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Traditional Print Media is Missing Online Opportunities

Front page of The New York Times on Armistice ...
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We’ve been in the midst of a free trial of the New York Times on the Amazon Kindle platform. We’ve looked at it both on the Amazon Kindle App for Android and on the Kindle itself. And it falls flat. But don’t take our word for it. The New York Times is the number 1 selling newspaper on the platform, and is offered at $19.99 a month. After the introductory offer of $5.70 a week, delivery of the actual Times is $11.70 a week in our neighborhood here in New York City.

If you explain the reduction in cost as being due to no printing or distribution costs, then this should be a phenomenal deal. But it is severely lacking. Many sections and features are missing from the Kindle edition. But you don’t have to take our word for it. Kevin C. Tofel, who is the mobile site editor for GigaOm, when we were complaining about this on Twitter, commented, “yup, after reading today’s NYT for Kindle on the plane home, I agree. More like a local web version than an ebook newspaper.”

Reading the Amazon reviews of the product, you see many people complaining about being unwilling to pay this price for partial news, and missing sections. Why would anyone pay $20 a month to get less than they can get on the New York Times website for free? Where is the value-added product? It is why, like many, we have no plans to continue our subscription past the free trial. Why is the New York Times putting out an inferior version of their product? There were similar complaints in other of the top papers and magazines. Missing content was the biggest complaint.

Most customers want a e-version of their newspaper to be a reproduction of the paper experience and to be formatted the same across multiple platforms(to the best extent possible). We can use the website, but the point of downloading a complete file is that we get everything without the need for constant connection. These issues are not limited to one platform.

Electronic subscriptions are up, but overall, subscriptions are down. If print media cannot put out its A game, then is it any surprise if it fails to succeed in paid digital subscriptions, and ultimately at preserving its relevance in a connected world.

Someone give us a top-quality electronic newspaper or magazine, or even just top quality online content packaged for our use. Give us something worth paying for, and people will pay for it. Not everyone, but those people unwilling to pay for content are not the target audience for newspapers or magazines.

What do you think?

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Published on January 17, 2011
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Digital Content: Do you really own it? Shouldn’t you?

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Earlier, while writing the first installment of our new series, Downstreaming, the issue of digital content ownership came into play. After all, we don’t own digital content, we own a license for it. If you buy a DVD, you own it. If you buy a book, you own it. The fact that we don’t own our content is somewhat disturbing.

Let’s take the Kindle license agreement. The Kindle, of course, was a top seller in 2010. Here is the Kindle license.

“Upon your download of Digital Content and payment of any applicable fees (including applicable taxes), the Content Provider grants you a non-exclusive right to view, use, and display such Digital Content an unlimited number of times, solely on the Kindle or a Reading Application or as otherwise permitted as part of the Service, solely on the number of Kindles or Other Devices specified in the Kindle Store, and solely for your personal, non-commercial use. Unless otherwise specified, Digital Content is licensed, not sold, to you by the Content Provider. The Content Provider may post additional terms for Digital Content in the Kindle Store. Those terms will also apply, but this Agreement will govern in the event of a conflict.”

So, we can view, use and display content. We do not, however, have a right to download such content in perpetuity, which makes one wonder what might happen if Amazon changes the configuration of the Kindle store someday in the future. Would the content we have work on the 20th generation Kindle?

The Nook store does not cover the issue in their terms of use.

Then there is Amazon VOD, which we discussed in this article. There, if your content becomes unavailable, even though you paid for it…you are just out of luck.

For other media services, the content is stored locally, but the license requires access to a server to authenticate. And those servers will not work in perpetuity. While we think that if you buy something, steps should be taken to ensure its continuity. Companies should advise you of how they plan to do that.

A recent Pew study found that 65% of users have paid for online content. On the media side of that:  33% was music, 18% was newspaper or journal content, and 16% were movies or TV shows. The average expense being $47 per month for material downloaded or accessed overall, be it subscription(23%) or individual file access(16%) or accessing streaming content(8%).

These numbers will only be going up and these questions should be answered by companies. But they likely won’t any time soon. Companies would prefer that online, rental prevails, with no purchase. Why not make you repurchase something you’ve already bought before with no value-added…just a chance to continue to make money off their property?

