Why Hasn't The Authors Guild Freaked Out About iPad Ebook Text-to-Speech?

from the inquiring-minds-want-to-know dept

Back in March, we pointed out how odd it was that the Authors Guild hadn't freaked out about the text-to-speech capabilities of the iPad, which would allow for ebooks to be read aloud. Of course, this was the same feature on the Kindle which caused the Authors Guild to freak out (with absolutely no legal basis), leading Amazon to make that feature optional.

It appears others are noticing this strange silence on the part of the Authors Guild. David Pogue, over at the NY Times wonders if the Authors Guild just wasn't paying attention:

This is exactly the feature that debuted in the Amazon Kindle and was then removed when publishers screamed bloody murder. But somehow, so far, Apple has gotten away with it, maybe because nobody's even realized this feature is in there.

Filed Under: copyright, ebooks, ipad, text to speech
Companies: amazon, apple, authors guild

Australian Newspaper Says The Only Way To Get Its iPad App Is To Subscribe To The Paper Version

from the you're-doing-it-wrong dept

rorybaust points out that the Sydney Morning Herald has joined the popular trend these days of offering an iPad app of its content. Nothing wrong with that, of course. However, what's odd is that the business model appears to be that you need to get a paper subscription in many cases to get the iPad version. It's no secret that some publications view the iPad and paywalls as ways to slow down the rate at which people are ditching subscriptions to paper publications -- but it seems particularly short-sighted to make that the only way to get access to the digital app. And that seems doubly true when people who have seen the app say it's little more than a PDF of the physical paper. If you're going to push an iPad app, at least let it take advantage of some of what the digital platform allows...

Filed Under: business models, ipad, paywalls, sydney morning herald

Time Magazine's New Paywall? Buy The Paper Version Or The iPad Version To Read

from the limiting-consumers-is-not-how-you-succeed dept

In a move apparently designed to remind people just how pointless Time Magazine can be at times, the company has started implementing a sort of hidden paywall, in that it's publishing only excerpts of most of its articles online with the latest issue. Instead, if you go to various Time Magazine articles, it tells you that you should go buy the paper copy, or pay for the iPad version. This isn't quite a direct paywall, since there's no way to directly pay online for the content. Instead, you first need to pay up for an iPad or take a trip to the store to get a paper copy of the magazine. Talk about the antithesis of embracing what the digital era allows. Time Magazine apparently thinks it's wise to opt-out of letting people actually share your content with each other. It seems to be rejecting the concept of valuable "passed" or "earned links," despite plenty of evidence as to how important it is. On top of that, Time Magazine seems to think that not putting its content online where people want to see it will actually drive people to find it in other formats, rather than driving people to either other destinations or to "unauthorized" versions of the content. If I were running a Time competitor... say the massively struggling Newsweek, I would be all over the place telling people that my content is available online for all of you who don't want to conform to Time's view of how you have to read a general news magazine.

Filed Under: ipad, paywall, time magazine

Could AT&T's iPad Email Leak Really Be A Much, Much More Serious Security Breach?

from the doesn't-sound-good dept

Last week, we wrote about the security glitch by AT&T, that allowed hackers to figure out the email addresses of 114,000 iPad users. A few people in the comments mocked this news, claiming that such info was pretty much meaningless, as email addresses are hardly private info these days. Of course, that ignored the connection of the email address to the fact that you bought an iPad. But now, some are realizing the potential security problems with this may be significantly worse. Slashdot point us to a story where someone walks through how poor security choices by the various mobile operators means that knowing the information revealed by the glitch can actually reveal much, much more. As the blog post walks through the details, it concludes that potentially, the data from the breach in some cases (though, not all) could then be used to figure out a lot more:

So yeah, knowing someone's ICCID can give you their full unpublished billing name, their cellular phone number (and hence their home address), their current location on a realtime basis, their voicemail, and if you're prepared to follow them around (within a few miles) then you get all their phone calls and SMS messages too.

There is a later edit, when he realizes that the voicemail/phone calls/SMS stuff might not be that big of a deal, since the iPad is not a phone device, but it's still instructive of how a "simple" data breach can lead to much more in certain circumstances.

