By Jeremy Greenfield, Editorial Director, Digital Book World, @JDGreenGrass

Amazon has decided to ship its hotly anticipated (sorry, couldn’t resist) Kindle Fire tablet a day early, but will consumers like what they get when that familiar brown box appears on their doorsteps 24-hours earlier than anticipated?

PC World called the device “revolutionary” and reviewer Sascha Segan ooh-ed and aah-ed its “amazing specs for just $199.” The Chicago Sun-Times calls the Kindle a “killer device” that won’t “kill” the iPad and reviewer Andy Ihnatko notes “the Fire slips into many pockets and will set you back just $199.” And MSNBC’s TECHNOLOG blog review is simply headlined, “Kindle Fire review: Yes, it’s that good” and reviewer Wilson Rothman notes that much of the “overall potency” of the Fire “comes from that $199 price tag.”

See a pattern?

While many of today’s reviews focus more on the specs than the price (as opposed to many early, September reviews where price dominated headlines), price still seems to be a big factor in giving the thumbs up to the new tech toy.

That said, consumer reviews be damned! You know who likes the Fire? Developers.

According to a new survey out today, developers are nearly as interested in developing for the Kindle Fire as they were in the iPad before its initial launch in April 2010.

The survey of 2,160 developers was conducted in early November by Appcelerator, a Mountain View, Calif.-based mobile development platform, and IDC, a Framingham, Ma.-based market research firm. About 49% of developers said they were interested in developing on the platform; in a similar survey from 2010, 53% of developers said they were interested in working on the iPad platform before it came out. Let’s see, though, how that number changes as the Fire hits store shelves; currently, 88% of developers are interested in working on the iPad platform. (More on this here.)

In other Kindle Day news, the device is set to ship a day early, according to a statement from the company. Originally set to leave warehouses tomorrow (November 15), the Fire will now hit the road today for those who ordered it off Amazon.com. PaidContent has the call out to Amazon on if the Fire will also be available at bricks-and-mortar retailers early, too.

Is this move a subtle dig at the Kobo Vox? There were grumblings on Twitter and elsewhere that the Vox, aggressively set to ship by the Toronto-based e-reader company two weeks before the Fire, was not reaching customers on time. More likely, Amazon and its well-oiled logistics machine under-promised and over-delivered.

Oh, and in case you’re interested in a more traditional offering from Amazon, the company also announced today that its Kindle Touch and Kindle Touch 3G e-readers will ship tomorrow, six days ahead of schedule.

Write to Jeremy Greenfield

In April I wrote about my first impressions of the newly released Apple iPad. At that time tablet computing, although not new, was getting a major boost as a widely accepted computing platform. Since then, many tablet and eReader devices have come and gone, some never having seen the light of day (remember the Skiff, Que and Courier?).

In a nod to the success of the iPad, each new tablet has been rated on whether it is the “iPad killer.” Thus far, none have been. However, Samsung’s new Galaxy Tab (aka “Tab”) might be the first able to go head-to-head with the iPad.

Disclaimer: I’m a gadget head, a content technologist, and solutions architect for an eBook and app production company. I am a fan of the Android operating system. I owned a G1 Android phone (which I gained system level access to and subsequently made several modifications on), and love my Samsung Vibrant Android phone. So I was intrigued to hear about Samsung’s impending tablet and was waiting at my local T-Mobile store the day of the Tab’s release. After the excitement of playing with my new gadget subsided, I was most interested to understand how this tablet would impact publishers’ move to mobile.

Just as younger children are compared to their older siblings, it seems inevitable that the Tab will be measured based on the high bar set by the iPad. However, there are many ways in which the Tab distinguishes itself from the current market leader.

Size

At almost exactly half the size and weight of the iPad, the Tab is smaller and more portable. It really does fit in your jeans pocket or a purse. It’s easy to hold in one hand for long periods of time without any strain. It is slightly smaller than the Kindle 2 and Nook, even though it has a larger screen (7 inches vs. 6 inches).

Even with its smaller size it boasts a color screen resolution of 1024×600, compared to 1024×768 on the iPad. Packing this many pixels into a smaller screen makes for some truly vibrant colors. The viewing areas are somewhat different at 3.5 inches by 6 inches (1.71 aspect ratio) for the Tab and just under 6 inches by 8 inches (1.33 aspect ratio) for the iPad. More on the importance of the aspect ratios later.

Performance/Durability

The Tab’s processor handles all of the apps I tested with little hesitation. No complaints. But most notably, the Tab is capable of handling true multitasking (native to the Android OS). Apple’s upcoming iPad iOS 4.2 release is expected to include limited multitasking − only for certain tasks such as messaging and music playback. Other types of processes are simply pushed to the background where they’re held in a sleep state until reactivated.

Another Tab differentiator is its desktop user interface. The Tab, like most Android devices, provides the ability to include widgets on the device’s desktop, whereas Apple’s iOS limits the user to app icons and folders, since no real multitasking is supported.

