This is Tech

[Fan Created Mock Design: Courtesy of Engadget.]

The New York Times is running an article today in its technology blog speculating that Apple is working on its own eBook reader. Steve Jobs has publicly stated that he thinks eBooks aren’t going any where. In his words “most Americans don’t read.” John Markoff at the New York Times thinks Jobs is secretly cooking up a Kindle killer. Having been sold on the Kindle and seeing how great it is to read on, I think there might be something to Markoff’s claim. I have heard a number of people say, I will be ready to move to ebooks when Apple puts out a product.

Considering how similar the ebook sales model is to iTunes, it seems hard to believe that Apple is not working on something. They already sell movies, tv shows, and music through their site. Their users already use Itunes and know how to sync their devices. The infrastructure is already in place, all they need is to create the device and secure licenses to the books.

You have to admit it is a little over the top for Steve Jobs to claim Americans don’t read. Apple’s segment of the computer market is on average more educated and literate than your the other computer company’s. This may be a byproduct of Apple’s pricing (more educated people make more money). Apple has to know that its customers read. I agree with the NYT, I think Steve’s got something up his sleeve and is trying to generate a little misdirection. Click “more” to for some excerpts and a link to the NYT article:

Reading Steve Jobs - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog:

“Reading Steve Jobs

By John Markoff
iTouchIs Apple’s iPod Touch media player just a product, or a platform?

Second-guessing Steve Jobs — or actually first-guessing — is Silicon Valley’s most popular spectator sport. Dozens of Web rumor sites pore over every one of his pronouncements as if he were the pope, looking for product and strategy hints.

At Macworld Mr. Jobs told me he was skeptical about the Amazon Kindle book reader because most Americans don’t read. That touched off a firestorm of criticism and speculation. My favorite bit of analysis was that this must mean he is readying his own book reader. A familiar Jobsian strategy is to denigrate an entire category — he did this with cellphones, for example — before reinventing it with Apple panache.

So if he were going to reinvent reading, how would Mr. Jobs do it?

Let’s put together the pieces of the puzzle:

Apple’s multitouch technology began life not as a cellphone, but as a notepad-sized skunkworks project internally dubbed Safari Pad, run by Tim Bucher, then Apple’s head of Macintosh hardware. To his credit, Mr. Jobs seized on the technology and morphed it into the iPhone.

At Macworld, when I asked Mr. Jobs about the idea of an iPod Touch in a larger ‘Safari Pad’ format, he snapped at me, ‘I can’t talk about unannounced products.’”

Intriguing.

“So despite all the criticism Mr. Jobs has taken for impugning American literacy, maybe he actually believes he can do for reading what he for listening to music? (I mean, if all a Safari Pad does is Web browsing, that would be a bit of an anticlimax.) And despite the mixed reports on the success of the Kindle to date — there are reports that it has sold out, but the word from the publishing world is murkier — Mr. Jobs has to have taken note that the Kindle’s real genius was in borrowing a page from the iPod-iTunes business-model playbook.

What would the reaction be to something about the same size and less than the thickness of the Macbook Air? Without a doubt the Apple industrial design department could do a better job than Amazon in conceptualizing a digital book.

Certainly stranger things have happened. Wouldn’t it be ironic if Mr. Jobs could ultimately claim to have saved reading books in the digital age?”

(Via New York Times.)