There’s been a big brouhaha over comments Steve Jobs made to NYT’s David Pogue in an interview following Apple’s event on Wednesday. Basically, most people are interpreting what Jobs said about eBook readers to mean that Apple plans to completely stay away from the market. But that’s not actually what Jobs said at all.
How do we know? Because before Pogue re-wrote his interview, he posted the transcription of the Q&A, which still resides in Google’s cache. Here’s the relevant part:
Q: Has your opinion of e-readers changed?
A: I’m sure there will always be dedicated devices, and they may have a few advantages in doing just one thing. But I think the general-purpose devices will win the day because I think people just probably aren’t willing to pay for a dedicated device. You notice Amazon never says how much they sell; usually if they sell a lot of something, you want to tell everybody.
We don’t see that it’s a really big market at this point. And in the future, the more general-purpose devices will tend to win the day.
I’m not sure that Amazon, as an example, really cares that much about being in the hardware business. If I were Amazon, I’d love selling stuff where I didn’t have to have a warehouse, didn’t need UPS.
Translation: We’re making a tablet, and eBooks will be a part of those.
Jobs isn’t saying Apple isn’t interested in eBooks, he’s saying that Apple isn’t interested in making a stand-alone eBook reader. And they shouldn’t be. While the devices will exist for a while, eventually the thought that this won’t be a functionality wrapped into other devices is silly. Why carry around multiple devices when you can carry around one? That’s kind of Apple’s thing, isn’t it?
Basically, a lot of people are wrongly translating Jobs’ thoughts about eBook readers as eBooks themselves. eBooks are a huge portion of the App Store, why wouldn’t Apple want to expand their support of them? They do, and they are. It’s just going to be on their tablet device or their other devices, not some stand-alone reader.
tanslation: we will gladly allow Amazon to distribute their ebooks on our superior tablet. Their meager hardware will be obsolete in a matter of time. -Sir Steve
That’s it, Apple knows how to make net margins is in the hardware business, not Amazon.
Thanks to the Amazon keywords in this article it’s funny to see those Kindle banner ad up top and down below…
They seem to be saying, almost desperately “Hey, look at me… Please?”
Weird, I got an ad for pantyhose…
that is pretty funny.
Apple’s focus on single-purpose ereader device like the Kindle proves that it has taken initiatives already. Apple is now an added killer to Amazon. Already the ebook war is in overhead between Amazon, Sony, and Google. If Apple jumps in, sure it would bring revolutions in the ebook world.
At last somebody gets it right. Thank you!
But will Apple make it easy for anyone to create e-books and sell them for $0.99 on iTunes? I’m thinking if they do, it will be more volume than the App Store.
It’s coming. There are pioneer long doc apps (Madcap’s Flare) that do advanced page composition entirely in HTML and CSS and can deliver content formatted for print or for web. That means that you can compose once and deliver to multiple media formats.
I’m back at school, adding programming chops to my print graphic design background for this very reason.
I’m not betting on Amazon’s proprietary format – the evolving HTML 5 and CSS 2 standards make it possible to do some extremely advanced formatting and composition.
but it won’t have e-ink….
That doesn’t matter to Siegler — obviously he’s never actually used a Kindle over an extended period of time where the advantages of an e-Ink screen vs. an LCD screen would become obvious.
yeah. i own a kindle. have for many months.
BTW, great device, but way too expensive for what it is. is e-ink nice? sure. but i think overtime the market will prove people simply don’t care about it versus the convenience of an all-in-one. or someone will make a screen with e-ink also. or a better type of display.
+1
Yes. I think e-Ink with thousands (I dare not say millions at this point) of colors is possible and will be inexpensive enough for mass production … some day.
now that there is a market for content, it may well come sooner the n expected…
Some day we’ll have better display technology. But I doubt Apple has some generational leap in display technology ready to go into production within 6 months.
Reading for extended periods of time on a backlit LCD is not good for your eyes or your battery life. If they are making a tablet, then yeah, it’ll work for books — the same way an iPhone works for books. Which is: sort of, but nothing resembling a primary function.
I actually agree with this. The iPhone is fine for a few pages at a time, but I wouldn’t enjoy reading an entire book on it, or on a backlit tablet.
I actually just read all of Magic Kingdom for Sale (great free fantasy book if you’ve not read) on my 3GS. It was several sessions but it worked out just fine.
Of course I also read the second-to-final Harry Potter on some Symbian device as I recall, so I MAY be a glutton for punishment
Funny you say that kindles will be obsolete and you got google placing adds all over your homepage about them…. I just cliked on one here you got $.85
well thanks.