The Tab has a very solid feel. The screen is made from a scratch-resistant Gorilla glass which can take more of a beating than the iPad’s glass. There is a video on YouTube showing a CO2-powered gas BB gun shooting at the screen, from around a foot away, and not leaving a mark on the screen. I have dropped my Tab a couple times with no damage. In fact, I even banged it on our kitchen counter just to see my kids’ reactions − with no visible impact (to the device).

I wouldn’t try that with my iPad.

A/V

The Tab’s video is a little better than the iPad, and the audio essentially the same. The Tab’s default media app, “Media Hub,” allows the user to buy or rent movies and TV shows. The aspect ratio of the Tab allows the video app to use more of the screen in widescreen videos than the iPad. But Media Hub has nowhere near the variety and breadth that iTunes offers. The Tab’s screen is just as reflective as the iPad’s, so is also difficult to view in sunlight.

Keyboard

While the onscreen keyboard is functional, I didn’t type this article on it, as I did with the iPad. In portrait mode, thumb typing works well, even with big thumbs. In landscape mode, some of the letters in the middle are a bit of a stretch, and the keys are too small to really try anything like “regular” typing. The Tab also includes “Swype” software which allows you to move from key to key without lifting your finger. It works well on Samsung’s mobile phone, but for me, the extra screen space on the Tab made it feel a bit more cumbersome. It took some practice for it to feel as natural as on the phone.

Bells and Whistles

Where the Tab really sets itself apart is with the inclusion of two cameras, a phone (in some regions), Adobe Flash, and expandable memory. There is a regular 3.2MP camera for shooting photos and videos, and a 1.3MP front facing camera for video chats. Memory can be expanded using microSD cards up to 32GB. A user with multiple cards can exchange the cards to load books, movies, songs, photos, etc.

US mobile carriers have deactivated the phone capability, but users in other parts of the world can place phone calls with their Tab. US users can only place calls with apps like Skype or Fring.

The Froyo version of the Android OS also embeds Adobe Flash Player 10.1. This allows most Flash-based websites to be viewable on the Tab, rather than showing the blue puzzle piece like on the iPad. Some notable Flash websites, like Hulu, have opted to block mobile users from accessing their content, choosing instead to sell $10/month subscriptions to content that PC/Mac users can view for free. Some Flash game sites like Farmville don’t seem to work, while sites that are mostly Flash videos, like CNET, work well.

One might imagine that some of the commonalities between the Tab and iPhone 4, namely the dual cameras and enhanced screen, will show up on the new iPad rumored for this Spring. Though, as explicit as Steve Jobs has been with his opinions, I’m not holding my breath for a smaller iPad with Flash any time soon. But having a strong competitor will hopefully force Apple to continue to innovate and update iOS and the iPad itself.

Like the iPad, the Tab is primarily a device for consuming content and media as opposed to creating it. Though, its added ability to ‘create’ using the dual cameras and video functionality, gives it an edge over its rival.

App Availability

The Tab has full access to the Android Market (Google’s answer to Apple’s App Store), something most other Android tablets and non-phone devices do not. Even so, the number of apps available (approx 160,000) is far less than the App Store (approx 300,000). It should be noted that as of August 2010, around 60% of the Android apps are free, whereas only 26% are free in the iPad’s App Store. Whether these extra freebies are worthwhile is in the eye of the downloader.

For business users, the Tab includes the ThinkFree Office suite which includes word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation viewing and editing capabilities, in addition to PDF viewing. The Android email app also allows access to POP, IMAP, and Exchange servers, in addition the Gmail app.

App Development

The ecosystems around app development on the two platforms are very different. On iPad and iPhone the control is maintained in a closed environment by Apple, who limits what is made available. The Android environment is considerably more open. Other device manufacturers can take the Android base and modify/customize it as they see fit. This is both a blessing and a curse.

There are many releases of the Android OS (1.5, 1.6, 2.0, 2.1, 2.2, and soon 2.3) on current devices, and probably several versions of each release. This makes Android app development more challenging. Because not all Android apps are compatible with all Android releases, the Android Market allows developers to specify which release an app can run on and then limits downloads to only compatible devices. Also, while Google recently stated that the current Android 2.2 version (aka Froyo) release, on which the Tab is based, isn’t optimized for tablets, Samsung has done a very good job making Froyo work well on a tablet platform. It will also be interesting to see if tablet-only Android apps begin to appear, like the iPad specific apps in the App Store. At this point, I am not sure that the Android Market has a way to differentiate apps in this manner.

An example of where the openness of Android has been a curse is in the development of the Netflix app for Android. Movie studios are balking at allowing Netflix to distribute movies in an Android environment over concerns of users being able to hack the app code and gain access to the video files and possibly redistribute them illegally.

App development in Android is very different compared to app development for Apple’s iOS. The core programming language in Android is Java. While several apps are available for both iOS and Android, chances are that the underlying code is completely different. Publishers considering developing apps for both platforms must be smart about how the apps are developed.

I would recommend that a core engine scheme be used. In this scheme, the processing portions of the app are custom developed for each platform, but the content is kept as a separate interchangeable layer which can be used as input to the different processing layers. This scheme also benefits app development on the same platform where the cost to develop a single engine can be spread across several apps.

