The next step in e-book evolution (part 3)

There really is an app for everything, including your reading material. Publishers are experimenting with accompanying book apps, which can be anything from games to excerpts, because they like to think they’ll draw more attention and possibly bring in more revenue.

“Apps don’t get a very high price, maybe $0.99, so it’s hard to sell enough to make any money,” says Michael Shatzkin, CEO and founder of Idea Logic. “I think they’re more of a marketing device than a product. They alert people and make them aware of the book, but they’re rarely a separate product.”

Quirk Book’s small staff means it has no programmers and any apps based on books come from outside sources. “We don’t have any definite strategy because it’s all so new,” says Jason Rekulak, editor of Quirk Books. “Usually if someone wants to license it then we do.” The Pride and Prejudice and Zombie game was created by an outside company, but it helps keep the book fresh in people’s minds, not that the surprise hit really needed too much help in that area.

In Rekulak’s opinion, certain texts, “where the content is reliant on being up to the minute,” have to begin reshaping themselves. Books like restaurant guides fall into that category. “So they won’t be selling their books, they’ll be selling the content,” he says. “They need to be able to market their product across different platforms.” Apps might be the best way for guides to sell their content instead of an entire book.

This app has the same content as the book but is enhanced with location-based features.

A how-to book can be broken down into short, condensed screens for an app and sold at a cheaper price or given away free. Job seekers once bought a text coaching interview techniques. An app could be a series of questions and answers that one might encounter during an interview or tips and lists of dos and don’ts. Apps may be great advertising, but they run the risk of replacing the book. A $0.99 app with most of the information in the book might be more appealing to customers. From former HarperCollins publisher Marion Maneker’s perspective, that’s not completely bad.

“What’s the worst thing that will happen if the app replaces the book?” he asks. “From the author’s perspective their ideas are successfully getting out there and they’re making money off of them.”

He agrees with Rekulak’s point that publishers can’t be stuck in the belief that the content can only be sold as a book. By only considering printed products and how to transfer them to digital versions, publishers “run the risk of being bypassed.”

But there remains some types of books that could be safe as hard-copies.

Another vision of e-books will be discussed in “the next step in e-book evolution (part 4).”

Who cares if there’s no camera on the iPad?

Okay, so many people were disappointed, nay annoyed, at the lack of front-facing camera on the iPad. And who wouldn’t be? The iPhone has a camera (though few phones don’t these days) and iPods have cameras. MacBooks have cameras. Sure there’s no camera now, but there probably will be since there’s supposedly a space for the camera in the iPad.

But why wait? Why worry about buying the camera-less iPad when one with a camera will be out in probably less than a year? If you have an iPhone 3GS then you can use the camera on it with your iPad. I think it’s incredibly cool although I don’t know how great the quality is. After all, will it simply be like taking a photo on a small display and blowing it up? Of course, that just makes the picture pixellated and very … not pretty.

Apps are a wonderful thing.

What slipped between the cracks

Here’s a quick round up of some other stories that happened this week:

Twenty-four global phone carriers have come together to combat Apple by creating one large app store that can deliver applications to all mobile users.

The Mobile World Conference was held on Monday in Barcelona, Spain and there was an Android tablet.

Also at the MWC was the announcement that Verizon is bringing Skype to its users in March.

TechCrunch brought to light the Web site called Please Rob Me, which uses location-based services, like Foursquare, to see who is not at home. Basically, if you check in somewhere that isn’t at your house, it streams to this site.

Lastly, if you like fashion with your tech, fashion designer Vivienne Tam has designed in-ear headphones that will put you back $200.

Apple apps restriction

Apple has decided to censor its apps store and anything that is remotely sexual has been removed. That includes the popular Wobble iBoobs, which, simply put, makes photographic boobs bounce.

There can be no nudity in the Apple store, no bikinis, no “sexual connotations or innuendo: boobs, babes, booty, sex – all banned,” nothing arousing or that is sexual content. Apple is really cracking down so the apps store doesn’t become filled with porn. And frankly, why is that a bad thing? You need porn that badly? There are plenty of free sites. Just Google it; they’re okay with porn.

However, Apple is sending mixed messages. It’s fine if Apple wants to take the high road and not let the apps store become overrun with porn or sexual apps, but they need to follow through all the way. For instance, get rid of the Playboy apps. It may seem like a no-brainer, but there are three Playboy guides and two entertainment apps (neither of which have full nudity but there are “explicit images”). There’s also Nude It, which puts your friend’s head on a generic body only clad in underwear.

Right now Apple is sending mixed signals about what can and cannot be in the apps store. Also, Apple has previously had certain apps banned, then decided to let them in and now is banning them again. Perhaps the reason Apple is sending mixed signals is because Apple can’t decide which way it wants to go.

There are, of course, people on both sides of the argument. There are well written justifications for why Apple is allowed to do what it did. There are attacks on what is considered a scary censorship.

Why the GPS is my favorite device

There aren’t a whole lot of things that make me wonder, how did we live before it? Let’s face it, as awesome as MP3 players, smartphones and laptops are, how much more difficult would life be without them? On the other hand, I don’t want to remember life before cell phones, the Internet and now the GPS.

