Earlier this week I broke the news that the Kobo Touch launch was not going well in Japan, and after getting a lot of negative reviews Rakuten decided to hide the problem rather than deal with it.

I happen to still be waiting for a response from Kobo, and to be honest I don’t expect to ever hear from them (their marketing dept doesn’t like me for some reason). But Rakuten has chosen to respond to the issue and I have a quote from them here:

Following the launch of Kobo Touch in Japan we saw a tremendous consumer response. Unfortunately, some users were able to gain access to the system before our official launch timing of 15:00 on July 19th. Users began writing reviews and comments about the service that was not yet ready for public release. We then launched on schedule, but considering the review board had been populated by feedback not relevant to the actual service we decided to temporarily suspend the review board feature, which we felt was not fully reflective of the service at launch time and was misinforming consumers.

However, we understand that we did not meet the high expectations of our loyal customers. We have been listening to their feedback through our customer support center and having been working around the clock to resolve all outstanding issues.

So according to Rakuten they let the site go live before the service was up and running. This let people get in and post reviews before Rakuten was ready.

I don’t believe that is the core of the issue, but even if it were it would only explain some of the problems reported. They’re glossing over a number of other issues.

For example, Rakuten promised 30 thousand Japanese language titles; they launched with only 18,894. What’s more, the statement above ignores the fact that (according to one of my readers) Rakuten/Kobo pushed out a buggy firmware update.There are also reports of activation issues for the Kobo Touch as well as problems with the Kobo Desktop software.

And Rakuten is also failing to mention how their customer service fell down on the job. This was clear in a number of reviews posted (though Google translate isn’t the best at Jap-Eng), and there were even complaints about Rakuten 's CS dating from the 20th through the 22nd – which means that the early access wasn’t relevant at all.

Folks, Rakuten & Kobo are pitching themselves as the only real answer to Amazon on the global ebook market. If this launch in Japan is any indication of their combined abilities I think we might want to save some effort and go buy Kindles right now.

Rakuten can’t even come clean on their mistakes – not even after they’re know to the world. Is this really going to be someone you’d trust to sell you anything?

Unlike the past couple infographics I posted (which ranged from bad to hilariously terrible), the following infographic is based on a recent survey of consumers and includes info not posted elsewhere.

Computers continue to dominate as the most popular reading device, and nonfiction edged out fiction as the most book category.

More Infographics

via spectros.com

There’s buzz going around Twitter this morning about a recent WSJ article (the top link). The article covers the various ways that Amazon and Apple are going head to head, including tablets, smartphones, app stores. and app development.

It’s a nice summary article, and aside from mistaking Amazon’s budget Android smartphone for a direct iPhone competitor (and getting the sizes of the app stores wrong), the article does show how the 2 companies are competing for your pocketbook. But I’m only interested in one little bit towards the end.

There was a footnote near the end of the article about a new app Amazon might be testing. No name was given, but reportedly this is a competitor to iBooks Author:

At the same time, Apple is trying to chip away at Amazon’s e-book business with new technology to build interactive e-books, called iBooks Author. Amazon has tested its own similar technology with publishers in response, said another person briefed on the project.

While I have no evidence to prove it exists, I’m betting that it does exist and that the new app is called the Kindle Scribe (or at least it was at one point).

Do I have any inside info? Not currently, no. Did I find a trademark? No, but then again Amazon does tend to file trademarks after they announce the product so that’s no big deal.

My one piece of information is a website address that Amazon registered last August. It’s kindlescribe.com, and while the address goes no where at the moment this is something which could be changed.

You might recall the name from the buzz around that time; many blogs were erroneously calling it Amazon’s next ereader or tablet. I didn’t. While many bloggers didn’t look beyond the obvious, I declined to speculate on how Amazon might use the site. Once again I am amazed at my foresight.

Even though I have no real evidence, you’ll have to agree that the name alone is compelling. The name Kindle Scribe is a good choice for an app to make Kindle ebooks, isn’t it?  What’s more, Amazon already has ebook creation software to build on. Mobipocket had already developed MobiCreator by the time Amazon bought them, and while development dies out in 2009 Amazon still has the source code to build off of in much the same way that the Kindle iPhone app used parts of Mobipocket’s never released iPhone app or the way that the original Kindle shared code with Mobipocket’s Java based reading app.