For example a question/answer type app might consist of an engine that handles the user interface, flow control, and score keeping for the quiz, but different sets of questions can be applied to the engine to create several different apps.

eBooks

One of the most anticipated uses of the iPad was as an eBook reader. The iBooks app has consistently been one of the most downloaded apps for the iPhone and iPad. Prior to the Tab’s release, Samsung’s promotional videos showed an app called the “Readers Hub,” which appears to be an integrated front-end to: the Kobo eBook reader, the PressDisplay newspaper reader, and the Zinio magazine reader. The app appears to provide the basis for reading on the Tab.

However, it hasn’t been released on Tabs anywhere in the world, which I find curious.

The “Kindle for Android” app is pre-installed on the Tab and allows full access to your Kindle library and reading history (like all the other Kindle apps), but cannot display dual pages in landscape, or access video or audio enhancements like those found in the Kindle AV titles. The iBooks app, and later the Kindle app for iPad, took advantage of the iPad’s lower aspect ratio to allow users to view the device in landscape and to view eBooks as two pages rather than one. However, the Tab’s increased aspect ratio might be useful in showing dual-page magazine and newspaper displays because they don’t typically impose page borders.

In addition to the Kindle app, there are also Android versions of the EPUB-based eReader apps from Barnes & Noble and Kobo that work just like the iPad versions. There are also several free eReader apps available from the Android Market such as Aldiko, Laputa, Wordoholic and FBreader. A common thread with all of the free apps is the ability to read non-DRM EPUB files. Most will allow you to download books from sites such as Project Gutenberg and Feedbooks, and many include the animated page flip made popular by iBooks.

A major downside that I discovered when using my test set EPUB file in the Tab’s various reader apps, is that none of them support the HTML5 audio and video elements that enable multimedia in eBooks on iBooks and Kindle for the iPad. While the use of HTML5 is technically invalid, iBooks has opened the door to its use and many publishers are beginning to develop enhanced eBooks with HTML5 elements. Also, next Spring’s update to the EPUB standard should incorporate these elements. To me, it seems prudent to begin adding these capabilities to the eReader programs now in order to better compete with iBooks and iPad…which brings me to another difference between the iPad and the Tab.

The iPad has iBooks which enable highlighting and take full advantage of the iPad’s functionality. The Tab doesn’t currently have a comparable flagship eReader app. Perhaps the Readers Hub will fill that void, but I have not able to find any announcements about its planned availability.

So, is the Tab the iPad Killer?

Probably not…yet. At least not for publishers. It is, however, a very serious contender in the tablet market and the first Android-based tablet to really give the iPad a run for its money. This means that publishers have yet another platform that they need to pay attention to.

The good news is that Kindle eBooks and EPUBs that have been created will work in the Android versions of the eReader apps. The not-so-good news is that, at this time, there doesn’t seem to be an eReader app that supports audio and video within the eBook files. However, I have little doubt that such capabilities will come sooner rather than later due to two factors: the Android development community and the upcoming additions in EPUB3.

Publishers looking to develop apps across platforms would be wise to plan the development to reuse as much content as possible while developing core engines that take advantage of each platform’s native capabilities.

The app environment is still somewhat volatile in the iOS arena, even after nearly seven months following the iPad release. I would expect that volatility to continue to a lesser degree as the device changes/matures. I would also expect continued volatility in the Android development space as Google continues to release updates to Android, including v2.3 (aka Gingerbread) which Google claims will work much better on tablet devices.

Bottom line − the Tab will usher in the Apple iOS/Google Android war into the tablet space. Android has been able to seriously challenge Apple in the mobile phone world through sheer numbers of devices supporting the operating system, and I expect the same will happen with tablets. With some maturity in the new Tab’s ecosystem and the Android OS, I expect later versions will legitimately fight the iPad for market share. So at this point, it’s “Game On!”

ADDENDUM: How Does the Tab Differ from Other Android Tablets/eReaders?

The Tab is not the first tablet/eReader based on the Android operating system (OS). The dual screen Entourage Edge and the Barnes & Noble Nook are Android-based, as are the Trend Micro Cruz tablets being sold by Borders. Yet the Tab is the first Android tablet to garner significant media attention.

There are several reasons why:

• It’s fully Google approved, meaning it has full access to the Android Market (Google’s answer to Apple’s App Store); something no other Android tablets/eReaders can claim.
• In some markets, the device also includes a phone. Though none of the US carriers have opted to enable this functionality, the Android hacking community claims to have enabled its phone capabilities.
• The Tab is available through all of the big 4 US mobile carriers, and sold by a wide range of retailers, unlike the iPad and other competing devices which were initially only available from a single carrier and outlet (AT&T and Apple).

Eric Freese is a Solutions Architect with Aptara, which provides digital publishing solutions that deliver significant gains in quality, time-to-market and production costs for eBook publishers.

By DJ Francis, Author, OnlineMarketerBlog.com

Charlene Li, formerly of Forrester Research and co-author of Groundswell, does with Open Leadership: How Social Technology Can Transform How You Lead what so few authors would find possible: making a convincing argument regarding a real and very powerful movement in the zeitgeist, despite it being inherently fuzzy to understand and difficult to prove.

