Profile - VitalSource
Fred Oliveira
13 comments »
Every once in a while I am surprised by some of the new web-application ideas people come up with. Some are bad - in fact, it’s disappointing to see so many applications launched just for the sake of launching -, but sometimes (just sometimes) you can actually feel when a project is set to solve a problem, even if for a small group of people.
VitalSource was announced yesterday, and I must admit I’ve been thinking about what its impact might be. Since you’re probably wondering by now, VitalSource is a web-application with the iTunes-twist. It consists of a client-side application (currently available for your Mac or Windows machine) that allows you to “buy books as you buy your music”.
A quote from their press release explains it best:
Now students can buy their books like they buy their music - by downloading them off the Internet. The Store offers more than 1,000 titles in the VitalBook(TM) digital format, starting from as low as $.99 to 60 percent off list price of hardcopy versions. The growing inventory of VitalBooks includes classics such as Shakespeare, reference materials, and textbooks in subjects ranging from law to philosophy to medicine.
On formats and openness:
VitalSource sure sounds promising. This wouldn’t be an article by me if it didn’t have an ammount of constructive criticism and question asking, though. There’s a few issues that come to my mind about this application:
1) If they are targetting students, why not support an operating system that students seem to be using more and more? You know, Linux. I can imagine some people climbing up their chairs screaming “market share! market share!”, but this is a matter of accomodating a lot of people from one of the major target markets - students (and very importantly I imagine, IT students).
2) I’m always sceptical when I see a new proprietary format for any kind of information, particularly now that the web is all about reusing content and taking advantage of open formats. Naturally, VitalBook is proprietary because (and I’m assuming here, people) of piracy issues, and in order to provide DRM. But that raises some questions about the use of a Book bought in VS outside of VS itself. Will it have a use? Will it be possible to read? People are starting to read on their computers, I agree, but is the market share worth it?
Wrapping up:
Despite these two questions - that are no more than eye-openers - I believe VitalSource does solve a problem for some people, particularly people who either can’t afford hardcopy books, or won’t need to keep a book all the time for reference. The idea of buying books at the kind of prices they’re announcing is, undoubtedly, exciting. There’s huge competition in this field, though (Amazon and O’Reillys Safari Bookshelf), and it sure will be interesting to see how the market accomodates this new solution.
More information about VitalSource is available on their page.
so I had a look around at vitalsource, and not sure I am as impressed as you I’m afraid. Some of the books seem to be significantly more expensive than to buy from Amazon - for instance, The Oxford Companion to Philosophy is $55.49 to download but $37.80 to buy from Amazon (plus I can search inside the book at Amazon). Not sure why I would want to pay more to download a book than to have the real thing.
A lot of the cheap books seem to be ones that are already in the public domain and can easily be found for free online.
I guess they’re not sticking up to the “cheaper books” policy then. Good catch, juniorbonner, thanks for the input.
I’m not impressed by their prices, I’m impressed by their approach to the web-application world by doing a client-side application that connects to a server, much like iTunes does it.
Thanks for the feedback on pricing. Some of it is under our control, and some of it is under publisher control. Certainly, we want to have much better pricing. I will pass your comments along to those who can make a difference.
As for the Linux question (and the main reason I am posting)…What UI toolkit? This has been the confusing question to me. I think that is the major question that any app developer has to answer first. Any thoughts?
Hey Willie, thanks for reading and dropping a comment about linux.
In my previous development endeavours with Linux (and other *nix environments) I’ve used GTK+, because it is GPL and widely available. I may be a little biased because I’ve used Gnome for a long long time (when I’m not on my mac) and have been a part of the dev team for a while - In fact, I’m working with Gnome and Google on a project that’ll launch in some days. But I do consider it the best widget toolkit for linux.
That said, why not look at the GTK documentation? It’s pretty easy to develop with, there’s hooks for a lot of programming languages and it is definitely a growing market you may want to explore with VS.
Good luck! Thanks again for your input, too!
I don’t doubt our ability to use a given toolkit per se, it is the politics of picking a Linux toolkit.
If you do GNOME, the KDE folks come after you. Or vice versa. Or at least that is how it seemed to be. Is it still like that?
It used to be like that, yes. Nowadays it’s a little more pacific than that, though, thankfully. Most people have libraries for QT and GTK installed by default nowadays anyway, because it makes no sense to pick one toolkit over the other and totally ignore the rest of the applications.
I know this sounds like herecy, but I would bet that 99% of the students out there are not running Linux.
No, dru, you’re actually right. 99% of students per se are not. But a far greater share of IT students are running OSS on Linux, that’s for sure. So are many government institutions in several countries and several schools.
And big corporations.
But I have to agree that the general public isn’t Linux-aware. Just like there are huge ammounts of people who are not IT-aware, too.
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Vitalbooks is a bad news company which has tried, for example, to eliminate all paper books on Dental Medicine in order to rent the rights to Dentists world over with a bizzarre DRM scheme.
See LULU.COM for a much better solution…
Ruben
Hey!…Man i love reading your blog, interesting posts ! it was a great Wednesday .