Quoth the Rowling, 'Pottermore.'

I'm posting this entry largely because I thought of the headline while walking the dogs yesterday and found it rather clever, since that repeated line in Poe's "The Raven" reads "Quoth the raven, 'Nevermore.'"

In case you hadn't heard, J.K. Rowling of Harry Potter fame is opening this fall a new web site called Pottermore (pottermore.com) that will, among other things, offer heretofore unknown ebook versions of all the Harry Potter novels.  At the moment it's unclear whether Pottermore will be the place you'll have to visit to get the ebook version of any of the seven novels in the series or whether you'll also eventually be able to download them from Amazon or BN.com or any other ebook retailer.

If you'd like to get the details from Rowling herself, check out her Olympian announcement on YouTube.  (What's Olympian about it?  Click through and you'll see.)

ADDENDUM: It hadn't occurred to me that if Rowling is going to sell Harry Potter ebooks direct to her Pottermore visitors there's an inevitable question: how will they show up on a Kindle or Nook or Kobo or Sony or other ereader?  After all, each of these devices is part of a walled garden ecosystem.  I've sideloaded my share of public domain titles into my (now quaint first-generation) Nook 3G, but doing so involves a level of techno gruntwork Rowling will certainly not expect of her fans.  Thanks to today's edition of Publishers Lunch, however, we learn that Barnes & Noble.com is "working closely with Pottermore to make Harry Potter ebooks available on our line of NOOK devices when the Pottermore store goes live."  (Amazon has no comment on its plans.)  Publishers Lunch also mentions that the Financial Times has reported that Pottermore will be selling downloadable Harry Potter audiobooks now sold on Apple's iTunes store -- and that iTunes will stop selling them when Pottermore begins.  (Curiously, I just fired up iTunes and could find only one Harry Potter audiobook, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, now on sale there.)  Meanwhile the planet's English-language brick-and-mortar booksellers are in despair.  Harry Potter has been a godsend for them -- generating foot traffic from millions of shoppers eager to claim the latest installment and, presumably, one or two other books plus maybe some stationery, a jigsaw puzzle, a board game, a DVD, and so on.  Pottermore seems certain to stem that revenue flow, perhaps irrevocably.

BTW: if you haven't read Poe's "The Raven" since high school when, like me, you found it a tedious and irrelevant 19th century fossil, by all means give it another look.  It's really an extraordinary poem: inventive, ruefully amusing, with a manic intensity, helped along by its meter and profuse rhyme scheme, that builds as it goes along.  When I first re-read it a couple of years ago -- only because my daughter was assigned it in her English class -- I could scarcely believe it was the same poem I'd sleepwalked through in 11th grade American Literature.  I doff my hat to you, O divine Edgar.

Proofreaders Need Not Apply

In space, no one can hear you scream.  And in cyberspace, no one can hear you scream “Typo!”

The disintermediation the Internet allows for publishing ideas or advertisements—requiring fewer and fewer steps and lower and lower expenditures to get the word out—has left corporations, governments, and the rest of us in a mad dash to promote ourselves early and often.

Along the way proofreading has become a neglected skill and an unnecessarily expensive and time-consuming step.  It is to the 21^st century what blacksmithing was to the 20^th.

Of course, typographical errors online come in a variety of flavors.  I may flinch when I stumble on one in the New York Times online or in print, but I acknowledge that it’s the price I pay to get reasonably good reporting on the 24/7 Internet clock.  I make the same allowances for the comments I read online attached to ecommerce product pages or news site articles, now that I know there are thousands who think the verb to lose is spelled to loose or that disappointed packs two ses and two ps or two ses and one p.

English orthography is a bitch.

Still, you’d think that image-conscious businesses or government agencies would take a slightly fussier stance.  Spelling stuff wrong on an authorized web site or official communication suggests haste or carelessness or indifference.  Those aren’t impressions you want to leave on customers or constituents.

But there’s a cost to correctness and clearly it’s too high for some entities in the information business.