But just because it is difficult to determine ROI, does not mean the elements of open leadership are not effective. From Li:

“In actuality, the activities taking place on [social sites] are inherently highly measurable, but we have not yet established a body of accepted knowledge and experience about the value of these activities versus the costs and risks of achieving those benefits.” (page 77)

The Value of Ethics

And not only is this leadership style actionable and (somewhat) measurable, but it also serves as a venue for your personal values. My favorite aspect of this book is the relation of an open leadership style to the leader’s own ethics.

Li writes in great detail about trust building, personal values and humility. Social technologies and open leadership simply allows broader activation of the leader’s (your) personal values.

When she speaks of humility, Li notes that open leaders accept “that their views…may need to shift because of what their curious explorations expose.” (page 169) She quotes Ron Ricci, Cisco’s VP of corporate positioning, as saying “Shared goals require trust. Trust requires behavior. And guess what technology does? It exposes behavior.” (page 198)

You begin to understand that Li isn’t railing against command-and-control operations nor does she dive off into kumbaya territory. But she does convince the reader that a world of ubiquitous social technologies, business transparency, and digital communication will require a different kind of leadership.

Open Leadership Isn’t Trying To Be The New Groundswell

As a huge fan of Li’s previous book, Groundswell, I couldn’t wait for Open Leadership. But they really are two different animals.

I found myself wishing there was more about the inevitability of openness. That – along with KPIs and a few other fundamentals – are given short shrift. Maybe there’s not a lot to say. Maybe not many studies have been done.

But unlike Groundswell, which was data-driven and highly intuitive, Open Leadership doesn’t provide enough ammo for younger leaders to march these ideas into the C-suite.

In order for these ideas to be enacted, one likely must already be in some position of leadership. While Groundswell provided the facts and figures for anyone to persuade doubters, Open Leadership does not. It’s an idea book, not a textbook. That’s OK – just something to know before you begin reading.

Buy The Book

Overall, I wholeheartedly recommend Open Leadership. It’s innovative, smart, and unlike any book you’ve read before. All that and it’s highly convincing as well. Do yourself (and your employees) a favor and read this book.

[I received a free advance reading copy of this book from Jossey-Bass publishers, but that did not influence my review of the book. I profoundly apologize to Ms. Li for a stunningly late review of the book she kindly sent me. Better late than never, I hope.]

This article was originally published at OnlineMarketerBlog.com, and has been reprinted with Mr. Francis’ permission.

DJ Francis writes OnlineMarketerBlog, a business blog about content strategy, online marketing, and social media. He also serves as a Senior Content Strategist at Critical Mass, Chicago.

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By Guy LeCharles Gonzalez, Chief Executive Optimist, Digital Book World

It’s been two weeks since Steve Jobs’ “magical and revolutionary” device officially went from fascinating Rorschach test to tangible consumer appliance, and while some of the hype around it being the savior of book, magazine and newspaper publishing has thankfully died down, there’s no debating that Apple’s App Store has had a significant impact on how we value and consume digital content.

That impact will likely increase with the introduction of the iPad, and it’s especially noteworthy for publishers who are looking to iBooks and the “agency model” to counter Amazon’s pegging $9.99 as the benchmark for eBooks. Savvy publishers are not putting all of their eggs in one basket, though, embracing the Smart Mantra of “Fail Better, Cheaper, Faster” by experimenting with a variety of other initiatives, including mobile apps and enhanced eBooks.

I’ve been using the 16GB WiFi iPad model for two weeks now, testing a variety of free and paid apps, and have come to the conclusion that it’s a very nice, expensive accessory with some compelling features (and even a few benefits), none of which favor the static eBooks offered via iBooks, Kindle or any other traditional eBook retailer, especially not at prices of $9.99 and higher.

Value is subjective, and I suspect publishers who saw iBooks as a way to push back against Amazon’s dominance of the eBook market and $9.99 may look back with a bit of regret as consumers weigh their options in the app store and see what else $9.99 can get them.

I noted this issue last week in The iPad, Transmedia, and the Future of Publishers:

Why pay $9.99+ for a single eBook, when there are far more compelling apps available for much less money, all based on familiar brands, that take full advantage of the $500+ investment in the device? At $9.99, eBooks are competing with everything from Netflix, which allows you to stream unlimited movies for $8.99/month, to well-known games like Scrabble, Need for Speed, Command and Conquer, and Civilization Revolution, all of which are $9.99 – $14.99.

I’ve spent 10+ hours overcoming evil in Dungeon Hunter HD ($6.99), and have stolen 15 minutes here and there to play Harbor Master HD and Battle of the Block (both FREE); caught up on the first five episodes of “Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution” via the ABC app (FREE); skimmed the news via the USA Today app (FREE); listened to music and news on radio stations from all over the country via the NPR and Radio.com apps (both FREE); surfed the web using Safari (FREE), and used Gmail to send myself the screenshots in this article (FREE).

