David Pogue’s “State of the Art” blog in the New York Times is not only our eye on technology but our eye on common sense as well.  His popular analyses of new devices and gadgets, trends and fads have stood out not just for their astuteness but for their practicality as well.  Underlying all of his product examinations is the question “What would a reasonable person like to know?”

In his latest posting The Lessons of 10 Years of Talking Tech he celebrate the tenth anniversary of his feature with a summary of major lessons he has learned over a decade, and one of them has particular resonance for us:

“Sooner or later, everything goes on-demand. The last 10 years have brought a sweeping switch from tape and paper storage to digital downloads. Music, TV shows, movies, photos and now books and newspapers. We want instant access. We want it easy.

“Our grandchildren will find it hilarious that people, when they wanted to watch a movie at home, used to get in a ‘car’ and drive to a ‘building’ to rent a plastic ‘disc’ that had to be ‘returned.’”

If we substitute “book” for “movie” we’ll immediately understand that the current system of visiting “buildings” to purchase the tangible objects known as “books” may one day seem equally hilarious to our grandchildren.  They will have grown up in a world where books are purchased on demand.

As we have often said here, there is nothing wrong with books.  But everything is wrong with the way they are distributed: in vehicles to buildings,  buildings to which as many as 50% of the people who purchased them return them. The returned books are then returned to other buildings called warehouses, then back to other buildings to be sold at a loss or pulped. There is much in this process for our grandchildren to find hilarious.  Indeed, there is much for us to find hilarious. Yet we have suffered it because we had nothing better.  Now we do. It’s called print on demand.

“By now it must be clear to all but a handful of diehards,” we recently wrote (See A World Without Inventory, Part 1 and Part 2), ” that the business model based on returnability of books for credit, a practice instituted by the trade book industry some 75 years ago, is no longer viable.”

Publishing oracle Mike Shatzkin concurs: “The idea of printing and distributing speculatively will make less and less sense as the potential market to be reached by that tactic diminishes as a share of the whole.” And David Taylor, president of Lightning Source, the biggest print on demand supplier in the business,  declares that  “POD is no longer an optional novelty; it is an integral and essential part of the future of publishing.”

Sooner or later, everything goes on demand, David Pogue wrote. He made no exception for books. Publishers that fail to see what he sees – to see what any reasonable person sees – will pay dearly for their shortsightedness.

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.

David Pogue, the wonderful blogger who tells technology like it is for the New York Times, has weighed iPad in the balance and found it not wanting.

He’s also weighed it on a scale and found it heavy compared to Kindle, 1.5 pounds vs. 10 ounces. But that is not a fatal factor in his evaluation.  In fact there are no fatal factors in his evaluation.  His biggest reservation is the fundamental concept of the iPad itself: why does the iPad exist? At first we were mystified by this enigmatic, existential question. But like a koan the answer came the next day.  More on that in a moment.

Pogue’s approach to appraising Apple’s tablet is divided in two: one column for geeks and one for shleppers.  We take umbrage at the distinction, because it doesn’t give much credit to a generation of lay users who are quite conversant with computer specs.  In fact this shlepper didn’t see anything so complex in Pogue’s “techie” section that could not be comprehended by an English major who did his Master’s thesis on Henry James.

Here are some highlights of Pogue’s analysis:

• There’s an e-book reader app, but it’s not going to rescue the newspaper and book industries (sorry, media pundits). The selection is puny (60,000 titles for now). You can’t read well in direct sunlight. At 1.5 pounds, the iPad gets heavy in your hand after awhile (the Kindle is 10 ounces).
• When the iPad is upright, typing on the on-screen keyboard is a horrible experience
• Things open fast, scroll fast, load fast
• The iPad can’t play Flash video…Thousands of Web sites show up with empty white squares on the iPad
• There’s no multitasking…It’s one app at a time
• The simple act of making the multitouch screen bigger changes the whole experience
• A great AT&T cellular deal
• 150,000 existing iPhone apps run on the iPad and 1000 specially designed for the iPad’s bigger screen

We said Pogue likes the iPad with an asterisk, but besides cavils like weight and glare, his specific reservations are so modest we won’t bother to reprint them here.  You can read them on Looking at the iPad From Two Angles

Pogue’s glowing bottom line is this: “The iPad is so fast and light, the multitouch screen so bright and responsive, the software so easy to navigate, that it really does qualify as a new category of gadget. Some have suggested that it might make a good goof-proof computer for technophobes, the aged and the young; they’re absolutely right.”

So – what does Pogue mean when he says the iPad is a hit except for the concept? The answer came in an article by Brad Stone and Claire Cain Miller published in the Times the next day. “Many consumers do not understand the device’s purpose, who would want to pay $500 or more for it and why anyone would need another gadget on top of a computer and smartphone. After all, phones are performing an ever-expanding range of functions, as Apple points out in its many iPhone commercials.” A banker commented that “I can do everything on my MacBook Pro, cellphone and BlackBerry. I don’t need any more devices. I already have six phone numbers and enough things to plug in at night.” A Silicon Valley entrepreneur was quoted as saying “But let’s see: you can’t make a phone call with it, you can’t take a picture with it, and you have to buy content that before now you were not willing to pay for.”

But that very same entrepreneur said “The first five million will be sold in a heartbeat.” Not very enigmatic or cosmic, but until something comes along to top the iPad, this would seem to be the last word.

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.

David Pogue, who writes the “State of the Art” column in the New York Times, is the wise and witty voice of technology, and you can always count on him to articulate what are the best, worst and dumbest features of everyday products. For several years he has been handing out his personal honors – “Pogies” – to the best gadgets, features or refinements of the year. This year he’s done something just a little different, celebrating the best ideas of the year, “great, clever features that somehow made it past the obstacles of cost, engineering and lawyers.”

Here’s a summary of some of the outstanding ones:

• “Docks” for your Droid, Motorola’s popular answer to the iPhone. Pogue cites a docking station for use in your home. “When you insert the Droid, the screen becomes a handsome, horizontal-layout alarm-clock/weather display, complete with buttons that let you access your music or even dim the screen for sleepy time. You have to charge your phone overnight anyway, so why shouldn’t it be doing something useful in the meantime?”
• iType2Go, a phone app that allows those of you who absolutely have to text while you are walking to see where you are going even as you text. Sheesh – don’t you people ever give it up for a few minutes?
• MiFi, Novatel’s portable power source, giving you “a Wi-Fi hot spot in your pocket, purse or laptop bag.”
• Nikon Projector Cam. A pocket camera with a built-in projector. “Now, with a single button press on the top of the camera, you can turn on the projector. The image is beamed straight from the front of the camera onto a wall, a ceiling or a friend’s T-shirt.”
• Bing Pop-Up Previews. Using Microsoft’s Bing search service – the answer to Google’s – you can “point to any search result in the list without clicking. A popup balloon shows you the first few paragraphs of text on it.”

Pogue’s favorite? “The single best tech idea of 2009,” Pogue gushes, “the real life-changer, has got to be Readability…When you click it, Readability eliminates everything from the Web page you’re reading except the text and photos. No ads, blinking, links, banners, promos or anything else.” Makes us want to gush too. It sounds like the Web’s answer to Tivo. Bring it on! (You can access Readability here.)

You can read Pogue’s article in full here.

Happy New Year, everybody.

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.