The Problem With Apple And eBooks

Apple Secretly Acquired “Pandora For Books” Startup BookLamp To Battle Amazon

The details are not clear yet, but the source says, “in broad strokes, the goal that [founder Aaron] Stanton and three of the folks he was working with from the original BookLamp crew is to beat Amazon at their own game.”

“I can tell you that in the next year to 18 months you will see some fairly major initiatives focused on books and reading coming out of Apple.”

Huh. And just earlier today I discussed the problem of Apple and eBooks with Baldur Bjarnason.

If Apple wants to boost sales, they have to treat books like books.

A Kindle book can be read on any damned platform — Kindle device, iOS, Android, Mac, PC.

Books bought from the Apple iBookstore are locked to Apple’s iOS and OS X hardware, period. Who wants book lock-in? No one.

Apple can think better recommendations will help, but if they want to be serious in selling books against Amazon — and with over one billion devices out there, they should — they need to liberate books from their Apple-only grasp.

And on the writer’s side of things, don’t require OS X hardware to submit to the iBookstore.

Xiaomi Caught Pirating Photos

Thanks to a tweet from Ric Day for pointing this out.

Another Xiaomi Shocker

I won’t defend their piracy. They’re a big company and can afford to pay for those images.

But did I ever think the images in the Camera Roll sample were taken by the phone? No. I figured they were stock photo placeholders. But if people think that’s a fraud, so be it. I’m not sure anyone would buy the phone based on the Camera Roll images; maybe some would, who knows?

I’m more interested in the blatant fraud of other companies laundering press material and cheating AnTuTu (and other) benchmarks.

Gene Simmons Is A Moron

KISS My Ass – Washed Up Rocker Tells The Poor To Worship His Money

You don’t remember the last poor person who gave you a job? That would be your audience at your last arena show. That would be the person who just paid $1.29 to download “I Was Made For Lovin You” on iTunes. That is the poor person who gave you a job.

All of the fortunes in entertainment are built on the foundation of customers who are poor. People who are poor need the fuel entertainment provides more than any self-absorbed one-percenter jetting around the world in first class or a private jet.

Never forget that.

The Onda V989 Factory

Charbax of ARM Devices.net gets the goods again.

Screensnaps and the video after the break.

Xiaomi MiBand Laser Etching

The Xiaomi MiBand can have words laser etched on it.

Given how Xiaomi is all about letting users customize their devices, they’re missing an opportunity here. They let users make money by creating themes for MIUI. Why not let users make money creating designs that can be etched on the MiBand too? That area is far larger than icon-sized and people can be very creative with it.

Gerry Anderson Is Go!

Here’s the poster for the highly-anticipated documentary, Filmed in Supermarionation:

Follow it on Twitter and Facebook, and director Stephen La Rivière on Twitter.

“Nervous Cat” Game

Via a Weibo communique from Bigertech (which seems to tweet more about things other than its own damn products, to both my frustration and amusement) comes news of a simple online game in China that was developed by one guy in thirty-six hours and has since been played over ten million times!

[Interview] @ river nerve sprouting cat tiger team “surrounded by nerve cat” developed in just a day and a half, art one person, one program. Since it is such a game on-line 48 hours, PV reached 10.26 million, IP reached 2.41 million, more than surprise, pen Ge technology to its production team interviewed, but saying that, you can at least surrounded by only a few nerve cats? More: http://t.cn/RPZV4Ah

An interview with the developer [Google Translate].