It is why, despite our love of technology, physical books and physical copies of media are unlikely to die any time soon. As long as companies can rescind our ability to use something we’ve lawfully purchased, other pros and cons aside, they are not going anywhere.

Published on January 1, 2011
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When The Cloud Fails You – Delicious and More

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This year, many services we have grown used to have started to announce shutdowns. Most notably, a news story reporting that Yahoo was shutting down Delicious caused many to scramble to find other services.

It turned out Yahoo is looking to sell Delicious, not to merely discontinue it. But it does mean that unless someone wishes to acquire the service, it will be shut down eventually. Delicious is a social bookmarking site.

Pinboard, for example, after the news, gained many new users, and gained seven million bookmarks with it, more than they’d collected over the lifetime of their service.

But that isn’t quite the point. The point is to not keep all your eggs in one basket. Cloud storage is great. We all use it, and love it. But be prepared. Periodically export your data and keep a copy elsewhere. There are also services. Paid services are also available, such as Backupify.

Backupify has an impressive collection of backup tools for GMail, Twitter, Facebook, etc. You may not wish to pay. But remember, you should have at least two backups, and at least one of them should be offsite…not in the same place you keep the primary storage. More on this to come.

Published on December 19, 2010
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Some Observations on the Kindle and E-Book Reading

Amazon Kindle PDF
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Over a month ago now, our editor went out and bought a Kindle. This was a hard decision, as we had spent a lot of time over here at Gadget Wisdom talking about how we weren’t going to buy a Kindle. Of course, when we said that, it cost significantly more than the $139 we paid to buy a Kindle.

Amazon announced this week you can now give Kindle books as gifts to anyone with an email address. This is a tremendous boost in possibilities. You get to give more thought to a gift than an Amazon gift card. And if the person doesn’t like it, they can get the gift card instead. We eagerly await the day we open up an email and discover that someone has gifted us a book.

The latest generation Kindle weighs 8.5 ounces, and measures 4.8 by 7.5 inches. Mashable suggests the true audience for a dedicated e-reader is someone who travels frequently, has overcrowded bookshelves, or read books for hours at a time. We focued on the overcrowded bookshelf issue. One commenter on the same story described the Kindle as “the ideal bridge for those interested in moving to a paperless environment.”

So, why did we go with the Kindle? We already had the Kindle App on Android, along with the Nook App, the Borders app, and Aldiko Book Reader. We read an entire e-book on the Droid, and it is doable. But it is a little screen. The 7″ screen is such a good, yet portable size, we’re already wondering about 7″ Android tablets(but that’s another blog post entirely).

We don’t really like DRM. If we have a choice between DRM and DRM-free, the DRM-free gets our business. So we buy O’Reilly books directly from O’Reilly, and then port them to Android and Kindle ourselves. But, with the Kindle app available on all platforms(save Linux), making it relatively easy to use your property anywhere, it is hardly the restriction that some DRM programs are.

Earlier today, we tried a free trial of a magazine on Kindle…a magazine we used to read every month. While we quickly cancelled our trial, as that title did not provide the value we desired, we still wished to read more content off the screen and on the Kindle…which is where Calibre, which we previously mentioned, comes in.

Because, as many have said before. With all the information overload that we experience with real time information sources like Twitter and such…it is nice to have a device where we can focus on what we are reading.

The next step we may do is the elimination of our classics sections in favor of Kindle books. Kindle versions of the classics are free of charge. And the shelf space would be most welcome. We’ve bought too many books to have room for more without losing something And that is why the Kindle works.

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Published on November 22, 2010
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Fun with Instapaper

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In the course of reading and assembling topics to write for Gadget Wisdom and other sites, we come across many different articles we may wish to reference later. Which means, as there are never enough hours in the day, we end up with stuff we need to read or review later.

You can bookmark the site, as we did, but keep doing that and you end up with a very crowded bookmark list with things that stay there long beyond their usefulness.

Recently, we decided to try Instapaper as an alternative. We set up folders for our categories, and a pull down menu of bookmarklets that save the current displayed URL into them. We use Google Reader to read blogs, and it offers a Send To function for stories that will send them right to Instapaper.

