Josh Sternberg of digitday.com reminds us that NewsCorp’s news app, The Daily, celebrates its first birthday this week, and after one year it’s not just viable but a growing commercial success in an Internet environment hostile to the publication’s business model: subscription.  Yet it has a quarter of a million monthly readers and 100,000 paid subscribers.

Though (full disclosure) my son is a reporter for The Daily, my enthusiasm for the app is completely independent.  I just happen to think it’s terrific. But don’t take my word for it – it’s the iPad’s third most popular app.

Though The Daily started out as a dedicated iPad application, it is now accessible on Android, but the eye-popping graphics play best on the iPad’s big bright touchcreen. Some fairly heavy-hitting advertisers like Verizon, IBM and BMW display their wares there.

“I think it is the future of print,” digitday quotes a media executive, an odd description since there isn’t a single drop of printer’s ink associated with the publication.  But that’s just the point: it delivers all the news, culture and entertainment of a printed newspaper or magazine, but the videos, popups, callouts and other dazzling graphics are exactly what the iPad was created for. If you don’t have one, borrow it, download a two-week free subscription and see for yourself.

By the way, I have dubbed The Daily a “zapp” – drawn from “news app” the way “blog” is derived from “web log”. I believe this term may be original with me and if it achieves wide circulation and enters the English language (Oxford English Dictionary are you listening?) I hope Rupert Murdoch will reward me liberally, or at least recognize me with an asterisked footnote in one of his, um, papers.

The Daily After One Year: Some Lessons Learned

Richard Curtis

In a much-anticipated press event, Apple today introduced a textbook app it calls iBooks2. The company described it as an educational tool and, given how quickly and completely kids take to the iPad, it may well crack open the e-textbook market in a way that all prior efforts failed to. (See Surprise: Students Prefer Print Textbooks.)

One significant feature of iBooks2 is that it enables students to create their own books, enhance them with pictures, music, movies, videos, and texts from other sources and publish them, thus “inspiring kids to want to discover and want to learn,” as the Apple executive put it.

All well and good.  But isn’t it likely that the pictures, music, movies, videos, and texts from other sources published in these books will belong to somebody else?

These books will be published, uploaded into the iBooks store and sold there.  Unless the authors clear the rights to that content, such sales may be infringements of someone’s copyrights and Apple will be faced with the same kind of spamming that Kindle is combating.

Apple has the obligation to review the content it posts on the iPad and make sure that it does not infringe on the copyrights of others.  Will Apple have the time and manpower to police countless books and vooks, texts and theses? Not likely.  But surely they will not risk incurring liability for selling stolen goods.

If kids want to discover and learn, then the most important educational tool Apple could offer, as an adjunct to its iBooks2, is a primer on copyright. If Apple doesn’t instruct users on that fundamental legal principle, it will need to create an app for defending itself and its authors against copyright infringement lawsuits.

Richard Curtis

Long ago humans possessed a tail, but today it is vestigial.  Will the same be said one day about human imagination?

Reading Lawrence Downes’ thoughtful speculations in the New York Times about the impact of interactive books on children, we have to wonder if our descendants will be devoid of one of the key characteristics that separate us from all other species. His concerns are intensified by a study that “found children swimming in a media ocean.” “What,” he wonders, “does interactivity do for the imagination, as reading a book gets closer and closer to watching television?”

Downes’ dark ruminations were inspired by a visit to Apple’s virtual bookstore, “a wonderland of unbound creativity and astonishment. The text is just the beginning, an anchor for pictures that glow and unfold, characters who talk and tumble, words that pronounce themselves and music that enlivens everything…. But does digital interactivity engender mental passivity? As fingers flick and flit, making pixels work harder, what do brain cells do?”

What indeed?  If they don’t do anything, they will atrophy and fade into oblivion, making us little better than cabbages gazing at screens.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by The New York Times.

