want to Throw Money At Him.

Previously here:

Pay The Artist!

Barnes & Noble hasn’t fixed that.

The Nook will no longer save Barnes & Noble.

Nothing can save Barnes & Noble when they treat customers like that.

Update, February 4, 2010: Barnes & Noble apologized, refunded the shipping charges, and forked over a gift card — one gift card. Why the hell did all of us have to pressure you to do even this much, Barnes & Noble?

This is your very, very early wake-up call:

New Macs for 2010 are going to take Apple to the next level

Touchscreens are coming to the Mac.

There will be one later this year.

What are you going to do about that?

Are you going to keep designing sites that look like Microsoft-inspired abominations, with long scrolls, multiple columns, and continue to use Search as a crutch?

Scrolling is an outdated legacy method from the time of CRTs and character-based interfaces. Scrolling has no place on a touchscreen when it pertains to reading, period.

I had intended to do a long post about screen design, but this blog dies later today and the subject is too big to get in during these final hours. So this will be akin to Fermat’s marginal note.

However, let me just point out one example of atrocious legacy design. It’s the Time magazine app for the iPhone. It’s a total mess!

They are so married to the print paradigm that they’ll sink to looking like an amateur publication by inserting a crappy graphic of the White House! Really, what do the photos add? Nothing! All of the contents can be one or perhaps two screens, period. Contents should be immediate, not hidden by scrolling.

It gets worse when an article is opened:

The article is not in screen format. It’s a scroll format. Scroll, scroll, scroll. How successful would the book have been if between its covers the pages folded out and down to read — like a scroll? How successful would Time magazine be like that in paper format?

It gets worse when the typeface is bumped up in size:

Because the scroll not only gets longer, but the overall effect is like having to pause and read line-by-line with one’s finger. As I used to do when I was in the early years of elementary school. Who wants that?!

The Editis video has demonstrated that use of white margins can preserve a screenful of content while also permitting typeface enlargement:

People read for information and for relaxation. In both instances, this means upfront they want to do the least amount of effort to read. Tapping — with a fingertip — will always win over scrolling. Always. Scrolling breaks concentration. Scrolling also screws up memory. Go read a long post that scrolls. Can you recall exactly where in that long scroll something is? No. (If you say “I can use the Find function,” you are FAIL. See Search, above.) But everyone can roughly recall where something is in a book. Because the information has been assembled into a format that takes the least amount of effort to access. It’s been broken into chunks.

I don’t care if you hate the iPhone, the iPad, and the Mac. These are the devices over a hundred million people will have — and that number will grow. And everyone out there has been imitating was Apple has pioneered — so add those touchscreen devices too and the future is inevitable: it’s touch.

Everything on the Internet will have to be rethought and redesigned to take advantage of that fact.

Start your thinking now.

And if you’re a WordPress template designer, start work today. Because the first templates that successfully capture the essence of this — the fine details and every question answered aren’t required from the start — will win big. That designer will have a place in history for making the first step that others will follow and build on.

Will that designer be you?

Final note: Yes. I’ve seen the videos from Wired, Sports Illustrated, and Berg/Bonnier. Each one is wrong in its own way. That’s what my original long post was going to do: dissect the wrongness of those. Don’t bother pointing those out to me in Comments. But do point out any site you see that’s already thinking along the ideas in this post.

Previously here:

Mac OS X To Get Major Facelift In 2010
The Fine Print = Apple iTablet WIN!
Touch Will Change Everything
Vook Debuts Digital Books
English-Subtitled Editis Smart Digital Book Video

Social without the internet? Yeah, Apple haven’t forgotten about real life. They’re not led by trying to build new innovative devices, with tonnes of features and taking advantage of the latest trends in social networks. They think how the masses could use it and then they obsess over making that experience great. They think through hundreds of scenarios and make sure their technology supports how people behave. Their goal is to make the technology disappear. Far too many tech companies want to make the technology as obvious as possible.

Like every other company, Apple has to make compromises. But they choose a different set of compromises to everyone else. The camera will come later because the camera makes sense to the masses. But it isn’t their priority. Other features won’t get added at all, because Apple have decided it doesn’t fit any experience that an ordinary person would desire.

An excellent post written from the point of view of real people.

He nails exactly why the iPad will sell in the jillions.

Of course they will!

And even though this Wikipedia entry describing Apple’s DRM system — called FairPlay — is all about media, the method for DRMing ePub files is likely to be similar: invisible to the end user, just as it is with iPhone apps.

The current widespread method of ePub DRM is from Adobe. It uses Adobe’s Content Servers.

Hello, Apple has it own damn content servers. Why would they want Adobe’s?

Will this mean a further fracturing of “universal” ePub, coming right after Barnes & Noble doing it with the Nook?

Yep.

Does this mean you won’t be able to transfer your current Sony Reader ePubs to the iPad?

Yep.

Apple’s iBooks application was done in-house. It doesn’t use Adobe’s ePub rendering engine. This right off the bat means it also lacks the bits to handle Adobe’s ePub DRM. If any part of Adobe was inside the iBooks app, you can be certain Adobe would be braying about it just as intensely as they’ve been whining about Flash not being in the iPad!

So … DRM bites eBook buyers once again.

This isn’t Apple’s fault.

Most of the book publishers have wanted DRM.

Your choices are:

1) taking what I think is a perfectly acceptable though illegal step: stripping off the Adobe DRM on your legally-purchased copies, or

2) lobbying for a change in the laws to allow DRM transfer.

You bought the words. You already paid Hachette or Random House for those words. You should be able to tell them, Yo, I’m switching to the iPad, now give me those books again without me having to pay for them a second time.

Chances of that happening are zero, unless you raise a very big stink with our lawmakers. I’d start at the FTC.

Steve Jobs has come out against DRM. I don’t know how true his stance was because Amazon was the first to offer DRM-free audio files. Whether record labels allowed Amazon to do that as a move against Apple (the labels wanted “variable pricing” at the time) or Jobs’ anti-DRM stance was a ploy, I don’t know. But if Steve Jobs’ anti-DRM stance is what he believes, at some point he’ll have to confront book publishers about it. However, don’t expect that to happen any time soon. They’re all afraid of going out of business as it is.

Look, eBooks via the iBookstore are going to have ridiculous prices. The publishers will set them and Apple will have to obey. That’s the agreement that’s been cut.

I won’t be buying any eCrap ePub priced above US$5.00. None of them are worth more than that to me. Especially with DRM on them.

And right now I already have a ton of free (legally so) ePubs from Smashwords to read. I’ll finally be able to do that when I have an iPad. I look forward to discovering some really good new writers too.

Don’t buy. That’s the solution to all this. Refuse the DRM, refuse the exorbitant prices. Give some back to the publishers.

And there’s another choice you have: Use the Kindle app or the Kobo app and buy from them instead of the iBookstore. That’s if Apple allows those apps on the iPad. With the iPhone, Apple disallowed apps that “duplicated functionality.” Wouldn’t those apps duplicate the functionality of iBooks?

If Apple disallows them, then you can go after Apple and the book publishers.

Just as well because, really, this is the dumbest of them all:

Molly Wood: The Apple iPad: It’s just ahead of its time

Right now, the iPad is a product in search of a market. It’s kind of poorly implemented, feature-wise; it’s been poorly articulated, market-wise; and it’s hard to imagine why on earth you’d ever need such a thing at such a price.

Previously at Mike Cane’s Blog:

Dumbass Of The Year: Ed Colligan
A Jackass Quote For All Of History
Another Jackass Quote For All History — No, TWO Of Them!