Here are a few examples I’ve stumbled on over the last couple of months.  I didn’t set out to find these gaffes—they found me:

Citi Group Credit Cards

Now that Citi Group’s credit card unit has had a couple of hundred thousand customer accounts hacked I guess they’ve bigger fish to fry than running the nonword “dinning” through Spell Check and correcting it to “dining”.  They’re sure to spend so much money on boosting security—or at least on PR to promote the idea they’re boosted security—they won’t have a penny extra to spend on agency billings padded with frivolous proofreading charges.

American List Council

{Sigh}  I’ve been there, American List Council.  You’re typing along, you enter a short word like “with”, and a few words later you’re supposed to enter an entirely different short word starting with “w” (in this case, “who”) but, because your brain’s on autopilot and you’re really thinking about where to go for lunch, or what you’re going to do on vacation, or how much your kid’s orthodontics bill is going to be, you absently enter “with” again.  Happens to the best of us.

Mark Ecko Enterprises, Unlimited

Here’s a twin killing from the Mark Ecko Enterprises web site—two goofs in two years on the company’s historical timeline.  These are classic Internet-age errors: Spell Check will never find them.  (Note that the subhead in red for the 2006 entry is also fouled up.)  Guess that’s what happens when your hip-hop web creative crew is so busy making your site look fly they’re not going to do that proofreading shit for you, man.

IPC Systems

IPC Systems’ slogan, “Absolutely Indispensable” (mercifully sidestepping the common misspelling “Indispensible”), describes its goal of building essential high-tech electronic trading solutions for financial services firms.  But proofreaders were absolutely dispensable when the company’s web team laid out the site’s promotional copy.  And no, a word needn’t be misspelled to qualify as a typo: breaking it and misplacing the hyphen on the turnover line is, in my view, just as embarrassing.

Paul Krugman's New York Times Blog

I've never encountered a typo in Paul Krugman's blog writings, so I suppose neither the Nobel laureate nor the New York Times can be blamed for a mistake that crept into a Federal Reserve Board Bureau of Economic Analysis graph caption on this blog entry from May 2, 2011.  If you’re Ron (or Rand) Paul, though, this is one more reason to hate the Fed: flabby proofing.

TiVo Guide Listings

My wife and daughter and I love to watch Modern Family—so we’ve naturally got a TiVo Season Pass.  And I admit that, whatever the show, on the rare occasions I read the one-sentence show recaps on TiVo’s right nav I've never noticed a typographic error.  In fact, I didn’t notice this one: my wife did.  (Yeah, she used to work in publishing, too.  The industry attracts literate fussbudgets.)

The Supermarket

Let’s leave digital behind and go analog.  The supermarket is as analog as it gets—and with miles of colorful packaging, exploding type, and fine print it’s not only as visually noisy as the web it seems to be just as errorprone.  So savor this irony as Budweiser’s marketers dutifully (and I’m sure hastily) alerted customers to a “printing error” on its mail-in rebate coupons:

Yep, another goof Spell Check won’t help you find.  Well, at least Budweiser apologized for the inconvenience—and they really mean it, since they ended their apology with an exclamation point.

As it happens, I once used a web site’s comments tool to point out a typo in a sample passage from Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad posted at avisitfromthegoonsquad.com.  All comments on the site are moderated, and while mine was never approved and released by the following day the typo I mentioned had been quietly corrected.

No need to thank me, Ms. Egan.  On the Internet information wants to be free, especially if it costs something to make sure it’s spelled correctly.

P.S. I apologize for the inconsistent leading afflicting the subheads in this post.  Looks like it's not a good idea to compose your rant in Microsoft Word and then copy it into the Blogger editor.  Too many mysterious Microsoft tags come along for the ride.

Amazon: Sneaky Fast

Sportscasters have a phrase they use to describe a major league pitcher whose lazy windup and delivery gives hitters no clue that a 94MPH fastball is humming their way: sneaky fast.

Lately that phrase has sprung to mind about Amazon, the ruthlessly efficient web retailer that effortlessly fires emails across my Gmail inbox and leaves me no time to wonder, “How did they know this would interest me?”

So it was yesterday morning when I found an email whose subject line, Free Today: Plants vs. Zombies Android Exclusive, notified me about an Amazon store I’m not sure I knew existed—or why.