When I got my first GPS two years ago on Christmas I was ecstatic. Never again would I worry about being lost after taking the wrong turn and trying to find my way back. I would never have to worry that I didn’t print out direction first or that I would have to try and read a map. My sister moved down to Virginia over a year ago and I never would have gone if I had to rely on actual maps. Who wants to do all that work?

When on the highway you should take a gander at the other cars (but only if you’re not driving!) and odds are more cars than not will have a GPS visible in the front. Really, how did we survive before?

Now I see something amazing. Don’t get me wrong, I love my GPS. It says street names and there’s a chime when I’ve reached where I’m supposed to turn. But this new thing I’ve found is possibly cooler. And at $90 it’s a heck of a lot cheaper.

This may look like the coolest and most useful GPS ever, but it’s actually an app for the iPhone. Sold! Those signs ensure that New Jersey’s crazy highways that criss-cross and have horribly confusing signs will never make me scream in frustration as I accidentally drive into Newark because I couldn’t tell just what the GPS was telling me to do. It has happened and it wasn’t a fun trip to get back out and driving in the right direction.

This is what I see:

Which isn’t exactly something to complain about, but I am in love with the view on the iPhone. There’s no guessing involved when streets do funny things as they sometimes do in the suburbs. But my GPS is still wonderful, just like all of them are because with them my mother and I no longer get lost everywhere we go. We really could have used a GPS 10 years ago when I was traveling to basketball games all over the tri-state area.

There are only few instances where the GPS has failed me: Harold’s Deli in Edison, NJ seems to be on its own plane of existence because no GPS can ever get you there. Instead you ‘ll find the GPS telling you that “you have arrived at your destination” while you’re driving on a highway and down a steep hill you can see the restaurant in a completely different location. You can wave at it while you go past, but, no, you can’t actually get to it from where the GPS leaves you.

Medicine and smartphones pt. 1

The more apps there are for smartphones the more convenient those inconviences in life become. Now you can use your smartphone to make doctors’ visits easier.

Going to the doctor is often a hassle, especially if you visit multiple doctors. With certain apps doctors can simply share medical records and doctors and patients can correct errors in these records with little to no hassle. Blue Cross sent out an app to more than 5,000 patients so they can carry their medical information and history with them.

Other apps all prescriptions to be sent from the doctor to drugstores, both chains and independent pharmacies. No more dropping off the prescription and hanging around Walgreen’s or waiting to get a call for the medicine to be ready for pick up. You can use apps to make sure there won’t be any adverse interactions between medicines or that allergies won’t be an issue.

Diabetics can even use an app to keep track of what they eat, blood sugar and insulin intake thanks to an undergraduate at Princeton University who wrote the app with his brother. The app takes the information inputed and then graphs the data. Thanks to a recent grant, the app should soon be able to be shared over the Internet so doctors can access the information and help patients.

Endless Spiral

Earlier I went through Apple’s available apps and found out there were more than 90,000 apps. Now, things at the Apps Store have gotten a little weird. There are so many apps that there are now apps to find what apps you should get. A little ridiculous?

New to iPhone? Don’t know which apps are worth getting, especially ones that cost a fee? Well there are now apps that can recommend which apps your friends use so you can see which of the 90,000+ are worth a download or worth the price.

I’m not big on apps, mostly because I don’t see a use for most of them. Do I really need to sound like T-Pain? Sure it’s probably fun, but how often would I use something like that? Some of the apps, like ones for Facebook or navigation, are useful, but others are either poorly made or completely useless. I guess the question you have to ask yourself is, do you trust your friends’ taste? Or do you know that you have to take their favorites with a grain of salt?

There really is an app for everything

The apps on iTunes range from the incredibly useful (iKidNY helps parents find child-friendly restaurants, the nearest diaper changing station, etc.) to the useless (Virtual Zippo Lighter is exactly what it sounds like) to just plain fun (the Games category makes up one-third of all the apps on the iTunes App Store.

With roughly 90,000 apps available on iTunes there’s a lot to scroll through, a lot of variety but also a lot of repeats. If you want to Tweet from your iPhone be prepared to choose between a multitude of apps: Twitterific, TweetDeck, TwitterTime, Tweetie. And then there are some that were created for Twitter and Facebook so you can update both with one app.

However, remember that one-third of the App Store? There are 20 categories and Games has, by far, the most apps and the most popular. As of today,  six out of the top ten apps (on both the paid and free lists) are Games. On the free apps list the other four are filled by three Entertainment apps and a Facebook app.

Amidst every I Am T-Pain (which is really just time-wasting fun) and PaperToss (which is something you can play in real life) are a multitude of useful apps that get overlooked. Almost every bank has a mobile banking app. You can track and manage your personal finances. There are apps that let you carry around your own English-to-any-language-you-want dictionary. There’s even an app that’s supposed to let merchants swipe credit cards for secure credit card transactions. The iSwipe Pro Credit Card Terminal would have been incredibly useful for the man I bought a painting from in France who made my fiance and I follow him away from the marketplace and back to his store. After a few minutes of following him down the twisting streets we began to get a little wary that our lives were about to turn into Taken.

For the most part the apps that are available are there to make people’s lives just a little bit easier, putting everything they need in one spot. And the best part about the iTunes App Store is that if what you’re looking for hasn’t been made, you can always create it.