Nothing stands in the way of the digital steamroller. In industry after industry, sooner or later some bright person looks at a conventional enterprise and wonders why it’s being performed the old way when new technology can  short circuit the process and save time, money and energy.

That’s what happened when a music student named Edward W. Guo, examining the high price of music scores, looked into the tedious and expensive process of buying scores for musical performances. “The site, the Internet Music Score Library Project, has trod in the footsteps of Google Books and Project Gutenberg and grown to be one of the largest sources of scores anywhere,” writes Daniel Wakin in the New York Times.  “It claims to have 85,000 scores, or parts for nearly 35,000 works, with several thousand being added every month. That is a worrisome pace for traditional music publishers, whose bread and butter comes from renting and selling scores in expensive editions backed by the latest scholarship. More than a business threat, the site has raised messy copyright issues and drawn the ire of established publishers.”

You can visit and, if you’re clever, download a score directly into your laptop or iPad as the Borromeo Quartet does. The pages are turned on the touchscreen the same way that you turn the pages of an iPad e-book.  Some laptops are equipped with a footpad that you tap to turn the page.

Free Trove of Music Scores on Web Hits Sensitive Copyright Note by Daniel J. Wakin in the New York Times.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

The Daily, NewsCorp’s  tablet-dedicated news app, does not possess a single atom of organic matter. Yet we call it a newspaper. A news paper. Why?

Reporter Joshua Brustein explains that this is an example of a skeuomorph, a “superfluous reference to the past.”

He reminds us that we not only use skeuomorphs (“from the Greek words for tool and form”) every day but vitally depend on them to navigate our brave new digital world

Another example is the analog custom of designating consecutive page numbers in e-books when it is more appropriate, digitally speaking, to fix your position in the document with a percentage of your progress. “E-books, by definition, do not have pages,” writes Brustein. “Depending on which size font someone uses, she may have to advance the screen many times before ‘turning a page.’ Then there are the questions of how to approach books with many physical editions, or texts that exist only in digital space.”

Want more? Brustein cites artificial sounds as more important psychologically than practically. Digital cameras make a satisfying click that hearkens back to the sound of a mechanical camera but is completely artificial, especially in view of shutter-lag that produces an image several critical moments earlier than the soul-satisfying but otherwise useless sound of a shutter being activated.

Read about some other self-deceiving skeuomorphs in Why Innovation Doffs an Old Hat.

By the way, I have dubbed The Daily a “zapp” – drawn from “news app” the way “blog” is derived from “web log”.  I believe this term may be original with me and if it achieves wide circulation and enters the English language (Oxford English Dictionary are you listening?) I hope Rupert Murdoch will reward me liberally, or at least recognize me with an asterisked footnote in one of his, um, papers.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

When Hyundai Equus owners want to know when to rotate their tires, they reach into their glove compartment and open their…iPad.  That’s because their owner’s manual is an app.

It’s “part of Hyundai’s effort to create an aura of exclusivity around its new flagship sedan” says Anita Lienert of insideline.com. Wealthy geeks can use the device not merely to look up the meaning of those puzzling icons on the dashboard but schedule service appointments as well.

“The manual-on-an-iPad appears to be an industry first—part of Hyundai’s effort to create an aura of exclusivity around its new flagship sedan,” writes Lienert in Buy an Equus, Get an iPad.

A few questions come to mind, like – do you have to get into your car every time you want to play Plants vs. Zombies?  What happens if you keep your iPad at home (to play Plants vs. Zombies) and forget to return it to your Equus which then starts making this funny noise on Route 80 South?

And – call me a New Yorker -  is a glove compartment the wisest place to store an iPad?