On the Android, we are recommending Instafetch, as the paid version supports folders, unlike the free Everpaper. If you want to save money, of course you can move things into folders later.

If you don’t have the desire for any apps, you can forward emails with links directly to a special Instapaper email address. Or, our personal favorite, email your Instapaper articles as a Kindle book to your Kindle for reading.

Instapaper is not new, but being as we just started using it, it seemed worth a a bit of a review. Try it out. And if you have thoughts for improving our workflow, send them on along.

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Published on October 28, 2010
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Xmarks to Shut Down

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XMarks is a service that offers cross-platform and cross-browser bookmark, password, and tab syncing. We’ve been using this service since it was Foxmarks, many moons ago. However, now, after four years, they have announced the discontinuing of service in January of 2010.

We’re not sure what we’ll do, as we tend to switch between Chromium and Firefox, using Xmarks to keep the two in sync. At this point, we suppose we’ll have to abandon one or the other. Firefox offers Firefox Sync. Chrome/Chromium offers sync to your Google account built in. Tough decision. As tough as choosing a browser.

Todd Agulnick, Co-Founder and CEO in a farewell blog post, thanked users, investors, and colleagues for their loyalty and signed off in true geek fashion, quoting Douglas Adams, “So Long and Thanks for all the Fish.”

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Published on September 27, 2010
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Calibre and the E-Book

Calibre is an Ebook Management Platform. Originally started in 2006, it has grown, with a team of dedicated developers from a small project to get content onto a reader to myriad of options.

  • Library Management – Calibre manages e-books stored in it for you, including options to sort, tag, comment, etc. Supports the downloading of metadata.
  • E-Book Conversion – Supports all major formats(full list here) including EPUB and MOBI. The conversion program supports rescaling font sizes, automatic detection/creation of chapters/table of contents, and insertion of metadata at the start of the book.
  • Syncing to E-Book Readers – Supports a list of devices it can sync to(Full list here) and automatically chooses the best format for the device.
  • News Ripper – Downloads news from websites/RSS feeds, formats it into an e-book and sends it to the device. Supports full versions of articles, not just summaries. Pre-supported sites include the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, etc. You can create custom ‘recipes’ for other sites and use them, even upload them to share with others.
  • Built in E-Book Viewer
  • Content Server – Calibre supports acting as a web server to access your collection using a web browser. Supports email and mobile devices.

Now, this is great if you have an E-Book Reader. Let’s go back to our recent discussion of the Amazon Kindle, with Wi-Fi. Many papers are available for free online. Let’s take the Wall Street Journal, which does charge. The cost of an Amazon Subscription to the WSJ is $14.99 a month. The cost of getting the newspaper is $2.29 per week($9.16 a month) and online only at $1.99 per week(7.96 a month). Personally, while we think charging more on the Kindle is wrong, here’s a way to extract the information using your login and send it to your Kindle.

We did a little test of this feature, and picked a few of their over 200 English news sources(They have additional foreign language offerings). We were able to program it to autogenerate a few choice news sources and send them on a custom frequency to our device as long as Calibre was running in the background. Next, it seems to have a command-line interface, and we’ll have to see if it can run as a cron job on our server.

We have yet to test it, but according to the Calibre forums, the following should work…

ebook-convert <calibreroot>/resources/recipes/nytimes.recipe todays_nytimes.mobi

That should work if set up as a cron job, but e-book conversion, we gather, can be resource intensive. We’ll have more on these experiments later.

Either way, Calibre is available for PC, Mac, and Linux. Why not give it a try?

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Published on September 26, 2010
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Leo Laporte Learns the Value of Federation

Early this morning, famous podcasting personality Leo Laporte, Head TWIT over at the TWIT Network, posted on his Leoville blog a post titled Buzz Kill. Laporte had switched his microblogging over to the underappreciated Google Buzz, which he used to update Twitter. However, he discovered today, August 22nd, that none of his Buzz posts had been public since August 8th. As he puts it,

“Maybe I did something wrong to my Google settings. Maybe I flipped some obscure switch. I am completely willing to take the blame here. But I am also taking away a hugely important lesson. No one noticed. Not even me. …But I feel like I’ve woken up to a bad social media dream in terms of the content I’ve put in others’ hands. It’s been lost, and apparently no one was even paying attention to it in the first place. I should have been posting it here all along. Had I been doing so I’d have something to show for it. A record of my life for the last few years at the very least. But I ignored my blog and ran off with the sexy, shiny microblogs.”