I’ve already deleted the free IDW Comics, Marvel, NYT Editor’s Choice, Vook and Zinio apps thanks to limited appeal, functionality or both, and while I haven’t deleted them yet, I’ve not given the iBooks, Kindle or Kobo apps a second glance since testing them out on the first day.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be spotlighting specific apps that I think show off the iPad’s features and benefits in unique ways, and offer publishers some ideas on what “eBooks” might offer in an increasingly transmedia digital book world.

First up…

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ComiXology (FREE): Comics are a visual medium and I’ve always thought they had the most to gain from digitization. When the Kindle first came out I suggested a Marvel Essentials-branded collector’s edition (or any of the major manga franchises) would be a smart move, timed for the holidays and targeted to avid collectors used to spending a lot of money on comics, while taking full advantage of the source material already being in black-and-white.

ComiXology’s excellent iPad app is an impressive step towards, and well beyond, that idea, offering a solid inventory of comics from a variety of publishers (including all of those found in Marvel’s app, which they also developed), at prices ranging from free to $1.99/issue. You can browse by Series, Genre, Creator, Publisher and Storylines/Arcs, or by Featured, New, Popular and Free. They’re currently featuring the 8-issue mini-series Kick-Ass (source of the action-comedy movie that opened this past weekend), selling each for $1.99, while the Hardcover collection of those issues has a $24.99 cover price, and the trade paperback and individual issues areout-of-print and only available on the back-issue market.

[NOTE: According to ComiXology, all 8 issues are among their top in-app purchases. That's a nice complement to the 100,000 copies of the Hardcover Marvel reportedly sold.]

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Where ComiXology one-ups all other ereader apps is with its “Guided View” and letterboxing presentation, playing to comics’ cinematic DNA by offering a panel-by-panel view and smooth animated transitions that goes beyond static ePub and animated page turns. Instead of simulating the look and feel of print (which is an option), they went a step further and built an app that leverages the iPad’s strengths while also meeting user’s expectations.

If they can come up with a subscription model (pull list) and time releases to coincide AT LEAST with the collected editions, if not with the individual issues themselves, ComiXology could be the killer app for digital comics than enables independent publishers to effectively compete with Marvel and DC.

Seeing how their iPhone app syncs with their website — including social networking and the ability to transmit pull lists to local comics shops — suggests there’s a lot more to come from ComiXology on the iPad, and a lot more opportunities for publishers to explore beyond being locked in to of Amazon and Apple’s closed ecosystems.

Guy LeCharles Gonzalez is the Chief Executive Optimist for Digital Book World, and also a longtime fan of comic books.

First of all, a disclaimer:  While I did own the only Apple ][ in my college dorm—and wish I’d bought Apple stock when it was $40 and my financial adviser didn't think it would go much higher—I am not an Apple fanboy.  Only recently did I cash in airline miles for an iPod Touch so I could hone my eReading skills (and of course, score cool points with my kids), so don't expect a gushing "this is going to change the world" review.

My iPad arrived bright and early Saturday morning.  I was running errands so it languished in its box for several extra hours after its trip from China.  Once home, the unboxing was quite the attraction as my kids crowded around me begging for the opportunity to use it first.  Fortunately, Dad wins in these situations, so I went about downloading free apps, books and songs to give it a good test drive.  I work for an eBook production company, so I was particularly interested in the device’s eReader capabilities (which I'll get to shortly).

For starters, the iPad just feels good in your hands.

At 1.5 pounds, it’s light enough to carry, though I wouldn’t want to hold it out in front of me for long periods of time.  Steve Jobs was spot-on in describing it as "beautiful" in a geeky sort of way; I felt like Captain Picard on the bridge of the Enterprise as I walked about the house.  The screen is crisp and clear, and the iPad-specific apps look terrific on the large screen.  Most of the iPhone apps look pretty good as well, though some lose their clarity when expanded to fill the larger screen.

I downloaded the iBook app, as well as a set of books my company uses to demo eReader units; they all loaded as expected.  The screen brightness automatically adjusts based on ambient light conditions, so the reading experience was fairly good sitting in my living room and downstairs in my office (aka man cave).  Output brightness can be adjusted, which is ideal if you have a bed partner who is as sensitive to light at night as mine is.  But outdoors was a different story, as predicted.

The glare and reflections from the highly reflective glass made it very difficult to see the screen on a sunny day.

The iPad’s book reading experience is very similar to most other eReader devices; ePUB-based files displayed as expected.  In portrait mode, you see a single page at a time.  In landscape mode, you see two pages in an “open book” layout, though it doesn’t equate to twice as much text.  The animated page turn is a nice, but unnecessary, feature for a truer book-like experience.  The table of contents and book scroller make navigating within an eBook simple.

My most disappointing iPad experience occurred with perhaps its most highly anticipated feature – a component of its enhanced eBook capability.  When I clicked on a web link in my eBook, a message popped up asking me if I “want to leave iBooks and open this link?"  Well no, I didn't, but apparently I didn't have a choice.

When I clicked the link (to another eBook file) the browser then asked me if I would like to open the file—IN STANZA!!!