To be honest, I’m not sure we’ll ever see the Kindle Scribe app, but I do think Amazon registered the website address just in case they ever needed it. And I do think that the app exists.

P.S. If anyone at Amazon wants to leak details or a copy of the app, you know where to find me.

It’s been just under a week since the Kobo Touch started shipping in Japan, and things are going so well that Rakuten has removed from their website all the reviews of the Kobo Touch.

No, seriously, all of the reviews are down – both good and bad.  I suppose there were too many people writing things like "I’m going to buy a Kindle" and that upset someone at Rakuten.

Luckily one of Rakuten’s potential customers tipped me to the story, including giving me a link to a blog that had collected responses and a screenshot of the review page before Raskuten removed it. That’s why I can show you things like this:

If you can’t see the image above, it says that the Kobo Touch has a 3 star rating largely due to the vast number of 1 star reviews. I unfortunately cannot show you the reviews themselves; no one thought to save them before it was too late. But I have been told that the many low ratings shared a number of complaints:

Generally people were complaining in their reviews about problem with crashing setup of kobo desktop application, very limited offer of Japanese books, unresponsive touch screens, poor customer service, etc

And you have to admit that graphic speaks for itself.

Update: My source found a Google Cache page of reviews. Thanks, Bibo!

Second Update: I’ve been reading some of the reviews. Here’s one that jumped out at me.

Reading revolution seems to have ended in failure, unfortunately. Ringleader of the revolution or imprisoned or beheaded will?

Rakuten launched the Kobo Touch in Japan with the expectation that they would dominate their home market. They are native to the country, and Rakuten does have a sizable retail presence there. Given their technical and CS resources, you’d think they would have been able to pull this off.

Unfortunately, it now looks like Rakuten has paved the way for Amazon to dominate yet another ebook market.This launch is rapidly turning into a debacle and  it’s going to damage Rakuten’s reputation. And according to some of the tweets I’ve seen (in Japanese) it already is.

Folks, they took the reviews down from the website so new customers wouldn’t be warned about the many problems. I want you to look past the fact they did it and think about how customers will feel once they discover the deception. That is what will make this a major debacle and not merely an embarrassment for Rakuten.

A bad launch could be recovered from. This is closer to being a systematic effort to lie to their customers. Okay, eventually people will forgive Rakuten, but in the short run this debacle could drive readers to Amazon.

And we know Amazon is planning to launch in Japan as soon as they can. If they get the Kindle Store live in Japan in the next month or so they’ll be able to capitalize on this story without lifting a finger.

I’ve reached out to Kobo, but they not yet responded at the time I posted this. I will update this post with their response.

When the Kindle launched in late 2007 it came with an experimental web browser as well as free web browsing over the 3g connection. As nice as that was to have, all good things come to an end. There are reports over at MobileRead today that Amazon has imposed a 3g bandwidth cap on some users. MR user Chamekke was surprised earlier this week while using their Kindle 3G:

I was using the browser when it popped up a message to say that I’d hit my 50 MB monthly limit of 3G Web access on my Kindle 3G. When I clicked the 'OK' button (which was my only choice, really), I got a second message saying that I’d have 24 hours of grace to continue to use 3G for Web browsing, but that after that I could use 3G only for visiting Amazon.com, Wikipedia, and the Kindle Store. Otherwise I will be obligated to use Wi-Fi.

From what I can tell, this new bandwidth cap was imposed at the start of July.

Now, as you probably know, the Kindle Touch lunched last fall with browsing over the 3g completely blocked, both in the US and without. This has led some to continue to buy the K3, which until recently didn’t have any restrictions imposed on the 3g connection (aside from when it simply wasn’t available). This was one of the K3’s nicer features (especially once we learned that the Kindle Touch lacked it), and it led to the Kindle being regarded as a precursor to you-know-what:

But it is only fair that I point out that Amazon has had this policy in place for some time now, even though I’ve never heard of it being enforced before. Here’s the relevant section of the K3 support pages:

The Experimental Web Browser is currently only available for some customers outside of the United States and may be limited to 50MB of browsing over 3G per month. This limit does not apply when customers are browsing over Wi-Fi.

Some are saying that this rule is being enforced because of the instruction on how to hack your Kindle and get free 3g data connection for your laptop. They were posted back in February, and I’m not sure they had anything to do with this.