Amazon selling Android apps?  Isn’t that what Google’s Android Marketplace is for?  And if you wanted to compete with Android Marketplace, how would you sell Android apps from the Amazon web site?  Everyone with an android phone knows you download them from your phone to your phone—no annoying web intervention required.

Was Amazon sneaky fast or was it hanging its pitches out over the plate?

(This intriguing question prevented me from asking myself an even sneakier one: how did Amazon know I had an android phone?  I’d bought mine at a brick-and-mortar Radio Shack.  More about that later.)

Get a Great Paid App for Free Every Day

I headed over to Amazon’s Appstore for Android (which promises “Get a great paid app for free every day”) and, as I eyed the zero dollar offer for the popular Plants Vs. Zombies adventure game, still couldn’t see how I was going to download it (or any other app in the store) to my phone.

Then I noticed the header Get Started in the right nav above an icon for the Amazon appstore app.

OK, I’m thinking, there’s an appstore app—but how do I get that on my phone?  Google isn’t going to permit Amazon to post an app on Android Marketplace that lets Marketplace customers shop the Amazon appstore instead.  (That competitive reality hasn’t stopped android phone users from visiting Android Marketplace to look for the Amazon appstore app.  Fire up Marketplace, enter the word “amazon” in the search tool, and the phrase “amazon app store”, presumably crowdsourced, appears in the drop down list of suggested search terms.  Pick it and you won’t be surprised when your results fail to bring up Amazon’s app.)

Only 8 Simple Steps

So while pondering the mystery of the appstore app icon I clicked on Amazon’s inevitable Learn more link.  Then watched the inevitable Get Started with the Amazon appstore for Android video starring a bespectacled metrosexual marketing genie named Paul Hochman.  And inevitably discovered that getting started involved “only 8 simple steps.”

Since Amazon’s marketers must have realized 8 simple steps might not sound simple enough, Paul quickly adds that “In fact, fewer than 30 seconds stand between you and thousands of apps for Android.”

If you’re now wondering whether Paul and his fellow marketeers work in an irony-free zone—most android phone users already know they can find thousands of android apps without having to bother following anyone’s 8 simple steps, or installing the Amazon appstore app—you’re not alone.

In fact, just about all the advantages Paul extols for the Amazon Appstore for Android apply to Google’s Android Marketplace: the ability to test drive select apps (which is what the free “lite” version of a paid app usually offers), get recommendations (Marketplace supplies plenty of starred user comments for any popular app), and buy using Amazon’s secure 1-Click payment technology (except in this case it’s Google’s 1-click payment technology).

But then Paul hit me again with the one sneaky fast advantage Amazon had thought of and Google apparently hadn’t: a great paid app free every day.

That’s something I’d never noticed browsing Android Marketplace.

Plants Vs. Zombies Vs. Android Marketplace

Sneakier still, its free Plants Vs. Zombies game app claimed to be an Amazon exclusive.  And sure enough, when I grabbed my LG Optimus V and dashed over to Android Marketplace I couldn’t find a free or paid version of Plants Vs. Zombies.

Amazon had done it again.  They’d found a brilliant marketing edge to jump start an Android app store that most executives would have said had no chance against Google’s firmly entrenched original. Indeed, by opening its own store Amazon can play off of Android Marketplace by promoting discounts and exclusives—such as its Plants Vs. Zombies offer.

And, of course, they’re free to formulate more agreeable terms for app developers.  At the moment it appears that Amazon’s Android Appstore requires a $99 program developer fee to sign up (which it waives for the first year) and offers members “70% of the sale price of the app or 20% of the list price, whichever is greater.”  Google charges a $25 registration fee and “the transaction fee is equivalent to 30% of the application price.”

Offhand I can’t figure out Amazon’s advantage in pegging its payments to either the sale price or the list price, since a list price would have to be arbitrarily high (and subsequently discounted to the sale price?) to make 20% more lucrative than 70%.  I also can’t find details about whatever incentives Amazon may offer to developers for securing exclusivity.

But none of that matters unless Amazon can convince the rest of us to follow their 8 simple steps.  For a free copy of a popular paid game app they’re clearly betting the effort is worth it.