Because the iBook app depends on iTunes to manage its content, simple access to other eBooks is not feasible.  This clumsy and unexpected user interface is possibly a significant downfall in the iPad’s support for interactivity. Web links are frequently mentioned as a class of enhancements; having to acknowledge leaving a book every time a link is selected gets tiresome fast.

In an effort to run the device through all of its eReader paces, I downloaded the New York Times Editors Choice and USA Today apps.  Not surprisingly, the iPad’s large, high-quality screen provided a very good newspaper reading experience—including ads, which might provide a new revenue stream for the struggling newspaper industry.  Whether it’s enough to save newspapers is another story.

Next I downloaded Hachette’s Twilight graphic novel.  (When did they cease being called comic books?) I was impressed with how slick it looked and worked. Many predict that the iPad will increase graphic novel sales; I look forward to following the reality, since as a kid, one of the coolest things about comic books was trading them with my buddies.

I downloaded the Kindle app for the iPad and browsed through some sample books.  It felt very similar to reading on a Kindle device, except navigation through the book was done using screen swipes rather than pushing buttons (and doesn’t include the page turn animation that is in the iBook app).  However, to download previously purchased Kindle books, browse the Kindle store and make purchases, the app opens the browser to the Amazon site.  Assuming you have a Kindle account, you can direct the site to download your content to the iPad app.

Next to its screen size and capacity, herein is perhaps the biggest benefit of the iPad as an eReading device − its ability to purchase and download eBooks from any retailer (assuming Barnes and Noble releases their app soon).

This might actually drive prices down since the iPad enables direct head-to-head competition between eBook retailers.

Many suspected that Apple would block apps from Amazon and Barnes and Noble, abiding by their rule of not duplicating core functionality on Apple devices.  But when they announced that the iBooks app would not come preinstalled on the iPad, they opened the door to other apps.   The device’s interoperability with other eReader stores suggests that the iPad could replace the PC, and all other single function eReaders, as the dominant reading platform.

There is a notable difference in presentation between eBooks sold as apps and those sold through the iBookstore as EPUB-formatted books; the former are simply stunning.  I downloaded the Grimm's Fairy Tales app from Vook and the Disney Toy Story app.  Although I'm not sure what the videos contributed to the stories in the Vook app, it was interesting how video could be included in-line with the text of the story.

In the Disney app, however, I was simply amazed at the graphics and use of different layers within the images to produce an almost 3D effect.  My youngest child (8 years old) got the privilege of playing with the book/app; she loved being able to turn off the read-along feature, sing along with the songs from the movies, and color scenes from the book.

Since the iPad was announced, I’ve been wondering how practical it would be for activities other than reading.  Turns out it’s very handy for visiting websites or checking email from anywhere.  With seven children, our Sunday evening ritual is reviewing the upcoming week’s activities calendar against the family’s schedule.  The iPad’s large touch screen made it quick and easy to review the school’s website while standing in the kitchen and relaying calendar updates to my wife.

The iPad has been touted as a great media player for music and videos. The music player was indeed as good as the iPod (no surprise).  I checked out ABC’s app for viewing their TV line-up and the on-screen videos looked great.

I purchased the “Pages” word processing app and am writing this very article on my iPad.  While I’m not the world's fastest typist and by no means a touch typist, I’m pleased to report that I had few problems.  Landscape mode makes the keyboard roomier and learning the software was quite simple. The only challenge was keeping lazy fingers from accidentally resting on the screen-based keyboard, something I expect repetitive muscle memory to solve.

One of the biggest advance criticisms of the iPad was its inability to multitask.  Case in point: the iBook/browser experience.  I was able to listen to music while reading a book and typing this, but there was no way to control the player.  You must exit the eBook app in order to control the iPod app.  It’s understandable that the device is more responsive with this sort of restriction, but in this day and age, it’s a surprising omission.

I can do it on my Android phone (hint, hint).

UPDATE: Just learned that you can control the iPod app while running other apps by hitting the Home button twice to bring up the iPod controls

Another major criticism of the iPad is its lack of Flash support.  As such, many websites have been rebuilt or specially-built to reduce or eliminate the dependence on Flash; eg: NPR set up a site for the iPad that works and looks great on the device.   If after this weekend’s first wave, iPad sales continue to climb, I expect we’ll see many other websites following suit.

My top three iPad takeaways after 36 hours are:

1) Its ability to access any eBook from any vendor who provides an app.

2) The added innovation and excitement to the publishing world that it has ushered in, including stunning new multi-media possibilities.

3) Mine won't be showing up on eBay any time soon.

Am I dumping my desktop machine for it?  No (and not just because I need something to run iTunes on).

Will I travel sans laptop with just my Blackberry and iPad?  Maybe.

Will it save the publishing industry?  Doubtful. Though, I expect it will be a much needed booster shot for the healthy and nimble publishers. But for publishers that aren’t already preparing for electronic content distribution, a single device or platform is not going to be a magic bullet.

Is it the new eTextbook?  Maybe.  I’ve already heard it reported that some colleges are planning to issue students iPads with eBooks pre-loaded, in place of printed textbooks.