Filed Under: breach, ipad, security
Companies: apple, at&t

AT&T Security Hole Revealed Email Addresses Of iPad Owners

from the whoops dept

Apparently, a security vulnerability in the way AT&T set up its network allowed hackers to capture the email addresses of 114,000 iPad owners. The breach was pretty basic stuff: if you fed an iPad ID number to a script that was publicly available on AT&T's website, it returned to you the email address associated with that ID. The hackers quickly set to testing out tons of likely IDs, and got back all those email addresses, including those of top execs at a bunch of big media companies, such as the CEO of the NY Times, CEO of Time, Inc., the President of News Corp, the CEO of Dow Jones and New York City mayor Bloomberg. Oh yeah, also a bunch of government emails: "Rahm Emanuel and staffers in the Senate, House of Representatives, Department of Justice, NASA, Department of Homeland Security, FAA, FCC, and National Institute of Health, among others." AT&T issued the expected "oops" statement soon after this was exposed.

Filed Under: email addresses, ipad, security hole
Companies: at&t

NY Times Confused About Its Own RSS Feed; Orders Takedown Of iPad RSS Reader

from the let-me-explain-the-internet-to-you dept

A whole bunch of you are sending in the bizarre news that the NY Times has sent a takedown for a popular iPad RSS reader because (*gasp*) it offers the NY Times' own RSS feed. Amusingly, this app was praised by the NY Times itself in a review just last week. It was also praised by Steve Jobs in his keynote at WWDC yesterday. As Wired notes, the details of the takedown request suggest that the NY Times is unfamiliar with the basics of both RSS and the web.

Basically, this app is your standard everyday RSS reader, the same sort of RSS reader that has been available all over the place for years. It's using the NY Times official RSS feed, because the NY Times put it out there. For the NY Times to then complain about it doing so is bizarre:

The Pulse News Reader app, makes commercial use of the NYTimes.com and Boston.com RSS feeds, in violation of their Terms of Use*. Thus, the use of our content is unlicensed. The app also frames the NYTimes.com and Boston.com websites in violation of their respective Terms of Use.

I'm guessing their concern is with the fact that the RSS reader is a paid app. This likely this goes back to an issue I raised more than five years ago, about companies who were putting "non-commercial" licenses on their RSS feed. How do you determine what's "non-commercial" in RSS? If I use that RSS feed as a part of my job, is that commercial? If I use it in a fee-based app, is that commercial? Either way, it's hard to see how this is really commercial use in any way. Yes, the RSS app is a fee-based app, but it's not "selling" the NY Times' content. It's just letting anyone access the free content that the NY Times put out for just this purpose. It's selling the software. In the same way Dell or HP or whoever sells a computer and lets people "access" the NY Times website.

This is actually pretty surprising. While the NY Times is pursuing a brain-dead paywall strategy, it had seemed like that was mostly upper management's doing. The Times' has pretty good tech folks who have done some neat things, and I've heard their General Counsel speak about copyright issues, and he has always seemed pretty on top of things (i.e., recognized the value of fair use and worried about excessively locked down copyright).

Filed Under: ipad, pulse, rss readers, takedowns
Companies: ny times

AT&T No Longer Offering Unlimited Data Plan To New Customers

from the no-longer-to-infinity-and-beyond dept

As they had previously hinted, starting June 7th, AT&T's new smartphone customers will no longer be able to opt for the $30 unlimited data plan that was previously offered. Instead, two plans will be offered, both with monthly usage caps: $15 for 200MB or $25 for 2GB. Additionally, tethering is now available for an additional $20 a month. However, tethering is only available with one of the new capped plans. Those who already have the old $30 unlimited plan will be able to keep it... but won't be able to tether. So, existing power users have to decide between $30 a month for unlimited internet data without tethering, or $45 a month for 2GB of data with tethering -- of course, with tethering, data usage would likely go up... even as the amount of data you can use goes way down.

AT&T's motive behind this switch (beyond the obvious of boosting profits) is to attempt to address the network capacity issues that it has been experiencing, of late. As anyone on AT&T can attest, performance of the AT&T data network is far from stellar. The adoption of smartphones like the iPhone have made the internet a truly useful part of the mobile experience, and as such, data use on the AT&T network has risen dramatically as a result. Clearly, AT&T was not able to properly plan to handle the increased demand on its network, and as a result, is claiming it needed to respond by throttling the usage. Of course, one might argue an alternative would be to invest more in capacity, but that gets in the way of that boosting profits thing.

Amusingly (but not surprisingly), AT&T is trying to play this whole thing up as a big benefit to consumers:

"Some customers, up until now, have been hesitant to sign up for a $30 monthly data plan" for unlimited access, says Ralph de la Vega

Fair enough, but just because some people have been hesitant to sign up for the unlimited data plan doesn't mean you should do away with it altogether.

