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.

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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?

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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

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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.

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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

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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

Spambots and other computer generated text is widely considered the bane of the modern web, but that wasn’t always the case. There was a time where when this idea was new and clever, and someone reportedly even used a precursor to today’s spambots to write a book.

Back in 1983 a pair of programmer/writers released a text generator called Racter (short for raconteur). The program was pitched as a way to let the computer write stories and poems, but there are reports that it wasn’t terribly sophisticated and in fact the quality of the output more closely resembled that of a MadLibs style of story writing.

While the released version of Racter was limited, it looks like there might also have been a more sophisticated version. One of the programmers, William Chamberlain, later published a book which he attributed to Racter. That book was The Policeman’s Beard is Half Constructed, and it was published in 1984.

That book is long out of print, and there is no legit ebook either. Luckily this book was saved from obscurity by Udu, a nonprofit group that scans obscure and worthwhile art and literature.

I’m not sure how this book qualifies as literature, but it does strike me as historically significant. After all, it does stand as a testament to the time before spambots joined the dark side.

You can find it as a 33MB PDF.

If you absolutely insist on a paper copy, you can find it on Amazon for about $40.

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You’ve probably already heard the breaking news this morning. Penguin is finally going to lessen their hostile position toward libraries.

They’re launching a new pilot program this fall with a couple libraries in the NYC area (NYCPL and and Brooklyn Public Library) to offer ebooks via the 3M Cloud library. The pilot launches in August, and if it goes well, Penguin will open up its e-books to libraries across the country.

The ebooks are going to be sold to libraries on a 1 year license, starting 6 months after they are published. The license will expire, and it doesn’t look like Penguin’s ebooks will be on the Kindle. But this is at least a slight move improvement on Penguin’s last decision on library ebooks.

That 1 year expiration seems a little extreme, doesn’t it? My first thought was that it was extortionate, but after I thought it through I calmed down a little and remembered that most librarians won’t be as upset as I am.

I also realized that with some books it won’t matter.  I’m more bothered by the length of the expiration, not the fact that libraries will need to rebuy ebooks. These won’t be the first expiring ebooks; the Harry Potter series came to OverDrive with a 5 year expiration attached, and I didn’t complain then because needing to buy a book every 5 years is much less punitive than buying it on a yearly basis. And there are other expiring ebooks on the library market, but those don’t get the attention of the big name deals like the one today.

In 5 years many technical books are outdated and need to be replaced. In 5 years many fiction books are forgotten and won’t need to be kept on the shelf. But the single year renewal is worse, and it’s going to make the ebook purchases difficult to justify.

On a related note Penguin’s justification for it is laughable. Penguin told the Wall Street Journal that the "renewable one-year expiration date on e-books, meanwhile, is designed to mimic the natural shelf life of print books." *snicker* So all those decade old hardbacks on the shelves of my local library have to be bought each year?

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There’s a second story here which I’m not sure anyone has noticed yet. The 3M Cloud Library doesn’t yet support the Kindle, and thanks to this deal with Penguin it probably never will.

You might recall that one of Penguin’s complaints about library ebooks was the ease with which patrons could load the ebooks on to their Kindle. Penguin’s official statements mentioned security, but that was a code phrase for their real fear, which was that making ebooks to easy to use would negatively affect sales on the consumer market.

It’s my guess that Penguin went with 3M because 3M doesn’t support the Kindle. If I’m right then one of the conditions of the contract is that 3M will never support the Kindle.

That, my dear, is a stupid move. It gives OverDrive an advantage that 3M cannot match.

image by My name’s axel

The Online Publisher’s Association has just released the results of a new survey into how people are using their tablets, and it’s a good one. A total of 2,540 Americans were polled in March of this year.  About 760 reported that they were tablet owners, and here are the highlights of how they’re using their tablets:

• 31% of Americans own tablets
• Nearly as many own an Android tablet as own an iPad (47% vs 52%)
• Half spend more than 10 hours a week on the tablet
• 60% use their tablet several times a day (or more)
• 60% get content several times a day (or more)

The above details just scratch the surface of the survey results, which run to 47 pages. It’s well worth a read, but there were a couple points that caught my eye.

This survey confirmed something I’d long suspected. While mobile use is up, it turns out that the users aren’t mobile. A full two thirds of the time spent on tablets is now at home, not while the user is actually in motion.

I’m not at all surprised by this because I’ve been tracking how I use my tablets. For example, right now I have a couple tablets sitting next to me. They’re set to ping whenever I get an email or tweet. I also use them when I want to sit back to read and contemplate someone’s blog post (rather than reading it on my laptop, where I lean forward).

The other point which caught my eye was both a surprise and an explanation for the decline in sales of E-ink screens.

When considered as a reading device, the tablet won out over everything from PCs and smartphones to magazines. That’s not much of a surprise, assuming that the content is well formatted. The bombshell was that respondents preferred tablets over dedicated ereaders like the Kindle:

It’s going to suck to be E-ink this year; the ereader market was quite lucrative. Now it looks like it might be disappearing.

image by lejoe

The American Library Association has just released the results of their annual survey today, and aside from budgets being cut while responsibilities are increased, things are looking good.

More libraries were lending ebooks and audiobooks last fall than the year before (76% vs 67%), and a significantly larger number of respondents said they were lending ereaders as well (39% vs 28%). The survey also showed an increase in the number of libraries that offered free Wifi, internet access, and technical training for patrons trying to use all the technology.

The statistics are drawn from the ALA annual survey, which is conducted on October of each year. The results o the October 2011 survey were just released today – 8 months later. What can I say, that’s how the ALA rolls.

You can find more information at the link below, but to be honest I’m only interested in the ebook stats. I’m surprised to see them up and the same goes for the ereader lending stats. 2011 was a tumultuous year for libraries, what with HarperCollins deciding to limit checkouts to only 26 per copy.

Methinks this is a sign that libraries are going to get into ebooks no matter what the major publishers do. The news of Penguin pulling their ebooks out of libraries and Random House quadrupling their prices will probably hardly even effect the next survey.

ALA

image by Robby van Moor

We all know that Microsoft announced their new Surface tablet last night, but that’s not all that happened. One unrelated story was lost among the froth of excited bloggery in the build up to the launch yesterday, and as I look over it this morning I realize it is nearly as important.

A spec sheet leaked a couple days ago which detailed the not yet released Xbox Surface. I saw it yesterday, and I initially held the post so I could use the info to support the big news announcement last night. I’m glad I held it because it turns out that the Xbox Surface probably has very little to do with the event last night.

A number of sites reported on the Xbox Surface yesterday, and some called it a tablet. That’s not quite true. A close reading of the spec sheet suggests that the Xbox Surface isn’t a tablet so much as it’s just a wireless controller for the next Xbox. Have you seen photos of the new WiiU controller? While we don’t know what the Xbox Surface will look like, we can guess that it will work much the same way as WiiU controller.

The spec sheet indicates that the the Xbox Surface has a 7″ (1280×800) screen with card slots, Wifi, and Bluetooth, but what it doesn’t have is a CPU. That is in the "stationary computing device", which in fact has 2 multi-core CPUs as well as 5GB of RAM and an unspecified graphics chip.

Don’t get me wrong; I think the Xbox Surface is going to be great – assuming this spec sheet is for real. But the important thing to note here is that the Xbox Surface isn’t going to be competition for the Windows tablets announced last night – not in any form. Those are mobile devices while this one is fixed.  Microsoft is quite carefully not letting their 2 products get in each other’s way.

Clever, that.