And how did Amazon know I had an android phone?  A few weeks ago I’d bought some LG Optimus V accessories from Amazon Marketplace.  And as those Marketplace vendors know, Amazon’s sign-up terms entitle the retailing giant to all Marketplace customer data.

Amazon knows all, sees all, and wastes no time marketing accordingly.  Sneaky fast, man.

New Ereaders Giveth, and Taketh Away

As the price of ereaders falls—Barnes & Noble’s just-announced touchscreen device goes for $139, while Kobo’s, announced the day before, shaves ten bucks off that (yet both still cost more than Amazon’s months-old Special Offers Kindle, which weighs in at a mere $114)—they’re all giving up a feature that once seemed essential to these read-anywhere, buy-anywhere gadgets: 3G cellular service.

[We interrupt this rant to admit that Amazon has just announced a 3G version of the Special Offers Kindle for $164. So Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos clearly feels this trend toward Wi-Fi only ereaders offers an opening in the market for those who know they need 3G.]

When the Kindle debuted in 2007 its true disruptive genius—what allowed it to trump the seemingly sleek ereaders Sony had been selling for years—was its free 3G connectivity. Suddenly it was easy to imagine buying and reading a book most anywhere: while commuting to work on the train, waiting at the airport to board a flight, vacationing at a resort, eating lunch in a city park. The possibilities were so tantalizing I remember doubting at first that Amazon really was offering 3G at no cost. (It's easy to forget that at the time 3G cellular service was state of the art.) Then, when I learned it was true, I decided the Kindle was so expensive because fully $100 of its initial $399 price must have been subsidizing that lifetime AT&T 3G contract.

And I still think having 3G on an ereader is a powerful plus. That’s because I spend a lot of time in upstate New York out of reach of free Wi-Fi or reliable 3G service. Rural New York has shown me that my year-old refurbished Nook 3G, which uses the same AT&T network as the Kindle, somehow manages to connect in areas where even my first cell phone, which used Verizon’s venerable network, typically gave up.

More to the point, I’ve learned that outside an urban center cellular data networks are far more reliable than cellular voice networks—they obviously require a fraction of the bandwidth to function. The telcos are certainly aware of this advantage, because they’re happy to tack on added-cost 3G data plans for just about any portable device—phone or tablet—that can benefit from them.

Yet ereaders, now that they’ve lost their free 3G cellular function, appear unlikely ever to gain the kind of optional cellular data support AT&T and Verizon offer for Apple’s iPad.  I surmise that the big ebook retailers don’t want a buyer worrying that an attractively priced ereader has the added cost of a perpetual 3G data plan weighing it down. They recognize that such marketing gambits are strictly for brazen telcos hawking tantalizingly cheap, heavily subsidized smartphones.

It’s easier to tout Wi-Fi capability, since affluent ereader buyers almost certainly have a wireless home network, bought and paid for, ready to do the heavy data lifting. (Of course, none of these devices supports Wi-Fi’s state-of-the-art 802.11n spec. Since downloading a text-centric book is fairly undemanding, Amazon and B&N and Kobo deem it sufficient to go with the slower, middle-aged 802.11g spec. Whenever cool technology is for sale, you can be sure the seller is rationing it somewhere.)

So we’ve come to a crossroads. Since today’s sexiest mobile devices are all data capable, we’re leaning harder than ever on carriers’ data networks. That turns Wi-Fi into a convenient fallback. I suspect when Virgin Mobile’s marketers decided to pair an all-you-can eat data plan with a tightly restricted voice plan (mine gives me 300 minutes a month for $25) for their android phones they consoled themselves that subscribers would get most of their data via the phones’ integrated Wi-Fi—either at home or on the road in a Starbucks, hotel, or the like. (My android phone has revealed that even supermarkets offer free Wi-Fi.) Sprint’s 3G network would thus take less of a hit, especially from Virgin Mobile’s inevitable android data hogs.

Certainly I go Wi-Fi whenever my phone tells me there’s a wireless access point available.