How did you know it was USD 0.85?
You know, the whole dollar “$” sign was a clue.
I bow to your knowledge of world currencies.
@MG Siegler: Just to let you know, according to google adsense policies, it is not advisable to promote / thank users who click on ads. Better yet, do not communicate with people who click on ad in any way. otherwise it will violate their terms of service and use. a good friend of mine had lost all of his $8000 month earning just because a user commented in similar way and he acknowledged on his blog. this was enough proof for google to show stopper for that month.
This Proque has been a fanboy, biased, non disclosures… can’t believe how anyone can take him serious…
Been writing mac manuals for years, writes a glorious review about snow leopard, then complains on blog /emails how crappy and unstable it is… no disclosure of all that….
i think so..
i think e-ink is key, but it has to come with color. winner will be the one who has both.
i saw a Jeff bezos interview saying that having color-based screens for e-readers are still a long way to go.
or apple could just move forward without e-ink and just do a bigger iPod touch with better battery life. i’d buy it.
“Thanks to the Amazon keywords in this article it’s funny to see those Kindle banner ad”
Do you think the type of audience attracted to techchrunch is the type of audience that does not have an adblocker installed? I think yiou may be the only one who sees ads. God bless ya…
Maybe we’re the type of audience that turns off AdBlock on sites we want to support…
i took that to mean, theres probably an app for it so download them to your iphone.
One very important thing that any ebook reader has to keep in mind is the ability to read on a screen without hurting your eyes. General devices need to have a non-back lit screens which will be easy on the eye to read; Kindle is such a device. Unless general purpose devices don’t take care of this display aspect, specific ebook readers are going to rule.
Right, Ravi. Yours is the main point that everyone seems to be missing. If Apple doesn’t have e-ink capability, then they aren’t actually competing with Amazon effectively.
Q: Can you read a Kindle in the dark?
A: Yes, with the help of an add-on called Mighty Bright XtraFlex2 Light.
To that I say: what? Newton Messagepad from the 1990s would let you read in the dark, runs on AA batteries, doesn’t hurt your eyes no matter even if it tries.
And it became obsolete.
E-Ink is awful.
I don’t understand why people say that reading that horrible text with a dark gray background is easy.
I prefer reading my books on my Iphone anytime. It has never hurt my eyes, you only have to adjust brightness.
Display issue as it may be, we are forgeting it’s Apple we are talking about! Think revolutionary! What about a multipurpose tablet that can switch the display mode to something similar to e-ink on the fly?
If Apple gets into ebook readers, they will reinvent the reader.
I also remember Steve’s famous quote, “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year.”
Which everyone took to mean that he wasn’t interested in ebooks and readers.
Turn it around, however, and it says that sixty percent of the people in the U.S. read two books or MORE last year.
Sixty percent? Now THAT’S a market.
45 percent of yanks can read? Well you live and learn!
Case in point: the iPhone is already one of the most popular e-readers on the market.
ebooks are a “huge part” of the app store when measured by total apps. On the other hand, when measured by total sales they’re only a blip.
Take a look at how the app store categories are sorted on your iPhone. Notice anything? They aren’t alphabetical. They’re sorted by popularity. ebooks are always second to last (above only “medical”).
Only Apple knows how well ebooks really sell in the app store. But, when you combine the ebook category’s placement in the app store with Job’s quote saying “We don’t see that it’s a really big market at this point”, you kind of get the idea that ebooks aren’t really a priority for Apple. Right now games are where the real money is at.
Sure, the Jesus tablet might be a great reading device. It’ll probably do a lot of things really well. But we won’t know for sure until it’s actually released. In the meantime, one thing is sure — of all the forms of media that Apple might sell to iPod owners, books will generate the least revenue. And that, in a nutshell, is why Apple isn’t rushing into the ebook marketplace.
The conflict for me lies in him saying all this right after pitching the ipod touch as a dedicated gaming device.
In 15 years, young computer geeks who write snarky posts about robots will snicker at old single digit pixel depth photographs of happy people holding kindles.
I do think a lot of people will go for a multi-use device, because they don’t read much, and so they don’t need a benefits of a dedicated reader. But I also believe dedicated readers will be around as long as they give a better reading experience than a multi-use device, the same way some people will still use vinyl instead of MP3’s, or a dedicated corkscrew instead of a multi-tool with a corkscrew attachment.