Does the iPad represent the death of the Kindle, Amazon, the Nook, Barnes & Noble or [insert device or retailer here]?  I don’t think so.  At this stage, the market is still taking shape; these devices and retailers still have sandboxes to play in, either as less-expensive alternatives to the iPad, or less-expensive sources of materials for their particular device.

Will the iPad be the “world changer” so many have predicted?  It’s the first step in a good direction.

Eric Freese is a Solutions Architect with Aptara, which provides digital publishing solutions that deliver significant gains in quality, time-to-market and production costs for eBook publishers.

You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto
by Jaron Lanier (Alfred A. Knopf, 2010; ISBN 978-0-307-26964-5)

Let’s just get this out of the way: I really like this book. This book changed the way I think about the Internet and intellectual property, and I think could change a lot of minds, but only if a critical mass of people start reading it and talking about it. So this is my Queen’s Gambit.

There are too many ideas in this book that I underlined and starred and ?ed and yes!ed to count. I’m just going to touch on a few, and especially the ones that made me think of books and publishing.

Probably the most interesting idea in this book, especially for the book world, is how the Internet’s push towards the hive mind (also known as the noosphere, a word so creepy that I almost become a Luddite every time I read it) has already damaged and threatens to essentially destroy art as we now experience it.

As Lanier puts it:

“The central mistake of recent digital culture is to chop up a network of individuals so finely that you end up with a mush.”

A thing, I’m sure we can all agree, that is not great for writing, which pretty much lives and dies by things like the strength and believability of an author’s individual voice.

“Authorship—the very idea from the individual point of view—is not a priority of the new ideology.”

Which is pretty well borne out by a quick glance at Wikipedia (an entity to which I am not opposed, by the way). The argument on behalf of the hive mind is that many many people working together will come up with a better answer, and faster, than individuals working alone. Lanier pretty conclusively demonstrates that this is not always the case, even for things to which humanity already knows the answer.

And what about novels, of which there is no clear question, let alone a clear answer?

Most interestingly, Lanier talks about how hive mind thinking has interacted with advertising to create an entirely new hierarchy of creativity on the web.

“The combination of hive mind and advertising has resulted in a new kind of social contract. The basic idea of this contract is that authors, journalists, musicians, and artists are encouraged to treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind. Reciprocity takes the form of self-promotion. Culture is to become precisely nothing but advertising.”

In other words, we’ve decided, or been persuaded to decide, that original content is not worth paying for, very often with the justification that the corporations that mainly provide that content are dinosaurs who can’t keep up with technology or don’t distribute the money fairly anyway (both of which are valid points, sometimes). Ironically, though, we’ve also elevated the only artistic output of non-media corporations, advertising, to a sainted level. We expect ads on websites, blogs, nytimes.com and Pandora to pay for our content instead.

Eyeballs on content: worth less and less with every $9.99 e-book.

Eyeballs on banner ads: expected to prop up an entire Internet’s worth of information commerce.

This is something I wonder about constantly. Writing has never been a reliable way of making a living, as anybody who reads biographies will tell you. But there has always been the (somewhat) rational expectation that if you wrote something good enough that other people would enjoy reading it, or be enriched by it, somebody would eventually pay you for it. Very few people have ever gotten rich as writers, but many people have eked out a living.

The (d)evolution towards hive mind thinking and writing makes that more impossible with each passing day.

“This trajectory begs the question of how a person who is volunteering for the hive all day long will earn rent money.”

(As an aside, this is not just important to booksellers because we sell the fruits of creativity, although that’s not to be ignored. But also because what we do is something that has been increasingly crowdsourced, via Amazon’s odd algorithms and reviews, and a million other ways besides, including my willingness to share book recommendations for free on Twitter with people who have neither the willingness nor the ability to reward my professional expertise with a purchase. On my cynical days, I wonder where it all will end. Will we all be expected to work at jobs to which we’re indifferent so we can come home and do the things we love for free online? If creativity is at the heart of most careers that people love, how many of those careers will disappear as we make the group decision that creative talent is no longer something to be financially rewarded? Is this potential insanity something that can be avoided? Lanier seems to think that yes, it is. I hope he is right.)

There’s another quote in here that I think can be fairly well applied to independent bookstores, but would be interesting even if it couldn’t be. “No one’s ever been able to offer good advice for the dying newspapers,” Lanier writes, “but it is still considered appropriate to blame them for their fate.”  You could substitute publishers in there for newspapers, or independent bookstores, and the sentence reads fine.

This is not to say that newspapers and publishers and independent bookstores have all been taking advice well, certainly. Obviously, it’s not necessary for me to recount the many things that failed bookstores might have done to stay in business. But sometimes (again, on cynical days only) I wonder if even everything we’re doing at WORD, and these are all at the top of all thinking people’s bookstore advice lists, will be enough: having an online store, curating our book selection to suit our neighborhood, hosting grand events, special ordering out the wazoo, and free shipping over $50, and great customer service, and all the rest.

Can any of those things matter if creativity is no longer valued because the general belief is that the product of the group is superior to the product of the individual? I suspect they will not matter a whit if that is the case. And that is the case that Lanier worries we are heading for.