Then, too, even a pedestrian Wi-Fi network is visibly faster than a good 3G network—and good 3G service, at least from Virgin Mobile’s parent, Sprint, isn’t that common. (Not long after getting my LG Optimus V I found myself unable to text my daughter from a parking lot on 9th Avenue and 33rd Street in Manhattan.) So users like me naturally train themselves to prefer Wi-Fi hot spots for surfing the web, streaming a YouTube video, or using a data-intensive app.

There’s just one problem.  The more mobile data we use, the more we want.  Getting it at home and at Starbucks and (amazingly) at the supermarket just makes us pine for it wherever we can’t have it—on a highway, at a rural park, in the wilds of upstate New York.  (Places where, maddeningly, your mobile phone’s GPS system has no trouble finding you.)

The Victorian art critic Walter Pater once wrote famously that “all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.”  My take: all technology constantly aspires towards the condition of real-time.

Real-time data, data on the run, data whenever you want or need it—whether it’s the latest bestseller on your ereader or an emergency text message from someone you love on your mobile phone—continues to be elusive. With the exception of that new Kindle 3G with Special Offers, these latest low-cost ereaders aren't aspiring hard enough towards the condition of real-time.

This Comment Has Been Removed

On the web, you never know when you're going to run into a political foodfight.

This morning I finally opened last Thursday's email from David Pogue, the consumer technology columnist for The New York Times, pointing me to Pogue's blog post about a new ebook app from former Vice President and presidential candidate Al Gore.

I hurried over to read it because as someone who's a little underwhlemed by the ebook reading experience -- and who imagines ebook readers doing routine things (e.g., looking up a word, making marginal notes) better than they do today -- I wanted to see what Gore's version had brought to the party.

So I sped through Pogue's enthusiastic report on Gore's iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch version of his book Our Choice but, because I don't have an iPad, iPhone, or iPad Touch I was a little frustrated by merely reading about something that sounded like very much more than a book.

Then I started browsing the blog comments.

The first thing I noticed was that comment #2 had been removed.  The Times had replaced it with their bland and opaque "abuse" boilerplate:

This comment has been removed. Comments are moderated and generally will be posted if they are on-topic and not abusive. For more information, please see our Comments FAQ.

I scrolled down a little further and found that comment #5 had also been removed.  Next, I noticed that comment #8, from asz of Erie, PA, while fully intact, was a little persnickety:

I don't agree or disagree with Al Gore, but please don't regurgitate publicist PR junk into such a valuable column. One more of these, Dave, and I'm checking out of your mailing list. I don't have time for it. Let him buy an ad.

Gosh, I thought.  Was Pogue's review that unctuous?

As I plowed on it became clear that most of the comments weren't from tech enthusiasts eager to weigh in on the UI (user interface) pluses or minuses of Gore's book/app -- or the thinking behind it (from PushPop Press).

Instead, there were 3 consecutive jokes about Gore having invented the Internet.  And by comment #23 Dbulleit from Atlanta had done asz from Erie one better and asked to be removed from Pogue's subscriber list:

This hurts, as I've followed and admired your BLOG for years. That said, please remove my name from your list. "It’s vintage Gore: persuasive, careful, reasoned..." Please!!! You'd do well to keep your Valentines private (as the large majority of informed scientist and engineers will tell you that Gore has unparalleled penchant for distortions, half-truths and outright demagoguery).
Anyway, I know this comment isn't likely to see the light of day; but, IMHO it's a sad day: to see a writer of your caliber stoop to such blatant, obsequious pandering.

It's not that I'd never before noticed this kind of behavior from Pogue's readers.

When I worked at Barnes & Noble.com and Pogue wrote an enthusiastic review of the NookColor I noticed what seemed to be dozens of hostile comments by Kindle owners.  Since for years Amazon had been eating B&N's ebook lunch I couldn't help enjoying these protests ... but it was a sobering reminder of just how emotionally invested people become in their tech choices.

So it shouldn't have surprised me that many of the comments about Gore's app skipped the app and went straight to Gore's views.  These commenters were emotionally invested in their political choices, too -- and those choices didn't include Gore.