That said, there are actually a few things that AT&T has done right with this announcement. It's surprising that they are actually offering a cheaper tier for limited data -- something that they had not offered before. Also, with the limited plans, they have introduced a system of alerts that will notify users when they are near their caps. And, existing users with unlimited plans can continue as long as they want, without the tethering option, of course.

Even so, throttling usage could put a damper on the explosive growth of smartphone usage that we have seen in the past few years. There is an added cognitive transaction cost whenever a limit exists, so, by introducing these limits, AT&T has effectively made the iPhone less appealing. Recently, when asked about AT&T's capacity issues, Steve Jobs said "things, when you start to fix them, get worse before they get better. That's what I'm told. And if you believe that, things should start getting a lot better soon." It sounds like Jobs knew what was coming.

Filed Under: data plans, ipad, iphones, tethering, wireless
Companies: apple, at&t

Authors Guild Worried About iPad Ebook File Sharing... But Focused On The Wrong Thing

from the people-are-reading! dept

A little over a year ago, we discussed the idea that the ebook world needed more "piracy," noting that the locked down nature of the Kindle actually limited a large part of what might help kick off the real ebook world. History has shown time and time again that so-called "piracy" is often a leading indicator of innovation in areas that people are interested in. But, unauthorized sharing in ebooks was still somewhat limited. Of course, some things have changed over the past year. There was the lawsuit against Scribd (which, last I heard, failed to get class action status) and then sudden totally unsubstantiated articles warning about unauthorized ebook file sharing.

Now, the latest, is the fear that with the success of the iPad in the market that it will become a popular platform for unauthorized sharing of ebooks. Apparently, author Scott Turow has recently taken over the Authors Guild, and has decided that ebook "piracy" is a "big problem" that has to be the focus. Perhaps next time the Authors Guild wants to show itself to be forward-looking and able to change with the times, it shouldn't put a 60+ year old lawyer in charge. Just a suggestion... Rather than saying that unauthorized file sharing is such a big problem, perhaps Turow should take a look at the music industry more closely. He seems to only be superficially aware of what's happening in that industry. Instead of recognizing that the industry wasted over a decade fighting what fans wanted, he seems to think that he can magically fight what every other industry has failed to fight. That doesn't seem like a strategy that has a high likelihood of success.

Perhaps, instead of automatically blaming those involved in file sharing, Turow should take some time to understand why it's happening, and look at those who have figured out interesting and unique models to provide more value for consumers who want it, rather than just focusing on the impossible task of trying to punish those whose actions the Authors Guild doesn't like.

Filed Under: ebooks, file sharing, ipad, scott turow
Companies: authors guild

People Start Noticing That The Web Competes With iPad Apps

from the well,-there-you-go... dept

Back in February, when many in the media were insisting that iPad apps were going to save the media business, we wondered why all the stuff they were talking about sticking in their apps couldn't work on the web as well. It appears that others are noticing that as well. Jason Fry at the Nieman Journalism Lab is noting that publications' own websites may be the biggest competition to their iPad apps -- and he was apparently a big believer in the concept of iPad apps originally. But after using the iPad for a while, he's realizing that the web is pretty good again:

After about a week of using the iPad, I started deleting apps, because the websites themselves were perfectly adequate. This is the reverse experience of the iPhone. On the iPhone, the browser was used only in emergencies, and apps ruled. On the iPad, at least for now, the opposite is true -- the browser is superb, and renders many apps superfluous.

That complicates things for news organizations. Many have already put too much faith in the idea that being able to charge for apps will reinvigorate their financial prospects. Now, they have to confront the reality that their apps may compete with their own websites -- and right now the apps don't win that competition.

Of course, I can see some in the media getting the wrong idea out of this, and using it as an excuse to put "exclusive" content only in the app... but, that will just leave them open to competition from publications who add more value to their website.

Filed Under: apps, html, ipad, iphone, journalism, news, web

Because Nokia And Apple Aren't In Enough Patent Lawsuits...

from the let's-add-some-more dept

Ah, the patent nuclear war in action. After Apple roundly destroyed Nokia's reputation as being the leading innovator when it came to smartphones, Nokia got petulant and sued Apple for patent infringement. In response, in typical patent nuclear war fashion, Apple turned around and sued Nokia back for patent infringement. Nokia's response? Find some more patents and sue again and also use the ITC loophole to get two shots at Apple with the same patents. And why stop there? Now that there's an iPad on the market, Nokia has sued Apple yet again for patent infringement. Isn't it great to see how two companies compete in the courtroom rather than the marketplace? Just like the creators of the patent system intended...

Filed Under: ipad, patents
Companies: apple, nokia