One of the things I keep hearing about is enhancing e-books with multimedia. I admit a bias: That word sends me looking for a link to somewhere else. ‘Multimedia’ evokes every website that wastes my time and slows Firefox to a crawl with bad Flash animation. It has a whiff of marketers who want to make everything more like TV, the better to sell me stuff.

People who read for pleasure generally want to ‘get lost in the pages,’ as Halpern puts it. The last thing we want is distractions that pull us out of the story, fiction or nonfiction. Certainly I would not pay more to get an e-book larded up with video clips of the author typing away, or whatever. And good multimedia costs money to produce.

Of course there are exceptions. Graphic novels obviously depend as much on the images as the words, perhaps more. The same for some kinds of nonfiction pleasure reading, say books about art.

And I can think of a few other possibilities. A hundred years ago even adult fiction often had a few illustrations, beautifully done sketches. If e-book economics allows a return of that charming custom, not many readers will complain.

As always, content is king. And content isn’t just information, it is information we actually want, such as words to get lost in, with perhaps an graceful sketch now and then. But don’t expect us to pay for needless clutter.

Says Shafer, no matter how we get online we end up on the Internet. And once there we’ll surf it; we won’t be kept on the reservation of apps that only take us to one website.

Not so coincidentally, Ryan Kim reported at SFGate last week that HP’s tablet device, due out this fall and also called Slate, will be a computer running Windows 7.

In the Apple-verse of the iPad nothing could be more un- sexy, but like my good old QWERTY keyboard there is a lot to be said for a familiar interface, one  I already know how to use.

Mobile access is different, yes; more spur of the moment, fewer extended sessions. Much of the time we just want handy access to a few services – mail and messages, driving directions or bus connections.

Businesses love the idea of a simplified, app-ified online experience, a virtual mall where they get to choose your menu of choices. And sometimes this is convenient.

But we have seen this video before. The multi-use personal computer and the full Internet will always win against specialized devices and restricted access, whenever they are in the game at all.

Meanwhile, by way of a spoiler space, Michael Copeland of Fortune says that ‘the iPod changes everything.’ Yeah, that is what everyone is saying, but Copeland gives it a new twist and a new term.

One more thing he sees the iPad as driving is the ‘app-ification’ of software – away from traditional do-everything packages (think Microsoft Office) to small apps for specific purposes.  Says Copeland, we ’snack’ on apps now, using them and discarding them casually.

(Doesn’t that sound like how people use traditional print newspapers? Today’s news, tomorrow’s swatted fly. No wonder the newspaper business has hope for tablet devices!)

And now, spoiler time. Is the iPad just a big iPhone? No. The iPhone is just a small iPad (that makes phone calls).

Ziing!

You can follow the link to read about ‘groundbreaking’ data plan options, and various nifty features. But one item jumps out, made a subtitle so you won’t miss it.

‘Reading is fundamental,’ says Moren, and with that the light of comprehension dawns. Everyone wondered what exactly the iPad really is. Now we know.

The iPad is, at bottom, e-reader, just packaged in with music, a way to go quickly online, and video if you decide you just want eye/brain candy. It’s a compleat e-reader.

The cult of Apple can get annoying, but Steve Jobs is really, really sharp.

But it is a hot new trend, says Bill Siwicki at Internet Retailer, and the merchants are jumping onto it. As usual there is a big generational divide; a quarter of mobile phone users under age 45 used their phone while shopping in a store; fewer than one in 10 older users did so.

Middle-aged fogie though I am, phone-a-friend (or product review site) while shopping makes a lot of sense. The only reason we weren’t doing it before is that we didn’t have the right gadgets. And now we do.

On another front, we all know that newspapers are hurting, and they do not suffer in silence. A whole genre had emerged decrying the death of newspapers and worrying about the future of news.

The worries won’t be eased by a new Nielsen survey reported at SFGate.com (the San Francisco Chronicle website). Internet users, especially in North America, are a tough sell when it comes to paying for news content.