Richard Curtis

Last May we explored student use of digital textbooks and learned that they were not going over well. “Students around the nation are flunking the format,” we reported. “They want their paper books back. It seems that e-readers are okay for reading, but textbooks are seldom read immersively like novels, and so far the e-books can’t match the functionality of good old paper. And even when it comes to reading for pleasure, gadgets like the Kindle DX tablet did not fetch high grades.”   (See Students Give E-Textbooks a Failing Grade)

That happened BiP – Before iPad. We suspected that once iPad found its way into schools we might have a different tune to sing.  We do. Winnie Hu of the New York Times reports that a number of schools are not merely encouraging the use of iPads but are actually purchasing and distributing them to students.  “As part of a pilot program,” writes Hu, “Roslyn High School on Long Island handed out 47 iPads on Dec. 20 to the students and teachers in two humanities classes. The school district hopes to provide iPads eventually to all 1,100 of its students.”

At $750 a pop, that’s no small investment, but there’s a tradeoff for savings on the cost of paper textbooks and other traditional school materials, plus a less tangible reward in the form of better student performance.  The iPads “allow students to correspond with teachers and turn in papers and homework assignments, and preserve a record of student work in digital portfolios.”

Not everyone is convinced of either the financial or the educational value.  If a school wants to go electronic there are cheaper devices, but they’re not as sexy as the iPad, and besides, “about 5,400 educational applications are available specifically for the iPad, of which nearly 1,000 can be downloaded free,” writes Hu.

As for academic benefits,the jury is still out, as researchers and psychologists report that screens create distractions for students. (See The Medium is The Screen. The Message is Distraction) Focusing attention on the subject at hand, even with colorful, entertaining and interactive applications, is a problem, as is retention of information. “There is very little evidence that kids learn more, faster or better by using these machines,” Larry Cuban, professor emeritus of education at Stanford University, told Hu.

Despite unproven educational benefits, it looks like nothing is going to stop the iPad steamroller. The Times tells us that schools and school systems in New York, Illinois, California and Virginia have invested in iPads.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by The New York Times.

Until recently, Guardian columnist John Naughton was so dedicated to his subscription to The Economist magazine that every weekend he made an “appointment” to immerse himself in his cherished publication.

But lately? “Every Friday, the postman delivers the print edition of The Economist. But the envelopes now sit unopened, gathering dust on the hall table.”

What happened?  The Apple iPad happened. The magazine’s management launched it as an app, accessible on a pay-wall basis for subscribers only. “It’s easier and more pleasant to read than its printed counterpart,” Naughton writes, “and much nicer than the Kindle edition of the magazine. The iPad has delivered a genuinely ‘immersive’ reading experience. In part, this is a reflection on the device’s screen technology and interface. But it’s mainly down to the quality of the app’s design.”

From a magazine it’s just a hop, skip and jump to books, says Norton. “The concept of a ‘book’,” he writes, “will change under the pressure of iPad-type devices, just as concepts of what constitutes a magazine or a newspaper are already changing. This doesn’t mean that paper publications will go away. But it does mean that print publishers who wish to thrive in the new environment will not just have to learn new tricks but will also have to tool up. In particular, they will have to add serious in-house technological competencies to their publishing skills.

“If they don’t do it, then someone else will. There will always be ‘books’. The question now is: will there always be publishers?”

The full story in Publishers take note: the iPad is altering the very concept of a ‘book’

Richard Curtis

Let’s see if we have this straight.  According to Inquirer, Amazon has created a free shopping app for iPad, the tablet manufactured by its bitter rival Apple.  And for the name of its app Amazon has picked the pocket of another rival, Microsoft. Is it an Amasoftapp? A Micrappazon? No, it’s Windowshop.

To go windowshopping, you survey product categories on the iPad screen. A touch takes you to the product page where you can browse via audio and video. Touch the item you’re interested in buying and it goes straight into your shopping cart.

Read details in Amazon releases a bookstore app for the Ipad by Edward Berridge

Richard Curtis

The US Copyright Office has just spoiled the fun for that elite cadre of hackers known as Jailbreakers.  Where’s the satisfaction of breaking and entering an Apple iPhone if the authorities tell you it’s fine, be our guest.

