Apple’s e-book plans: Decoding Jobs
So who’s taking bets on Steve Jobs‘ doing a Kindle rival very soon? That’s the feeling of many TeleBloggers, and now Jim Lynch at Extreme Tech has written a whole essay reaffirming this conviction—based on jobs’ passion for badmouthing products that he supposedly won’t be competing against.
Jobs’ anti-Kindle noises go beyond the machine to include the argument that no one reads anymore. Lynch’s translation? Steve’ just announced the iBook eBook Reader.
“Remember when Jobs denied that Apple would build an iPhone? Or the time he said that people would never want to watch video on an iPod? Jobs always misdirects attention away from what Apple is doing and it amazes me that people seem to fall for it time and time again…even some of the “savvy” folks in the media business who really ought to know better.”
February 6th, 2008 at 2:55 pm
I so want this to be true, yet he’s drawing a long bow. It seems that the evidence continues to suggest that a tablet is in the works–some kind of scaled up iPod touch–which would hopefully be good as an e-book reader. It wouldn’t be E Ink, of course, and its battery life would probably give hours of use, rather than days/weeks without a recharge. He’s right about the iPod touch not being suitable for reading: it’s a beautiful interface, and you *can* read from it (PDFs etc), but I find it’s just too small for reading anything substantial.
I have my fingers crossed; this ongoing rumour is enough to make me hold off purchasing a Cybook or iLiad… but I’m not going to wait forever!
February 6th, 2008 at 5:08 pm
To put his, uh, article in its proper perspective, see this:
http://mikecane2008.wordpress.com/2008/02/06/mike-cane-to-techmeme-bite-me/
February 7th, 2008 at 9:12 am
plagiarized or not, i hope it’s true. like jason (above), i’ve been waiting for a long long time, and i don’t want to wait much longer!
February 7th, 2008 at 9:40 am
As noted, TeleBlog readers were aware of this first, and while I haven’t checked, I suspect Mike would be at the head of the pack. Feel flattered, Mike. David
February 8th, 2008 at 4:11 pm
Oh, I made no aspersions of plagiarism (this is the Net, dammit!), just that his piece which landed on techmeme did not deserve that spotlight.