erin!balser

I got an iPhone today. My luck in waiting only 10 minutes to get a phone is completely due to suckers like Matt who waited all day yesterday with a broken service system to get theirs, taking hours and hours to activate a single phone, leaving the Fido flagship no choice but to close yesterday with about a dozen phones left over.

The guilt eats at me.

It really does.

I went back and forth on getting this phone for a long time. What finally broke it for me was that I was truly disappointed that I didn’t have any way to Twitter throughout BookExpo while running around like a maniac. So this is my plan with my little phone. To Twitter and liveblog all the book events I attend, and maybe someday, to move this twittering from my personal account to the account of whichever publisher I’m working for at the time.

Also, unbeknownst to me, the iPhone has an amazing eReader application and public domain books are only 0.99. My dream of reading books from this phone is so much closer than I ever knew! Hopefully publishers will get on board with this format and make their books available to iPhone and iPod Touch users.

Any suggestions for making this machine as publishing-friendly as possible?!

Thanks to Descant, I recently discovered an online service called Book Mooch, where people all around the world can trade and share books.

All you do is sign up, type in the books you want to give away. Once they are given away, you receive a “point” which allows you to mooch a book you’ve been wanting to read off someone else. Read it and then keep it forever or return it to the mooching pile for someone else to enjoy.

It’s great way to meet fellow book lovers around the world, find that elusive out-of-print book you’ve been dying to read and to dispose of books you no longer need or want in a way thats helpful! It even has a handy Wish List feature, allowing you to acquire the books you’ve been dying to read.

Check it out for yourself here.

Thanks to Joe Wikert, I came across Podiobooks, a website that offers serialized audiobooks for free.

Users can subscribe to a book or books and download the chapters to listen to as they are released. They let you get your books through iTunes, Juice and Transitor. They currently have over 190 titles and 42,000 users. Pretty crazy stuff.

Joe makes the great suggestion of Podiobooks joining forces with the other publishing platforms. Joe’s a smart guy, you should read his blog.

Check out Podiobooks and let me know what you think!

A few days ago Timothy Egan of the NY Times responded to Steve Jobs’ statement about Amazon’s Kindle:

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is,” Jobs told the Times. “the fact is that people don’t read anymore. Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year.”

I’m one of the people who found this statement really disappointing. I believe Apple is a company that could make an e-book reader work, make it compatible with several other programs on the market and make it sexy. Hell, it could be as easy as giving the iPhone book-reading capabilities.

Anyways, back to Egan. In his refute of Jobs and his declaration of his love of books, he had the following to say:

The Mac, Pixar, the iPhone, the iPod, iTunes. This stuff is cool. Lighter than air. iGetit. But it’s just product, dude.

Just product? Maybe so. But these products revolutionized the way we consume things. Apple has changed how we interact with technology, with creative industries, and, to some extent, with each other. How can it be “just product” if it’s doing that?

Egan’s statement comes from a desire to demonstrate that reading is above being “just product.” “Reading is something else, an engagement of the imagination with life experience,” he writes. “It’s fad-resistant, precisely because human beings are hard-wired for story, and intrinsically curious. Reading is not about product.”

Egan is confusing “reading” with “books”. iTunes and iPods are products, listening is not. The Mac is a product, everything we use it for is not. iPhone is a product, interacting with friends and surfing the internet is not.

If we had a device that had inter-active cross-references and indices, that let us immediately hook up to others reading the same book, that gave us access to secondary and outside resources through the very book we were reading, that gave us the ability to instantly store and save passages we found moving or thought-provoking, wouldn’t that change how we read?

Yes, reading is more than product.

But, just as with those other products, the right e-reader will be more than “just product.”

We just need to get Steve Jobs on board.

Image by Dave & Bry. Licensed through Creative Commons.

Here is my magazine website anaylsis assignment for my Mags 2.0 class for the Book and Magazine Publishing Program at Centennial College.

All three magazine selected, The Walrus, Entertainment Weekly and Teen Vogue have an established online presence of varying success. Here they are, presented from best to worst.

The Walrus

The Walrus is one of the best 2.0 magazines out there. They have lots of unique online content that is interactive, including eight different blogs from various contributors, regular podcasts which can be subscribed to via iTunes, a Discussion section featuring articles of particularly interesting or hot topics, and interactive and online galleries.

Their RSS options are showcased on their header, multiple times on their sidebar and in their footer. They have several different subscription options including their Features, Blogs, Field Notes, Discussions, Podcasts, and News and Events.

All these features are clearly showcased on the frontpage of The Walrus’s website, using a clear color-coded system. The ability to subsribe to any of these features is evident using the RSS icon button beside each headline.

You have several options through which you can subcribe to their feed using both online RSS feeds as well as desktop software through a variety of programs. For their content that is free to readers, several social bookmarking sites are available at the top of each article including RSS. They are clear and use the bookmark tools’ original icons, yet integrate seamlessly into the design of the website. New readers can immediately recognize the site’s interactive potential no matter where they enter the site from and then are immediately provided with several different options through which they can interact and bookmark the site.

The Walrus provides its readers with a variety of 2.0 content. There is essentially something for everyone. The 2.0 element is very clear with the Walrus from the get-go and it has more online and interatvie content than most 2.0 and online magazines. However, it is frustrating when you are navigating their website and hit a “sorry this is for subscribers only” page. Advertisers and editors should be able to easily recognize The Walrus’s interactive new media approach and be able to easily capitalize on this opportunity for developing new and innovative content and reaching consumers.

Analysis of Entertainment Weekly and Teen Vogue below the jump!

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