Geeks, media, and the real world.
There was a fairly noticeable kickback against Apple’s new iPad a week or so after its release, when it was revealed that the cost of the hardware components was something on the order of US$300.
Geeks of the more hard-core techie variety are quite fond of pointing out how ‘crap’ it is, based on some of the numbers associated with the hardware – CPU clock speed, amount of ram. Of course, they do the same with the iPhone.
Of course, these are basically the same conversation, just about different sets of numbers (one dollars, one techie). They also both miss the point.
The media, picking apart the device and calculating what the individual hardware components are worth, is missing the point that the device as a whole is worth more than the sum of its parts. The geeks are looking at raw numbers, and comparing them to those associated with other devices (laptops, desktops, perhaps smartphones), and declaring that the hardware is inadequate.
The hardware can’t be considered in isolation, it has to be evaluated in conjunction with the operating system it runs. And this is where the pure numbers fall down.
By way of example: if I tell you about a car with an inline, 4 cylinder, 2.9 litre (177 cubic inch) engine, you’ll probably compare that to other vehicle engines that you happen to know some of the numbers of, and assume that it’s a moderately capable car, able to handle freeway and city driving quite adequately.
Unfortunately you’d be wrong – I’m talking about the engine of a Model T Ford. The numbers don’t tell the whole story.
Where Apple excel, is in making device operating systems better than they have been before. In particular, there’s a focus on making the operating system and hardware work together, as optimally as possible. In the real world, this is what matters – but there’s no real metric for this, no numbers to compare.
Years ago, when I first switched to Mac and OS X, I switched from a fairly powerful Linux desktop computer, with a pair of 17″ monitors, to a much smaller computer with a single 15″ screen. My Linux environment was configured for me, by me, to be as efficient as I could make it, so I could get the most done in as little time as possible. Yet, within a week, I was getting more done on the Mac than I ever had under Linux or Windows. The real world experience made a lie of the numbers.
I don’t yet have a iPad. I’m not enough of a fanboy to pay the premium to import one, but I’m probably enough of an enthusiast that I’ll be lined up to buy one the first day that they’re available over here. What I’ve read indicates that Apple has repeated its earlier successes. Negative comments seem to be based around false assumptions: that the numbers matter, or that the iPad is designed to replace a full computer (more on this later, once I can speak with some actual experience on the subject). Positive comments seem to be based on the hard-to-measure ‘User Experience’, the area in which Apple, traditionally, has been well ahead of their competitors.
In the real world, it’s the user experience that matters. Not the numbers attached to the components, not the cost of the hardware – simply, how good the product is to use.
Thoughts on bits vs atoms, physical book vs the soul of a book.
I buy a lot of books. Increasingly, I buy them in the form of bits, not atoms – that is to say, e-books. On the iPhone, I carry something like 300 books around with me – I always have something to read.
For some reason, most publishers* set the price of e-books at very similar to the price of the paper books. I don’t get why.
When they create an ebook, they create it once. It then effectively copies itself. The biggest expense after that point in time is probably in the bookkeeping to track sales and see the cash rolling in. Sure, there’s a little bit of server maintenance and bandwidth cost, but that’s negligible.
When they create a paper book, the have to create one copy for every sale. Not only that, but these copies have to be sent to the end customer, probably through 3 or 4 other sets of hands (each one of which adds a little bit of markup) that the customer ends up paying. I understand why the price of a paper book is so high. What doesn’t seem to be justified, to me, is the price of an ebook being roughly the same, especially when it has less utility (such as, it’s designed to be impossible for me to loan a book to a friend).
I understand why they do this. Politely, it’s called “gouging”. I simply don’t like it, and my motives are purely selfish – I want to buy more books for the same amount of money, and it seems to me that e-books, because they’re Bit Based not Atom based should be a lot cheaper than they are. It doesn’t mean I spend more with them, I simply buy fewer books. Sure, talk to the PR side of a publishing company, and they’ll tell you it’s a niche market, with not many sales. My bet is, if the books were priced at a 10th of what they are now, they’d sell more than 10 times as many. They’d get more money overall. The author would get more money overall (and that’s the person I really care about – publishers add comparatively little value to my reading experience).
Physical books are a luxury item. I understand that, I respect it; I’ve always lived with it. I understand the expense of getting the words from the author to me when it’s constrained by being a collection of atoms. For some books, I want the physical form. For others, I just want the content, the soul of the book.
The soul of a book needn’t be a luxury. e-books should be far, far cheaper than they are, growing the market, increasing the numbers of readers, the volume of book sales.
I don’t know how much an author makes, on average, from a given book. I’d be happy if the price of a book was, ooh, say, about twice that. At heart, I’m a capitalist, and I do see an amount of value added by publishers – they should, in fact, must, be able to make a profit. If they paid the author an advance, they’ve also taken a risk, and if they’ve taken the risk on the right content, they deserve some reward for it.
Right now, it seems to me that the reward is disproportionate to the reward attached to more traditional book forms. I’d like that to change. I’d like e-books to be one of the driving factors behind a renaissance of the written word as a form of mass-entertainment.
* Baen seem to be the prime exception to this rule. I’m sure there are others, most likely in genre fiction. I’m mostly talking about the more mainstream ‘name brand’ publishers – the lesser known brands are already ahead of the game, much like some indie music labels were years ago with digital downloads.