Cartwright Reed

iPhones, Apple, audiobooks and ebooks

I switched from a BlackBerry 8830 (great phone!) about six months ago to try out Apple's iPhone. In spite of some problems with ATT service, I'd agree with those who say that Apple has made the first convergent device.

The iPhone is the first device I've used that did a "good enough" job as a phone, email reader, browser (the best mobile web browsing I've used -- in spite of the limited EDGE connectivity from ATT) that I don't take more than one device on the road. Although the pseudo GPS capability is quite poor, I find myself tolerating this and leaving my nuvi 650 at home rather than take two devices.

As you can imagine, I've pushed hard to make sure that iofy audiobooks are compatible with the iPhone and Apple iTouch as well as the standard iPods. People were pretty happy when we rolled out software to support the iPhone and iTouch a few weeks ago.

As iofy is a digital media platform developer as well as a device designer, I'm keenly interested in Apple's plans.  Today's NYT has an intriguing article by John Markoff where he opines on the future direction of Apple media devices:

On Wednesday, at a financial conference, Apple chief operating officer Tim Cook, confirmed that the iTouch was a platform, not a single product. That would indicate that there is something like a Safari Pad in the offing — a Wi-Fi connected device that would be a scaled-up digital media reader.

I think Markoff is right, but that the focus will be on an iTunes Pad, not a Safari Pad. Apple's story on the video side is just gearing up; a six or seven inch iTouch would drive sales of movies and tv shows -- and maybe tell an ebook story as well.

Audiobook Acceleration!

The audiobook space is humming, what with Amazon's purchase of Audible and now Random House's announcement to go DRM-free in the retail market. iofy will have some announcements of our own to make at the PLA show coming up in a few weeks.

About the Random House story: Cory Doctorov was the first to blog about Random House, but there was no independent confirmation from RH. Sol Young, iofy's VP of engineering, blogged about it and got immediate responses from Cory - and a comment on his blog confirming the new RH policy from Madeline Mcintosh (she also emailed him). Mcintosh is the publisher of Random House Audio.

Here's the important part of Madeline Macintosh's letter (courtesy Boing Boing) to publishing partners:

... because we believe that the future health of the audiobook category will depend on allowing a competitive retail marketplace, we will now allow our retail partners to sell in the MP3 format (in other words, without DRM).

This new approach from Random House represents forward thinking as the audiobook industry makes the digital jump. DRM isn't going away; there are business models, authors and titles where DRM may be appropriate, just as copy protection is used in the software market.

But the audiobook retail market will grow in a more healthy way without DRM, and iofy is looking forward to working with publishers that want to be part of that growth.

There are a bunch of missing blog posts on iofy web services, Amazon's Kindle ebook reader, Amazon's MP3 audio offering and the Apple iPhone. Let's see if I can get them all out next week.

In which a post is inconveniently delayed....

...and of course I waited too long to do a new post and now there is too much to talk about.

I'll start with an update on our iofy player. Its selling well and we've gotten great feedback from customers that used our first generation players in 2005. We have a new gallery of iofy player pictures here. Here's a sample:

I've also got new news on our download software. We've got a new version posted that I'll blog about more tomorrow. Please try it out by downloading a sample audiobook title that we've put up on the iofy website. Here it is:

(It's got Sherlock Holmes, it's got vampires, it's got Sussex, Sussex, Sussex!)

Picture of the county of Sussex courtesy Wikipedia.

Look for more updates tomorrow on DRM, Rock Band and Twitter!

Announcing our new Player at CES

We will be announcing our new iofy player at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas on January 7, 2008. We've been working on this player for a long time and I'm very proud of it - we've responded to just about every request for new features from our previous player, including USB, MP3 support, better navigation, better audio quality - the list goes on and on. Of course, it does a great job playing audiobooks on SD cards, but now you'll be able to make your own chips, upgrade firmware and search in audio using tag clouds like this. Stay tuned for more!

We'll be announcing the new player with our hardware partner, GeneralPlus, a division of Sunplus, the manufacturer whose processors power many low cost consumer electronics and smart toys. (Remember the Furby? That's them.)

The CES is a great show - reminds me of my favorite quote from William Gibson: "The future is already here - it is just unevenly distributed." There are always new companies showing devices that feel like visitors from a place a little further down the road.

First Post

I founded iofy three years ago to explore the opportunities of dynamic, device-independent and vendor-independant digital content. As we built a successful company managing 12,000 titles from major publishers, we've learned a lot about what the spoken audio industry needs. Now, we're making use of what we've learned by introducing the iofy platform.

I'm passionate about spoken audio -- you have audiobooks which begin as regular text, specialized audio, such as speeches, training audio, and sermons, which are more like performances, and podcasting, free-form audio that is brand new and yet as old as fireside conversations.

Although I've been blogging consistently since 2003, the blogs were always part of one skunkwork operation or another. This one will be out in the open, so please be patient as I figure this out!