I’ll mention just one more thing that piqued my interest: the ways in which our creative culture has stalled since the prevalence of the Internet. I can’t put it better than Lanier when he writes:

“Certainly with enough time, culture will reinvent itself. But how patient should we be? I find that I am not willing to ignore a dark age…It’s as if culture froze just before it became digitally open, and all we can do now is mine the past like salvagers picking over a garbage dump.”

And it’s true that mash-ups and re-mixes have become one of the pre-eminent forms of art of late. Lanier points out that while most of the decades of the twentieth century have their own distinct musical styles, due to rapid leaps and changes in the possibilities of music over the course of the century, there’s very little that distinguishes that last ten years or so of music from the ten years previous. There’s a lot of throwbacks, a lot of retro music—and not all of it necessarily bad, and some of it quite good—but also not the overhauling quirks of imagination that propelled music forward several decades ago.

I don’t know that I agree with all the conclusions that Lanier draws from this observation, but I think it’s a very good point.

Again, it’s also echoed in the book world. For all the expansion of book technology, there’s been precious little expansion of writing formats. I’ve always wondered why the main focus of e-readers has been a fancier version of reading a .pdf one page at a time on a screen small enough to fit in my purse. Even things like the Vook seem to me like the offspring of a book and the jump scenes in a video game, to be honest. Emily Pullen at Skylight has written movingly about her desire to see the boundaries of this new medium pushed a little. Writing and storytelling themselves seem also to be at a relative standstill; “it’s all been done already” echoes off every bookstore wall and writing garret.

There are also a few things in this book that I disagree with; namely, Lanier’s characterization of (and subsequent dismissal of) social media rankles, for me.

Perhaps this is because I’ve had a uniquely good experience with social media, but I doubt I’m the only one. His main argument against its ubiquity? Its calculated personalities: we spend an absurd amount of time crafting our online personas, and there are few true friendships to be found in social media.

“A real friendship ought to introduce each person to unexpected weirdness in the other.”

It would take more than one person’s anecdotes to disprove his belief, I guess, but let me be the first to say that I have formed several true and important (and unexpectedly weird) friendships due to social media. This is partially because I experience it through the existing book community, and probably also because that community is full of fantastic people who I am predisposed to like. Nevertheless, here is a short list of people I never would have met, let alone shared booze and good times with, if not for social media spurring the whole thing: Jenn! Suzanna! Melissa! Michele! And for Pete’s sake, Josh and also Liberty, neither of whom I’ve even met in person yet, but who I would invite to my wedding if I had one tomorrow.

My friendships with these people are almost exactly like many of my real world friendships, except that we type with each other more than talk.

For those six reasons and many others, I feel that Lanier is wrong to write off social media as he does, although I understand why he does: like many of the things he talks about in the book, it’s a tool that is not always well-wielded. Which is not to say that everybody should use social media the way that I do, just that a lot of the anxieties and potential problems he sees in it are non-existent for me and I suspect a lot of other people. (Aside from the “favorite music” prompt on Facebook. I hate that section.)

This is an especially odd problem because Lanier so clearly draws a line between the capabilities of tools/means of communication and what people actually do with them elsewhere in the book, especially with his emphasis on the importance of the individual voice and authorship.  Different types of communication are best served by different forms of media, but a person can retain their individuality and sense of self in all of them if desired. Social media is still developing in that regard, but I think Lanier is too focused on the primary implementations of it.

In any event, I would recommend this book to anybody reading this review. If I were Oprah, I would pick this for my book club.

If you love technology and are excited about its future, you need to read this book, because there are a lot of things you and I haven’t thought about yet. You won’t agree with all of it, but at the end I think you will agree with me on this point: we are not hearing enough voices talking about human interaction with technology. We hear a lot of “it’s fantastico!” and a lot of “it’s an abomination!” and not much in-between.

For that alone, this book is very important.

So too, if you do not like technology, or are nervous about it, I think you should also read this book. Lanier is one of the first technophiles I’ve ever read who acknowledges and treats as valid many of the anti-tech arguments I hear on a regular basis. Primarily, I thought often of a point that Jonathon of Talking Leaves…Books made in a discussion about e-books at NAIBA in 2009. Though I didn’t agree with everything he said, I did agree when he cautioned everyone in the audience to keep an eye on who is the greatest champion of e-books, and what they have to gain from the success of e-books. (Obviously, this applies more to Amazon than Booksquare.)

This same idea—who gains from the current and coming technological changes, and what do they gain?—is a crucial underpinning of this book, and I will never regard digital advances in the same way because of it.

I’m sorry this review was so long and rambling. Scarily, it was originally twice this length! There’s just so much to talk about wrt this short little book. (On that note, though: a $23.95 hardcover for 200 pages about, you know, changing the way we look at the digital world? Wowza, would I ever have played that one differently). Anyway, one of the things I’m most excited to see in the coming months is the responses of many other people to this book and the ideas therein. I encourage all of you to get your hands on it, read it, digest it, and comment on it as well.

[This review was originally published at Bookavore.com and has been reprinted with Ms. Anderson's permission.]

Stephanie Anderson is the manager of WORD Brooklyn, in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and a “voracious reader with a certain verbal attitude”.