That free web browsing was an expense that Amazon took on so they could get more people interested in the Kindle. It was a promotional item which cost Amazon money everyday. It was a constant drain on their purse and like all freebies it had to go away at some point. That’s simply how things work.

image by Try Stan

Qualcomm held their quarterly meeting with investors on Wednesday and given the size and magnitude of the bombshell they dropped I’m surprised California hasn’t fallen into the sea.

They’re getting out of making Mirasol screens and will instead be licensing the technology to other manufacturers. (Seriously, how did this not get reported everywhere?)

Mirasol was just one of the many topics discussed, but TBH I’m not all that interested in the many chips (3g, 4g, Wifi, GPS, Bluetooth, CPU) made by Qualcomm; I just want to read about the Mirasol screen tech. Here’s what Paul E. Jacobs, the CEO of Qualcomm, had to say about Mirasol:

With respect to QMT, we’re now focusing on licensing our next-generation mirasol display technology and will directly commercialize only certain mirasol products. We believe that this strategy will better align our updated roadmap with the addressable opportunities.

Given today’s news, it would seem that Qualcomm is having insurmountable issues in manufacturing the screen tech themselves. And that means that they’ll start looking for someone else to do it for them. Good luck with that.

From what I can tell Mirasol is not now nor has it ever been an easy screen to manufacture. And that’s according to a source at the company who used to make the demo Mirasol screens for Qualcomm.

Way back before Prime View International bought E-ink and then changed its name, PVI acted as a manufacturing partner for a number of companies. They used to do small production runs for Qualcomm to produce the Mirasol screen (this was before Qualcomm’s own factory was up and running). According to my source PVI could never get the QA rating high enough for the screen to be cost-effective for the consumer market; too many screens failed the final checks.

And that production issue likely carried over into Qualcomm’s own factory. In checking back over my notes, I see that one of my sources with Pocketbook told me in April 2011 that the reason Pocketbook hadn’t produced the Pocketbook Mirasol eReader was that they lost "about half of the screens in mass production".

I don’t think Qualcomm has seen the success they expected when they bought Iridigm (the original developer of the Mirasol screen tech) back in 2004. That set Qualcomm back $170 million, and the subsequent 8 years of development and production costs would probably have been sufficient to invade a small 3rd world country.

Note, though, that this comes as not much of a surprise. The latest I had heard was that the South Korean bookseller Kyobo, Qualcomm’s first partner, was discontinuing its only Mirasol eReader. And from what I was told at SID Display Week, Qualcomm’s new factory in Taiwan was facing yet another delay before it could get to making the Mirasol screen.

At this point the Mirasol screen is used on a handful of Chinese ereaders, and in spite of what the population would have you think the Chinese ereader market is actually quite small. That’s not a good sign that Qualcommwas able to make enough screens for the US or European markets.

But I’m not sure that imminent death of the Mirasol eReader is all that big of a loss.

Mirasol is one of the several revolutionary screen techs that came and went in the past few years, and like most of its competition there were hopes that it might succeed in the consumer market where Mirasol’s low-power operating costs might provide a great enough benefit to justify the high cost of making the screen.

PlasticLogic is another example of a failed screen tech. As impressive as it was when I saw it a couple months back, their screen was simply too expensive to sell well. After a couple failed devices, PlasticLogic decided to pursue a plan to license their tech, not make it.

Unfortunately for just about everyone, over the past several years battery life improved while most chips in consumer devices got more energy efficient. This largely killed any need to go with a more energy efficient screen.

And yes, consumer devices were the holy grail of the screen manufacturers. While screens do go on many another device in many market segments, tablets and ereaders were potentially the single largest market anywhere.

via

OLPC, the One Laptop Per Child program, is determined to switch to tablets for their next device, but the XO-3 tablet won’t be out until at least 2013. Not everyone is willing to wait that long.

Just over a year ago Thailand decided to launch their own independent OTPC program, and the first shipment is coming off the trucks this week. This first shipment is going to first grade classrooms in 20 schools spread across 8 provinces of Thailand, and reports indicate that an additional 800 thousand tablets will be issued to first graders this coming year

The device in question looks to be a 7″ Android tablet from a Chinese manufacturer. It looks to have rather mixed specs and is running Android 4.0 on a Rockchip 2918 CPU. (Luckily it gets better from there.) The 7″ capacitive touchscreen has a resolution of 1024×600, and the tablet also has Wifi, Bluetooth, a pair of 2MP cameras, mike/speaker, and a g-sensor.