But the same study shows that people are a good deal more willing to pay for movies, music, and games (and professional quality video, but not the user generated kind). The Kindle shows that they will also pay for books.

It seems that people are willing to shell out for content they regard as individually distinctive. If you want a particular song, or a particular book, you’ll pay for it.

The problem for newspapers is that people usually don’t care about a news story for its own sake – its sparkling style or dramatic mood – the way they care about a book or movie. They just want the news, and understandably regard widely available information as a commodity.

No, this does not lead me to a magic solution, but understanding the source of the challenge is a decent place to start.

Analysts are paid to commit truth, and Rich Doherty of telecom market research firm The Engineering Group has some embarrassing truth for AT&T, ‘I’m not aware of any company in this country that has had so aloof a stance toward quality of service.’

I get my landline and broadband from AT&T, and have no problem with them. But I have none of the warm and fuzzy feelings I have toward my computer or software. Bandwidth is a classic commodity good, without distinctiveness, something you only notice when it isn’t available or reliable. But it can’t be good for a company when the only buzz it is getting is about bad service.

In other news, people talk about having thousands of tunes on their iPods, and they can’t have bought them all from the iTunes Store at 99 cents a pop. Lee Gomes at Forbes lets the cat out of the bag. Content piracy remains pervasive – and in fact the industry depends on it.

People find music to play on all those iPods. And Gomes cites one representative from a computer maker that produces high end home theater setups, who admits that they are used mainly for viewing illegally downloaded movies.

Also in Gomes’ sights, ’some newspaper publishers’ – read Rupert Murdoch – who complain about Google. People don’t need Google News to read stuff lifted from Rupert’s rags; there are a million gossip and political blogs happy to provide it. And if they didn’t, how many readers would pay for it?

The underlying truth is that we have no problem paying to use the Internet. Mobile or landline, we pay every month, and only complain if the service is bad. What we won’t do, except in exceptional cases, is pay a second time to see particular content.

And yes, my implied stance here, which is that of most Internet users, creates an impossible business model. But if content is king, the customer is emperor, and the users will likely win in the end.

Also the article is worth reading just for the wind-up quote from William Watkins, former CEO of disk drive maker Seagate, about the content his products are used to store. ‘We’re not changing the world,’ said Watkins. ‘We’re building a product that helps people buy more crap–and watch porn.’

Of course, that is a way to change the world, too. It worked for a tech entrepreneur named Johannes Gutenberg.

The coming Web will be media-centric, he suggests, with ‘text-based interactions’ dwindling. But, adds Parr, social media will be its largest component. When you go online in a few years, he says, ‘most of the time you spend will be to connect with your friends.’

It is easy to hum along and nod to either one, but do they quite go together? Sometimes, yes, and there is nothing new about that. Entertainment and socializing have gone together since we did them around the cave fire. Now we can just do it at a distance, and mobile.

But usually we end up doing one or the other. We get to talking and the music fades to background, or we sit back quietly to listen to the music.

Now that we can have gadgets that let us do both, of course we will want both. But there is still a subtle paradox. The social part of social media is basically about chatting, whether it is voice or text.

Sure, we can send videos back and forth, but someone will have to make the videos. Most of us can’t come up with that many clever things to do with our iPhone cameras. (Or, in the enterprise world, send each other enough PowerPoint presentations that are actually worth the time.)

So whether we immerse ourselves in media alone or with friends, when we do it we’ll be communing first and foremost with … content creators. Who, for quality content, will mostly have to be paid one way or another.

Once before at TecTrends Monitor I looked at the SEO business, and a second look is prompted by a new piece on Demand Media by David Carr in the New York Times.

The story is again about astonishing output – five times more YouTube videos than any other source; a million articles floating around online. And the remarkable, semi-automated way it is produced, with search algorithms spitting out topics (mostly in the how-to genre) for ’sharecropper’ writers and videographers who then grind out content in bulk.