You can read the full text at his blog here, but it does emphasize the thought processes we’ve been exploring as we learn about the federated social web. We have had some conversations with Evan Prodromou of Statusnet, among other people, as we try to understand this, and he was kind enough to send along some recommended reading since the last time we blogged about this.

We should own our own brand, and build its value at a site controlled by us. If you have an email address at a domain you control, you may have someone hosting it, but you can move it whenever you like. You have control. If you have your identity, and our email addresses and social media are part of the identity we build online, then the content is in your hands. Social media becomes a means of distribution, rather than a destination.

That is where the federated social web concept comes in. In a federated system, there are distinct entities that control parts of the system, but those parts are connected with agreed-upon rules to make a pleasing and usable whole. The World Wide Web is such a system. Email is such a system.

Statusnet instances aren’t for everyone, admittedly. Ours hasn’t attracted as many connections as Twitter, but gives us access to a different crowd. But what about blogging? Let’s take Gadget Wisdom.

  1. We write a blog entry.
  2. Our RSS feed updates. We use Feedburner to assist with that, but that isn’t required.
  3. We tweet the post to our Twitter account and dent it to our statusnet instance, so people know what we’re talking about. We still own the conversation.
  4. Our site draws in anyone talking about our tweet as comments on the post, thus bringing the discussion back to the blog.

Everything comes back to us. We are integrating social media into our site, not going out and relying on it exclusively. It is part of the reason that we don’t participate in Facebook but we do in Twitter. Twitter and similar microblogging paradigms works as a news delivery system, and can even be an alternative for RSS. Facebook has its status updates as well, but it is part of a bigger system that sees to tie everything together. We prefer to do that ourselves.

In case you didn’t get what we are saying…microblogging, social media, and sites such as Twitter, Jaiku, Friendfeed, Plurk, Pownce, Google Buzz, etc should be a content delivery and enrichment system, not a content creation system. Now, we disagree with Leo that they are “an immense waste of time.” We just believe that he should change his approach to social media. Let’s all bring our identities under our control.

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Published on August 22, 2010
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Fun with SIP, Android, and Free Dial-In Numbers

Sipdroid 1.0.7 on a HTC Hero mobile phone
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SIPDroid is a free VOIP client for Android that uses the standard SIP protocol. The VOIP calls will go over the data connection, be it 3G or Wi-Fi, and thus not affect your minute count.

According to their FAQ, it “uses G.711 A-law to transmit voice which needs about 80 kBit/s in each direction. This corresponds to a total of 1.2 MB per minute. A video call needs approximately twice as much. When optionally enabled for all calls Sipdroid uses GSM codec to compress to about 30 kBit/s in each direction resulting in a total of 0.5 MB per minute.”

You can use a + in a phone number in order to indicate to the Android device to use the secondary as opposed to the primary choice. You can set either the phone or SIPDroid to be the primary method of dialing. Emergency calls will always go out over the phone line.

SIPDroid prefers you set up a free or paid account at PBXes. This allows you to have all the advantages of a PBX and is already set up for connecting calls anonymously to Skype and GTalk. You can, if you use them, set a feature that will, if the data reception is bad enough, transfer the call to the phone’s cell number. You need to set up a gateway to the traditional telephone network(PSTN) from the PBX for this to work, however.

For services like dialing onto the regular phone network, you do have to pay money. But not to SIPDroid. To a VOIP provider(more on that at some point). PBXes also offers a paid account with additional features, such as a better voice codec and support for more lines.

If you don’t want to go out on the traditional telephone network, you can use the five extensions offered in the free version to talk to other people logged in(only 2 simultaneous conversations at a time, however).