The 7″ tablet costs around 2500 baht (~$81 USD). Thailand is also looking at a 10″ model, but the price of 6000 baht (~$189 USD) has been deemed too expensive.

"The students who will receive the tablets will be able to take them home, if parents and teachers allow them. The children will have ownership of the tablets after three years," said Education Minister Suchart Thada-Thamrongvech.

Thailand also plans to distribute another 800 thousand tablet to 7th grade students this fall, but not all of the funds for the new tablets have been budgeted until the 2013 fiscal year, so there’s always a chance that this program will dry up. The 7th graders will be getting a more capable tablet which is expected to cost around 12,000 baht (~$379 USD).

On a related note, Apple is also participating in the project. They’ve donated 600 iPads to be used by students in 20 classrooms, and Apple is also organizing training courses for teachers. "Apple will train teachers to use the tablet and develop education applications to share in Apple’s App Store. The project participants will be able to use iCloud service to store content. The project will kick off this year," said a senior Thai official.

Thailand has a population of around 70 million, with a school age population (primary and secondary) of  just over 10 million. Over the long term this project is going to supply tablets to all Prathom (grades 1 through 6) students, though it’s not clear when this will happen.

New curriculum is currently being developed for grades 2 through 4 which will make use of the tablets, but it’s not clear when that will be released to the teachers. The Office of Basic Education Commission (OBEC) that it’s ready to distribute the tablets to the first graders now, and that it has 336 learning objects ready for use by the students.

So will it work? There have been some doubts that the Thai government was truly prepared to retrain teachers to make best use of the tablets rather than simply tossing them in the classroom in much the same manner as the Peru OLPC project. But I am reasonably confident that this project will turn out well.

Thailand is currently in its second decade to reform and modernize its education system. They’ve made significant improvements in teacher to student ratio, attendance, and the general quality of teaching. While this doesn’t guarantee that the tablet program will be a success, it does indicate that the Thai Mibistry of Education has the right general mindset.

via Bankkok Post

For the longest time now I’ve been bugged by the fact that Amazon continues to label the 4 year old web browser on the Kindle experimental, but after today’s news I can see that  it is still an experiment.

A German security firm has just posted a proof of concept hack which exploits a security hole in the web browser on the Kindle Touch.

The security hole was identified about 3 months ago over on MobileRead. It seems that the latest update to the Kindle Touch added a new plugin for the web browser.

It’s a NPAPI plugin, and you actually have a variation of it running in your web browser right now. Ever open a PDF in the browser? That’s one kind of NPAPI plugin, but in the case of the Kindle Touch the plugin is set to look for commands embedded in webpages and then execute them on the Kindle Touch.

Okay that doesn’t sound like much, but it turns out that the plugin can execute the commands with admin or root privileges on the Kindle Touch. For example, if a hacker embedded the right commands in a webpage, they could erase your Kindle. There’s also a chance that the hacker might be able to get at the credentials for your Amazon account.

This is something of a concern, but I wouldn’t get too worried. So far it doesn’t seem that very many people have noticed the hole. There’s a browser-based jailbreak that exploits it, but that’s about it. And there are reports that Amazon is working on a patch which will close the hole.

At worst you’ll end up reporting fraud on your account. It’s a pain, but not the end of the world. Still, I’d give up on any potentially unsafe web browsing for the time being, just to be safe.

So apparently Amazon’s definition of experimental involves using all of us as guinea pigs. Hey, Amazon, take this experimenter back to the lab, would ya?

via

Of all the many infographics I’ve seen about ebooks and ereader, this is the first that shows real thought went into the design. There’s not much that’s new, but it does an excellent job of illustrating the changes to our reading habits thanks to the development of ereaders.

TBH, I’m not sure that we’ve seen the positive change described below – not yet. Sure, some people are reading more, but are more people reading?

More Infographics

via

An author who wants to give away their work currently has a lot of venues to do so, including Feedbooks, Smashwords, the Kindle Store, and they can even set up their own website. Last week Project Gutenberg  threw another option into the mix. It hasn’t gotten any serious amount of attention yet, but Project Gutenberg is now letting authors upload and distribute their own works. The new site can be found at self.gutenberg.org.