But that’s pretty much what happened today, according to Nicholas Deleon of Crunchgear.  The Copyright Office’s decision took him so aback he was all but speechless:”This is easily the biggest tech news I have come across in quite some time—we’re talking years here.” he gasped. “I’m actually going to need a few moments to digest all of this.”

For you boring law-abiding hardworking taxpaying nine-to-five citizens, Jailbreak is a technique for hacking an iPhone to free it from Apple restrictions. “Because the iPhone is far from flawless as Apple created it,” one website explains it, “thousands of iPhone users have flocked to Jailbreak in search of iPhone changes and improvements. iPhone has been held back by limited customizability, text message privacy issues, and a lack of multitasking capabilities. But Jailbreak can solve all of these problems with apps and fixes available in Cydia and Installer. Cydia and Installer are the unofficial “App Stores” of the Jailbreak world. Developers create apps and tweaks and different utilities and upload them to these package managers, which organize everything into categories. The differences between Cydia and the App Store are the lack of an app approval process, and the lack of access limits on the iPhone software — i.e. you can do things Apple did not design the iPhone software to do.”

Is Jailbreak legal? Well, it is now. At least in a number of ways, says Deleon. According to rule updates created by the Copyright Office under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, six classes of jailbreaking are now exempt from prosecution:

1. Defeating a lawfully obtained DVD’s encryption for the sole purpose of short, fair use in an educational setting or for criticism
2. Computer programs that allow you to run lawfully obtained software on your phone that you otherwise would not be able to run aka Jailbreaking to use Google Voice on your iPhone
3. Computer programs that allow you to use your phone on a different network aka Jailbreaking to use your iPhone on T-Mobile
4. Circumventing video game encryption (DRM) for the purposes of legitimate security testing or investigation
5. Cracking computer programs protected by dongles [defined as "hardware that connects to a laptop or desktop computer for the purpose of copy protection or authentication of software"] when the dongles become obsolete or are no longer being manufactured
6. Having an ebook be read aloud (ie for the blind) even if that book has controls built into it to prevent that sort of thing

Before you rush to hack that antenna problem in your iPhone 4 you might want to consider advice offered in a tutorial by iPhone Apple iPhone Review

1. *The folks at Apple know what they are doing. They have not enabled multasking — the ability for apps to run in the background, simultaneously — most likely because it is a huge battery drain. By controlling the user experience, Apple ensures that your iPhone “just works,” and you don’t have to worry about managing battery life or any other technical details.
2. *Jailbreak could (maybe?) brick your iPhone. “When someone develops something for an Apple product and that development isn’t sanctioned by Apple, you run the risk of it not working as it should, conflicting with the device itself, or just all-around bricking that iPhone,” warns Chris Pirillo, who prefers not to Jailbreak his iPhone because “my iPhone just works already.” But I have never heard of Jailbreak completely ruining an iPhone. The consensus at this forum seems to be that the chance is “extremely slim.”
3. *Every iPhone update from iTunes disables Jailbreak. Every time Apple comes out with an update for iPhone, they find a way to prevent hackers from cracking the code again. Hackers then scramble to Jailbreak the iPhone again and release the new methods. That means if you like to download Apple’s iPhone updates, you are going to have to figure out each time how to Jailbreak your iPhone yes again. Do you really want to play this cat and mouse game?
4. *Jailbreak might increase your risk of getting a virus on your iPhone. The only two iPhone viruses ever reported have spread across iPhones that have been Jailbroken. That’s not to say the iPhone platform as Apple built it is totally secure. In fact, some say compromising an iPhone’s security is “child’s play” (i.e. easy).
5. *Jailbreak voids your iPhone warranty. If your iPhone is bricked because of Jailbreak, or if your iPhone has another problem and it happens to be Jailbreaked, your warranty becomes void. I once saw a sign at the Genius bar of The Falls, Miami Apple Store that warned customers not to Jailbreak iPhones or they would void their warranties. Harsh.

Richard Curtis