Since we didn’t want to pay any money for a test, we opted to sign up for a free number with IPKall. They offer dial-in only numbers in the 206, 253, 360, and 425 area codes that will auto-forward to a SIP account you designate. We had some issues as we tried routing a call from them to PBXes and then to a phone on a wi-fi connection logged into the PBXes server. A few times it didn’t seem to connect, and when it did, there was some lag. But it was free and when it worked, it was clear. We also experimented with SIPGate, which offers a free dial-in phone number as well.

We could see a lot of potential uses for this technology. VoIp is nothing new. We’ve played with it before. But, think of the possibilities. A little private network your phone can always be connected to that will alow you to communicate airtime free? Let’s go a step further. We know of someone who lived on a college campus with good wi-fi coverage and considered having an iPod Touch and Skype or such instead of a phone.

As public wi-fi and open wi-fi becomes more available, and with fewer people calling and more people using data…we could imagine a future where people opt for a data only connection and the occasional SIP call. The possibilities are endless.

And we’ll have more on playing with SIP later.

Published on July 25, 2010
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So You Want to Only Use One Microblogging Service

A highly simplified version of the RSS feed ic...
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Last time, we discussed some of the things we’d learned about Status.net and the OStatus standard. Now, our understanding is far from perfect, but we keep trying to learn more. This is some of our attempt to summarize it.

So, here we are once again looking at how other services play with Status.net. We’ve covered the fact that Twitter doesn’t. Although, since Twitter has an API, a bridge has been created that imports the tweets into your timeline as notices. There is a Facebook bridge as well, but we have yet to test it, as we aren’t Facebook users.

But many sites do support standards that Status.net can use. A service has to be PuSh enabled. OStatus is reliant on the fact that most sites noawadays put out an Atom or RSS feed. The problem is real-time notification. That is where PubSubHubbub(PuSh) comes in. It is a simple extension to RSS and Atom feeds for real-time subscriptions. Basically, the feed declares a URL for the Hub server. Now, instead of the subscriber server/reader repeatedly polling the site to look for updates, it can register with the hub to be notified of updates.

That is how OStatus is built. Each site builds a feed of updates and uses PuSh subscriptions to send relevant updates to other sites, and each site is responsible for pushing those updates to the correct user. The rest of OStatus is also built on top of Atom feeds, including extensions to describe social activities like replies, following, user profile information, etc. As their wiki describes it: “the real beauty of it is that at this point we[OStatus] already have something useful, without anything StatusNet-specific. In fact you can already subscribe to someone’s public Google Buzz feed as an OStatus remote user, and they haven’t done anything special for us!”

So, there is one example. You don’t need to be on Google Buzz. If Google Buzz supports PuSh and OStatus, you can subscribe to their feed. Let’s go a step further:

  • WordPress – All the blogs on WordPress.com have PuSh enabled. If you run a WordPress blog elsewhere, you can set up your site as a Hub using a plugin like PushPress. If you are using Feedburner with Pingshot enabled, PuSh is already enabled and no plugin is needed. Sound useful? Why not subscribe to this blog, which is PuSh enabled, by entering the URL into the Remote Subscription option on your identi.ca/status.net account?
  • Tumblr – We tried the test-tumblr that the Status.net wiki used and that was recognized, but a random Tumblr site would not work.
  • Google Buzz – As mentioned above…we tried a few accounts and it does work. It is, of course, one-way.
  • Posterous – It would allow us to subscribe to a random posterous account we picked.

Status.net is working on some workarounds for additional integrations, but any established site can become PuSh enabled and thus support subscriptions in status.net. With a little extra work supporting the standard, they can support activity streams, replies, and other user events without any change in the user experience, except opening it up to interaction with any other site that supports those standards.

Imagine this a few months/years down the road if people support it. It would be like Email. Anyone can self-host or sign up for a social media account on whatever server they want, but anyone on any other server can communicate with them.

We’re in on the ground floor. We’re on our status.net which imports Twitter and lets us subscribe to any PuSh enabled site. And since we run it, we don’t have to worry about the service being discontinued or falling out of favor, because the next service is likely to be…if not immediately compatible, eventually bridged.

In the meantime, check out supporting PuSh on your site. Next time, we hope to have more to say about WebFinger…or how to tie your identity to a website.

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Published on July 11, 2010
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