The new site currently has 677 titles, and it doesn’t quite operate under the same rules as the Project Gutenberg main site.  It’s being run independent of the main site (search doesn’t cover both), and while the 40,000+ titles on the PG main site are in the public domain (and thus can be freely shared), the ebooks offered via the new site are still under copyright. What’s more, not all of the titles are offered under a Creative Commons license.

You can still download the ebooks; you just cannot share them. This not so subtle distinction should appeal to some authors; they still have the option of adding a CC license to their ebooks if desired.

I have to say that I have mixed feelings. Yes, it’s a good idea to offer this service, and it ties nicely into PG’s own free ebook downloads, making it easy for authors to attract the attention of readers looking for freebies.

But I do wish they’d offer some format other than PDF. Say what you will about the format being supported on almost every device, it’s still not supported well on the Kindle or a number of other ereaders. I’d much rather have Kindle or Epub as an available download.

All good things must come to an end; that’s a truism. Luckily it also applies to the less than good.

Kyobo Book Centre, South Korea’s leading bookseller, has recently put their Mirasol eReader on sale at a drastic discount. I’m still waiting for confirmation from Kyobo or Qualcomm, but it looks to me like this ereader is on the way out. That’s great; neither the software nor the screen tech were worth the original retail, which was more than $300 USD.

The price posted above is 99,000 won, or about $87 USD. That’s a considerable discount off the original 350,000 won, and it leaves little doubt that this ereader is headed for the scrapheap.

Kyobo was the first company in the world to carry an ereader or tablet or tablet with a Mirasol screen, and they launched it in late November 2011. It generated a lot of attention at the time, but the excitement started dying off shortly after I posted my review. The bloom completely fell off the rose when all the tech blogs got a chance to see it at CES 2012. The screen frankly didn’t live up to the previous several years of hype.

The original design for this ereader came from inside Qualcomm, with the reading app and other customizations added by Kyobo. It’s based around a 5.7″ Mirasol screen. It runs a closed version of Android 2.3 Gingerbread on a 1GHz Snapdragon CPU.

The screen, now that took a while to develop and given what I’ve heard about the limited sales I’m not sure that Qualcomm has broken even on it. The Mirasol screen tech was originally developed by a company called Iridigm, which Qualcomm bought in 2004. After 8 years of investment that likely has totaled a couple billion dollars, Qualcomm  has little to show us beyond a paltry number of devices sold in a few small niche markets (South Korea, Taiwan, and China).

Now, Qualcomm did show off a new 4.3″ screen at SID Display Week last month, so there’s hope that they can enter the smartphone market and recoup their costs. But there’s no word yet on when that new screen will go into production.

via

It looks like my fears that Sony was getting out of ereaders were unfounded; a new Sony Reader appeared on the FCC website Sunday.

That image at right shows the backside of the new PRS-T2 ereader, an that image is about all I have to show you. Everything else is either permanently concealed or won’t be revealed to the public until 29 September.

But the backside does tell us a lot. It’s the same general shape  as the current Sony Reader Wifi and it even has the same proportions and an identical microSD card slot. We also know from the test sheet that it will have Wifi but not Bluetooth or 3G (like the PRS-G1 in Japan).

Arguably this means we’re looking at another 6″ Sony Reader, but that’s about all I can say at this point.

FCC

via

The one thing that publishers like most about ebooks is that you cannot resell them. This precludes the used book market (aka the bane of publisher’s existence), but if a recent court ruling in Europe means what I think it does then that’s about to change.

Zeit is reporting that Oracle has just lost a case in Luxembourg. According to the European Court of Justice (ECJ), software publishers have no right to claim copyright infringement when someone resells a software license. In the US we would say that the court affirmed the "first sale" doctrine; Europe has a similar legal principle.

This particular case involved a Munich-based company, UsedSoft. They specialized in buying and reselling used software licenses (which the original buyers are no longer needed). While that in and of itself is not a shocking activity, a close reading of the license doc itself showed that Oracle forbids resale (they all do, pretty much). According to this new ruling, that clause isn’t enforceable in Europe.