But then, their comments also suggest that the novel interactivity of the former veep's app -- however elegant or involving -- is doomed to fail at persuading those Gore must surely think most in need of persuasion.  And that an app with a political point of view, no matter how inventively designed, can be dismissed, unopened, as easily as any printed book.

BTW: one of the comments did mention a presentation of Gore's app that one of Push Pop's founders, Mike Matas, made at a recent TED conference. It's brief but gives you a good idea -- possibly better than Pogue's review -- of what Push Pop is doing for (or to) ebook reading.

Postscript: on August 2, 2011 Facebook, of all online businesses, announced they'd bought Push Pop Press.  My guess is Zuckerberg and company are mostly interested in the company's talent in designing user interfaces -- it's hard to imagine they want to get into the interactive book publishing business.

What Doomed Osama bin Laden? No Internet!

Looks as if Osama bin Laden's security team thought it would be a bad idea for his 3,000-square foot compound near Islamabad, Pakistan to be wired for Internet or phone service. But you can file this cautiousness under "cure being worse than the disease."

According to a story published today on The Atlantic's website by contributing editor Marc Ambinder, bin Laden's "radio silence" seems to have made his compound just as suspicious as if he'd shared a friends-and-family plan with Ayman al-Zawahiri or was addicted to trolling on armyforums.com:

NSA [National Security Agency] figured out, somehow, that there was no telephone or Internet service in the compound. How it did this without Pakistan's knowledge is a secret. The NGIA [National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency] makes the military's maps but also develops their pattern recognition software -- no doubt used to help establish, by February of this year, that the CIA could say with "high probability" that bin Laden and his family were living there.

So there you have it: do without a phone or Internet service to avoid having your chatter picked up and our spooks wonder, "Hmm, what's a guy with a deluxe ultra-secure compound doing without a phone or Internet service?"

Most sobering of all is what this story suggests about the state of technology underlying pattern recognition and probability theory -- and how our intelligence agencies can apply them.

On the other hand, building a conspicuous retirement home for a local folk hero like bin Laden in the suburbs of a city, half a mile from the country's West Point-style military academy, probably wasn't the smartest idea either ... whether or not you decided to skip calling PTCL (Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited) for their money-saving Super Sunday Offer or awesome UltraNet 50mbps VDSL.

Can Google Be Trusted with Our Books?

So asked Craig Morgan Teicher in his Publishers Weekly blog yesterday, noting what he called "a disturbing observation" made by yet another journalist writing for The Guardian in the UK. That observation, spurred by Google's recent decision to pull the plug on Google Video, wondered whether the search company's cold business calculus about online videos didn't mean it would do the same to the millions of books it's scanned and uploaded should Google Books flop, too.

As it happens Google appears to have reversed course on this decision, so for the time being those videos remain safe for viewing. But what's odd about this hand-wringing is that it overlooks that just about everything on the web is as vulnerable as those Google videos. Wikipedia, for instance, despite its status as a not-for-profit venture, is just as likely to go 404 should it be mismanaged and its contributions dry up. And what about those of us who rely on Gmail and, like me, have years of email correspondence archived in their accounts?

Which brings us to The Cloud.

It's a vogue term these days, especially with Amazon's latest attack on iTunes via its Cloud Player. The Cloud Player allows those of us who use Apple's music store but don't have an iPhone to play our ripped CDs and, uh, non-DRM downloaded music (meaning only the stuff you've bought from iTunes at the premium, non-copy-protected price) on an Android, BlackBerry, or Palm smartphone. Or from a notebook or desktop PC via a web player.

Then there's Amazon's Cloud Drive, which is basically your backup hard drive in the sky.

Whatever you call it, the Internet has slowly been storing (and occasionally losing or exposing) more and more of our data -- from credit card numbers to medical records to email addresses -- since the web became a consumer hit in the mid '90s. So wondering whether Google can be trusted with our books is a little like wondering whether Chase can be trusted with our credit cards or United Healthcare can be trusted with our medical records. Except wondering about Chase and United Healthcare is a tad more important.

After all, should Google hit the skids and shutter Google Books those millions of volumes will still be available ... they'll just be stuck in antediluvian libraries, where to read them you may have to (shudder) visit them and check them out.