The day the multi-user device has a screen that is as easy on the eyes and decently sized, with a decent battery life, then the dedicated reader dies.
The reason so few ebooks sell in the iPhone app store despite the fact that lots of people use their iPhones (and iPods Touch) as ereader devices is because most people have downloaded a single free app that requires obtaining books from elsewhere. The most popular downloads in the books category are Kindle, B&N Reader and Stanza.
Much of the for-pay content of the book app category is overpriced out-of-copyright stuff that easily can be obtained free for the above mentioned readers or egregiously overpriced new issues on the Scrollmotion platform.
This post and Jobs comment have a bit of misdirection or red-herring-ness about them. No one ever thought Apple was going to build a single-purpose ereader device like the Kindle. The question was/is whether Apple was going to start selling its own line of ebooks (in its own proprietary format) through the iTunes store. I have argued for a long time that they would not and all their actions up to this point, particularly allowing Amazon and B&N to post ereader apps of their own, supports that view. So Jobs here is just reiterating the status quo and dissing Amazon a little bit.
Thank god he came, we are not alone
Meh. How many things has Jobs said Apple would never do that they ended up doing? Cell phones? Video ipods? Whatever.
2 points
1) “You notice Amazon never says how much they sell; usually if they sell a lot of something, you want to tell everybody.” Amazon doesn’t have to tell the world. All they have to do is wait during those 3 periods when Amazon ran out of Kindles. That tells you something right there… or it should.
2) Say this with me “Amazon doesn’t care about the Kindle”. That’s right. Amazon cares about selling books… lots of books… with no overhead at all. OK, the overhead on a kindle e-book is 5 megabytes of storage on a server.
Anyway, Amazon ‘developed’ the Kindle because all the other e-book readers sucked. They probably didn’t really want to… but they had to so they can sell e-books.
Sorry Steve, you missed the boat on this one (and the new ipod touchs too).
Isn’t the e-ink reading advantage overstated? Doesn’t e-ink suffer from screen flash on page turning? The videos I’ve seen make that look very irritating–and hard on the eyes!
And the lack of a backlight means no reading in the dark–which means you cannot read without disturbing your sleeping partner?
So, a color e-ink with optional backlight and no flash on refresh — or an easy on the eyes LED screen on a tablet–will be good.
The multi-purpose device with good display will win out.
Nice clarification…
…I agree with Steve Jobs, great to see him back!
Ever since Jobs met the Kindle I was confident he’s gonna comeback for this game. But his words not only reveals they want an eBook capable device, but he’s signaling how inefficient it is for Amazon to rely on UPS and it’s own warehouse, making it’s own hardware:
“I’m not sure that Amazon, as an example, really cares that much about being in the hardware business. If I were Amazon, I’d love selling stuff where I didn’t have to have a warehouse, didn’t need UPS.”
i.e, he’s hinting Amazon should use their upcoming tablet device to deliver the rich library of books they have. Should that thing happen, that would be awesome. I just hope they respect current Kindle owners and all the books they purchased.
I’m from Canada so I can’t get a Kindle 2 yet. But I want one. Or a Plastic Logics when it comes out. Whichever device I buy will be big enough to have the text at a comfortable font size and still fit the entire textbook page.
It will display my pdf sheet music on my music stand or on my digital piano. It will be large enough yet light and thin to make this convenient.
It will allow me to read for more hours on a single charge than a general lcd device.
A tablet/notebook or iPod cannot fill this niche. I’m not going to bother putting my iPod (because it’s too small) or MacBook Air (because it might fall) on my music stand.
For night-reading I can use my red LED headlamp to avoid bothering my plane/bus neighbour. Or clip on a cheap reading light. I need a light for my paperbacks anyway.
An optional built-in light would be more convenient. And color would be vital for viewing magazines. But my focus is on textbooks, sheet music, and a few novels here and there. Kids in school and college/university surely read more than two books per year. The vast majority of my reading is done in a room with a roomlight or daylight streaming through the window.
Larry Ellison is the CEO of Oracle. Steve Jobs is the Oracle of CEOs. His words get more scrutiny and interpretations than Revolution 9.
The winner of ebook producer will be the one who care about users’ eyes.
Why don’t I read the interview that way AT ALL?!?! I don’t think they’ll be in the business of even ebooks. The main takeaway i see was likening digital distribution (and Apple’s MP3s through iTunes) as being better than as selling and shipping items. It still seemed as if he thought making an ebook reader to get to the end result of digital distribution was a necessary step for Amazon, but the future will be an all purpose device.