That is of particular interest to anyone who reads ebooks. You see, most every ebook is sold under a license that includes a similar – and now unenforceable in Europe – clause. Here’s what Amazon says:

Unless specifically indicated otherwise, you may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense, or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party, and you may not remove or modify any proprietary notices or labels on the Digital Content.

Sorry, Amazon, but according to the ECJ at least one of those clauses isn’t valid anymore (though it will likely take a lawsuit to get Amazon to admit it).

Now, some might argue that this also invalidates the DRM on the ebooks, but I’m not so sure. This ruling only covers transferring the content to a new owner; DRM currently prevents it but that’s a technical issue, not legal.

And do you know what? I think Amazon will love this ruling (once they calm down). Amazon is currently a great place to find used paper books, and I bet they’d love the chance to take a commission when people sell used Kindle ebooks to one another.

Note that this would involve 3rd party sales, just like the current used book market on Amazon. All Amazon would have to provide is a mechanism to remove an ebook from one account and authorize it to another. That’s a technical issue, and best of all (from Amazon’s viewpoint) they don’t have to unlock the DRM.

That sound you hear right now is a thousand publishers saying "oh, crap". Their greatest enemy is positioned to build another secondary market which the publisher can’t touch. I bet you hadn’t thought of that one, had you?

image by upyernoz

I was reading last weekend about the antitrust lawsuit against 3 of the Price Fix 6, and it reminded my of a historical footnote which adds an amusing twist to the current situation. The lawsuit moved a step closer to trial yesterday. U.S. District Judge Denise Cote has set the trial date for Apple, Penguin, and Macmillan for 3 June 2013.

That does not come as a surprise and isn’t much of a news story, but I am amused by the fact Penguin is involved in a price fixing lawsuit, given their early history.

I started reading a book this past week that sheds some light on this issue. It’s called Two-Bit Culture, and it focuses on the rise of the paperback and how the publishing industry responded. I’m still working my way through the book, but I’ve already noticed a number of similarities between the current ebook situation and paperbacks.

Paperback books predate the turn of the century, but they really got their start in the 1930s. Several companies were started in a few short years with the same general goal. They wanted to mass-produce a cheap book which could be sold for a quarter (or 2 bits, in American slang). They published classic fiction as well as reprinted books which had been successful in hardback.

There was no bookstore industry in the US in that era (not as we know it today), so these cheap paperbacks ended up in a novel distribution venue: newsstands. The paperbacks were sold alongside pulp magazines, one of the possible inspirations for the business model.

One of the companies launched to produce cheap paperbacks was Penguin. This company was formed in 1935 in the UK by Allen Lane, who had left his previous position as Publisher at The Bodley House, a well known firm. According to Penguin’s unofficial corporate history , Lane actually was inspired by the cheap pulp magazines he saw on a newsstand.

The thing about Penguin is that when they were launched, they were the period equivalent of the many ebook startups we have today. Allen wanted to sell his books as cheap as he could in order to get the largest audience, so he embraced new technologies and new distribution venues in order to accomplish that goal. He would have loved Amazon’s deep discounting of ebook prices for the simple fact that it built the market.

When I hear about Penguin being one of the companies involved in keeping ebook prices up, I snicker. Their current actions provide a stark contrast to their early history.

But it’s also not a surprise. Penguin is an example of the classic pattern of how businesses live and die. A young business adapts quickly to new markets (sometimes even inventing the new market) and does its best to grow. A mature business works at improving its position in established markets. And a moribund business tries hard to hold on to what it has, sometimes even going so far as to stifle new markets through financial pressure, backroom deals, and even criminal conspiracies.

Tell me, which stage do you think Penguin falls in?

I know some of my readers work for Penguin (discovering the one from Penguin Group South Africa was a shock) and you probably don’t appreciate what I’m saying about your company. Do me a favor and take a look at how Penguin is handling the library ebook market right now. It’s a regressive position, not innovative. It’s designed to limit the damage ebooks might inflict on existing markets, not build a new one. That is arguably the actions of a third stage company.

P.S. Much of the detail in this post comes from Two-Bit Culture. This book was published in 1984 and is regrettably out of print. Luckily you can find it on Amazon for under $10. Go buy it.

P.P.S. If anyone knows where I can find the ebook edition, please leave a comment. Thanks.

Penguin and Cheap eBooks – A Historical Perspective