information week interview with Tim O'Reilly about e-books

http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2009/02/tim_oreilly_unp.html

This is a really interesting article, in part because it displays several really big rhetorical lapses.

Here's the one that triggered this post:

"So this idea that long-form fiction is the heart of publishing is just bullshit." O'Reilly correctly notes that the novel is a comparatively new development. He does not attribute the "long-form fiction" quote to anyone. I suspect he is thinking of Bezos, who constantly says "long-form reading" when describing his mission for the kindle. Perhaps he is hoping we will. But Bezos never prejudices the novel over non-fiction when discussing the kindle. I am not claiming O'Reilly made a factual error -- just that rhetorically, he has created a straw man and then mocked it, as if this is somehow relevant to discussing the kindle, e-books, whatever.

O'Reilly is, predictably, quite full of himself (he's got a long history of this, so no big surprise). He talks about twitter and having the power to bestow status on others, but thinks that when "celebrities" do this, it is somehow different. Which is weird, because if O'Reilly isn't a celebrity of geekdom, I don't know who is.

The interview is loaded with weird little tidbits that either make sense (and are self-serving, to put a good face on it) or don't make sense at all. His long-form fiction straw man is up against people wanting to learn things. Well, of course he'd think that. His world is all about teaching people how to do things. When Amazon tells him they aren't going to help him out with his formatting issues, he says they told him, "Well, you guys are a specialty publisher and there's not enough demand for those features for us to put them in."

I suspect that's not actually precisely what they told him. I think they told him more or less what he quoted, only they included some word along the lines of "yet".

In _my_ world, I see a lot of things that don't work the way I want them to, but do work in a way that other people value. I piss and moan, and then go, damnit, why isn't someone marketing to me. I _don't_ imply that somehow this is a matter of open vs. closed.

O'Reilly also drags netbooks into the discussion (bad O'Reilly! Psion is going to come Get You for violating their trademark!). This one is so breathtaking I feel compelled to quote it more fully:

"I guess what I would say is, in addition to the smartphone, there is this netbook phenomenon. And the Kindle in many ways is a kind of netbook; similar price point, just a different heritage. I would actually start to imagine the Kindle merging into a converged device with the netbook and the tablet; the netbook tablet, so to speak. It clearly has advantages in terms of battery life. The eInk technology is way superior to traditional laptop technology. That being said, it lacks color and the ability to do some of the things that people have come to expect on their displays."

Wow. eInk is better than traditional laptop technology? Really? He notes that it lacks color (altho we've seen that Fujitsu is willing to give you color if you're willing to fork over for it), but points out the advantage of better battery life. What, precisely, does he mean by "the ability to do some of the things..."? Maybe, like, _fucking refresh in a reasonable way_?! Has he _used_ an eInk display?

One of the huge problems with IT folk is their tendency to see the possibilities: the great battery life, the easy on the eyes. They see these possibilities in a Bright, Shiny, Compelling way that causes them to think that ordinary folk would be willing to live with a screen that flashes whenever it refreshes (which it does crazy slow). Which I would _not_ be willing to do. You can think of this as roughly approximate to focusing on what the music customer or book customer wants (free music and books by their favorite authors as soon as they are available) vs. what the producers want (a nice middle class lifestyle and to be able to pay for their kids college education).

I'll save my launch into which OS is going to win the netbook scrum (what? didn't know there was a scrum?) for a later post.

good ideas, customers and the mini notebook OS scrum

The world is full of good ideas. Nobody wants or needs good ideas. What we want are usable products. When I worked at that place where they magical things like kindle, good ideas were incredibly thick upon the ground. The trick was to get people to shut up and code them and create the business process and hire the people to create a real product. I'm sure this kind of thing happens elsewhere as well.

At that source of all kindly goodness (pun intended), we talked about things like "scaling" and "drinking from the fire hose". We did not have the time or the people to screw around with fiddly things that only a few people would be interested in. When I started working there, Our Fearless Leader had already been posting birthday greetings in the New York Times as a way to get our name out for cheap. When the NYT turned around and did a story on us, I started a pool on how many orders we would get that day. It was a matter of weeks later that we were getting that (truly amazingly outstandingly huge at the time) number of orders hourly.

So when people complain about the company having problems meeting demand on the kindle, I laugh at them. When those people expect somehow that demand will be met better with kindle 2, I laugh harder.

Fire hose.

O'Reilly, for all his narcissism and his tired and worn out information wants to be free (to be fair -- he didn't say that), recognizes the value of being on the kindle platform. Which is good. You don't want the IT folk to be slower on the uptake than Harlequin. That's just embarrassing. But for all study of the commentary in the gadget press and out of it on the subject of whether the kindle is a good thing, a bad thing, too expensive, lacking in features or whatever, I am failing to see some really important commentary.

And for my more recent obsession with the netbook, I'm seeing some of the same. It is, in fact, the _same_ missing commentary.

What are people doing with these products?

Carrying them around and looking at the screens for long periods of time, and getting pissed off when the screen dies due to lack of batteries. Also, getting pissed off when they are out of coverage. They also get somewhat annoyed at the usability of the buttons.

There are a variety of ways to tackle the battery problem, which I think is key. The kindle actually handles this pretty well, by dint of eInk's low power usage, but that will not solve the netbook problem. The netbook folk are having more trouble, largely because they keeping shoving normal OS's and more or less normal desktops onto a tiny device that can't really handle it for people who I suspect don't really need it.

There are some netbooks coming out that offer up a cell-phone like iconic display, instead of a desktop. The HP Mobile MI line is one. Some of these are built on top of Linux. Some of these are built on top of Windows. People are talking about building netbooks on top of Android. And shortly, if vapor ware is to be believed, there will be netbooks built on ARM.

That's why I call it a scrum. So far, it's been a face-off between Linux (light weight, but then you have to deal with IT folk and they are not friendly to ordinary customers, largely because there are too many of them and they don't have the patience or the support structures) and Windows (not light weight, really a piece of crap and they're having trouble getting enough money out of the product due to the low price point). If OpenOffice weren't such a dog, Linux would have won. Google has a real shot, but their Google Docs is not ready for prime time (you should have heard me screaming at the upload feature last night; I _really_ wanted to just yank everything off the laptop onto Google Docs so it would be available everywhere; it so was not possible). They'll win whatever the platform, tho.

ARM, however, is a cell phone OS. If Palm had its act together, it would be putting their new OS on netbooks (hey, maybe they do -- got any rumors?). I used to travel with a Treo and a folding keyboard. A 10 inch color display would be freakishly luxuriant by comparison. My word processor was the Memo feature. And I kept a decent sized travel journal with that set up. These days, I really would demand cellular data and a multi-tasking OS, but I _know_ Palm can put that out.

RHI, we'll see an ARM based netbook for $200 by the end of the year.

Scrum.

Yum.