A number of firms have jumped into this business, and AOL may be about to join them. The problem is that much if not most of what is produced this way is junk, produced in haste by people who don’t know or care much about the subject, but know how to crank out boilerplate text filled with search terms.

A  search fail described by the always useful Farhad Manjoo at Slate illustrates the problem. During a recent scandal the top search result for a celebrity plus mistress’s pictures rewarded salacious searchers not with the pictures, but merely an illiterate SEO spam ‘news’ article crammed with text repeating the celebrity’s name and ‘mistress’s pictures.’

This works, in a nutshell, because Google (and Bing) have not yet figured out how to identify this sort of junk and filter it out of search results. Just give them time, because SEO spam detracts from the quality of their product, namely good search results.

Search engine algorithms aren’t going to be literary critics in the foreseeable future. But linguists will probably be able to work out the pattern and density of keywords that marks spam or semi-spam, not substantive text, and adjust search results accordingly. Which will be the end of the SEO spam business.

The bottom line here is that usable work has to be created by and for humans, not with automated shortcuts. And while many labors of love can be had online for free, the rest you have to pay for, and pay enough to get coherent results, not SEO spam or other kinds of junk.

Rachel Mets of Associated Press declares that the iPad is more than just a bigger iPod Touch. Meanwhile Ryan Kim of the San Francisco Chronicle says, ‘You mean it’s a big iPod Touch? Basically.’ Which, Kim adds, is just fine.

As noted previously in this blog, there is a long back story to the iPad, an industry fascination with devices – call them slates, tablets, or now presumably pads – that are bigger than a smartphone but smaller than a laptop. Michael Malone of ABC News calls it a Holy Grail quest, even speculating that this size corresponds to a deep rooted human impulse going back to the first data processing technology, the Sumerian clay tablet.

Opinions on the iPad may be all over the map, but digging a bit under the surface reveals a pretty consistent underlying topography. Love it or hate it, the reviewers identify much the same strengths and weaknesses. The differences in opinion come from how they weigh them.

The iPad is not ‘a computer.’ It runs a version of the iPhone operating system, and like the iPhone it completely hides the file structure from the user. If you like simply using a functionality with a minimum of fuss that is a plus; if you like knowing where your content is, and being able to move it, this hidden-ness will be a minus.

Likewise, all reviewers seem to agree that Apple has not solved the keyboard problem. If you only expect to use it to send the occasional instant message or tweet, this won’t be an issue, but if you want to write paragraphs, this is probably not the device for you.

Put another way, based on the early reviews the iPad is a good device for consuming online media while on the go – reading the news or an e-book, surfing the Web, watching video, and the like. But for interacting with online content – playing with it, mashing it up, creating it – the iPad’s limitations are more serious, perhaps fatally so.

In short, if you wish your iPhone had a bigger screen, the iPad may be what you are looking for. If you wish your laptop were lighter and easier to carry, it probably is not.

[Original post]

Steve Jobs knows what I am thinking: Does the world really need a tablet computer? The idea has been around forever in geek years. Jobs’ former nemesis Bill Gates predicted in 2001 that tablets would be the most popular type of PC within five years.

We are still waiting for them to break the 1 percent barrier, but the wait could be over tomorrow, when Apple is expected to make the public launch of its tablet, rumored (by Slate magazine) to be the iSlate.

So, does the world really need a gadget that is too big for your pocket or even your purse, but too small to have a true keyboard? Steve Jobs knows that my opinion doesn’t matter, since I’m not a mobile device user and don’t own iAnything. I’m not the target market.

The consensus seems to be that no, there really isn’t much market out there for a tablet computer – but Apple will probably manage to create one. I have to agree with the conventional wisdom.

The Apple mystique has always eluded me, but there is no doubting that it exists. The iPod transformed music listening, and the iPhone is transforming the way we think about smartphones, so no one will be surprised if Apple also transforms the way we think about tablet PCs.

They have a rare talent for guessing what consumers will like, and they certainly have everyone’s attention. I wouldn’t want to bet against them.