What am I to believe, and what will it mean, in the long run, even after the “glitch” has been fixed? Am I simply being paranoid? Is mine simply the blanket distate-for-Amazon of an independent bookseller? Maybe. I’ve learned a lot about the book world since signing up.But I digress.I was by turns upset and confused by the Amazon story (known on Twitter as #amazonfail) and I still am. Most of the people I know on Twitter are other writers, or editors, critics, or publishers. And it’s that, certainly, but it’s also an incredible way to spread information and start a dialogue. People love to argue that Twitter is a time-wasting site for people to announce what they’re doing: They’re doing their taxes, or they’re drinking the best beer ever, man, or they’re on the toilet.

I learned about the Amazon de-ranking debacle on Twitter (follow me y’all). Actually, maybe I will get an iPod after all. I don’t own an iPod and probably won’t get one any time soon, nor can I imagine myself ever being a serious consumer of ebooks, but I still think it would be cool to see kids (and adults) walking around reading books on their iPods. Apple already has a distribution system in place, iTunes, that lots of folks are already comfortable using.Īnyway, I’d love to hear thoughts anyone might have on this.Obviously that would no longer be an issue. One of the problems with eBooks is that nobody owns the devices to read them.The iPod association would up the cool-factor for books big time. The marriage of the book and the iPod would launch old-fashioned books into the twenty-first century.By offering books through iTunes, publishers would suddenly be able to put their books in front of young readers who perhaps never go to book stores.

Some thoughts (sorry, but I’m thinking in bullet points today): The iPod, however, as it has in other realms, would change the rules. In earlier posts ( here, here, and here) about various incarnations of eBooks, I’ve talked about how useful they might be for textbooks and technical books but also how challenging it might be to get customers to embrace them. What interests me in particular is that this offering would differ from previous eBooks that I’ve talked about. Now, I know from previous posts on the topic of eBooks, that this news will likely make many readers of The Millions say that they will never read books this way and that they would miss the look and feel that books offer, but I’m curious as to whether this effort would take off amongst the less-discerning broader public. It’s no e-ink, sure, but a widescreen iPod would be well suited for the purpose, and according to our source, the books you’d buy (presumably through iTunes) won’t have an expiration - kind of like Apple-bought music

Some further details:Ī separate trusted source let us know that the next iPod will have a substantial amount of screen real estate (as we’d all suspected), as well as a book reading mode that pumps up the contrast and drops into monochrome for easy reading. (There’s a mocked-up image of what it might look like in the post linked above.) When turned horizontally, the iPod would allow for a screen four inches wide and almost two and a half inches high, not a lot of real estate, but then again, people watch movies on video iPod screens even smaller than that. How would this work? Well, it wouldn’t work on current iPods, but speculation is rampant that the next generation of iPods, likely out in time for the holiday season, will have a much larger screen, one that takes up the entire face of the device. Today, the Publishers Lunch newsletter pointed to a post at Engadget indicating that Apple might make eBooks available through its iTunes Music Store.

Elliott smith either or ipod