Darn it, Walt, you’re supposed to CARE about consumer issues: Why no mention of DRM in ScrollMotion reader, etc.?
Once again the press is snoozing. Wall Street Journal tech maven Walt Mossberg, deservedly one of the leading consumer writers in the world of tech, somehow managed to write a double review of ScrollMotion and Shortcovers apps for the iPhone without exploring the DRM and eBabel issues.
No evil here. I’m a Walt fan. But so far, he apparently does not care enough about e-books to discuss whether you can own books in those formats du jour for real. Issues have also arisen about the sophistication of ScrollMotion’s DRM approach. In addition, as noted, there’s the ticklish eBabel question. Why isn’t Uncle Walt pounding the table for ePub? Some big publishers might actually be ahead of him on that one. It isn’t as if he’s never written thoughtfully on DRM or eBabel, but I’m sorry to see them missing from his review of ScrollMotion and Shortcovers (note: Iceberg is the name of the SrollMotion reader).
A major point of his: The size differences between the Kindle (nice big screen but harder to carry) and the iPhone (small screen, more convenient to tote). See accompanying Mossberg video.
Excerpt, with Walt Mossberg’s usual informative approach:
Shortcovers is the more ambitious and creative of the two. At launch, it expects to have 200,000 shortcovers—chapters or other free excerpts—available. About 50,000 of these also will be available for purchase as full digital titles; the rest can be ordered as physical books. Of the digital titles, roughly 15,000 to 20,000 will be older or public-domain books, and the rest commercial books. Typical book prices will be between $10 and $20. If you want to buy paid shortcovers—say a chapter of a business or travel book—the typical price will be 99 cents.
The key aim of Shortcovers is to get people to discover new works. So it emphasizes community features such as rating, tagging and sharing. It even allows people to make “mixes†of their favorite works and to upload their own writing. The Shortcovers catalog is a riotous mix of classics like “The Three Musketeers,†current titles like Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers,†and blog posts and magazine articles…
…Iceberg doesn’t allow bookmarking and Shortcovers lacks annotation. Neither app allows highlighting, or looking up words.
January 15th, 2009 at 1:26 pm
Darn it! What is it with these columnists that think ebooks began with the first Kindle? Perhaps the Kindle is too large to carry conveniently, but my Sony Reader isn’t. It easily fits in my wife’s purse, in my coat pocket, and in a waist pack.
The video showed page turning using a finger in an upward motion. What I noticed was that the text scrolled upward, too. I’ve not tried an iTouch or an iPhone, but I would find the scrolling to be annoying.
January 15th, 2009 at 7:12 pm
In fairness, the article and video weren’t supposed to be about DRM. It’s a review of iPhone applications, not the content and its restrictions. To keep the article tight, it wouldn’t have made sense to drift off topic in a rant about DRM. It’s clear Mossberg wanted to focus on the actual reading experience of the applications.
January 15th, 2009 at 7:58 pm
But Spider, the Apple DRM tie was newsworthy in the case of ScrollMotion, and there was also the issue of yet another addition to the Tower of eBabel. Walt should be in there swinging regularly against DRM when such issues arise. Thanks for your thoughts. David