Comments for Dr. Chucks Blog

Comment on Two Camera Sony HD Interview Shoot – Lightweight / Travel setup by Chris Avram

Chris Avram — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 23:07:24 +0000

Thanks for documenting your setup, having been on the lens side of the setup, I was impressed and have been waiting for this list to upgrade my kit, the lights and stands in particular.

Comment on IBooks Author: Here Comes Apple – The Publishing World Ends in 2017 (rant) by Charles Severance

Charles Severance — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 19:26:13 +0000

David – you are quite right. One of the downsides of proprietary innovation is that the owners of the innovation decide who gets it and when. To be clear I wish there were an open movement in this area – but I fear that everyone will maintain their selfish and non-bold positions and play into the hand of our Apple overlords. This is a perfect example of the Nash Equilibrium http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jo5aAz9UWB0 where groups are maximizing their individual strategies, ignoring the group strategy, and finding themselves stuck in an equilibrium lose-lose situation with no ability to alter their strategies. In a sense, the participants in the marketplace are facing a multi-player prisoner’s dilemma with Apple as the police who have set the game up so Apple wins.

Comment on Two Camera Sony HD Interview Shoot – Lightweight / Travel setup by Rich Wiggins

Rich Wiggins — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 18:26:30 +0000

Even though I’ve seen this kit in person, I enjoyed reading the details about the pieces in detail. The quality of the video and the audio so far is amazing.

Sony has always been the company you love to hate, ever since they refused to admit Betamax lost. Invented the Walkman and owned portable audio; ceded the space to the iPod. So it’s not surprising they offer this incredibly cool tripod – for the consumer market, no less – but screw up on interface features on the cameras themselves.

Anyhow, it will be interesting to see what feedback you get and how your travel kit evolves. Increasingly major media companies, whether TV or even newspapers, are sending reporters out to the field to shoot their own video, so it will be fun to compare your kit with others’.

Comment on IBooks Author: Here Comes Apple – The Publishing World Ends in 2017 (rant) by David Horwitz

David Horwitz — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 17:03:34 +0000

Thanks for the interesting take on this Chuck. The whole iBooks issue has been met with rather more skepticism down here for one reason that is being missed by US competitors – Apple has an appalling record in dealing with territorial rights. Only a small fraction of the the world actually have have app stores with itunes, movies or books. To give you an example the South African store only has public domain works and Apple manuals – you book is not visible (though some say they found it via the direct link I’m not sure if they could actually download it).

So to quote the general line seen here “This may be a revolution but its no ours”

Comment on IBooks Author: Here Comes Apple – The Publishing World Ends in 2017 (rant) by Charles Severance

Charles Severance — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 22:15:19 +0000

George, The EULA does not apply to the *words* in my book – simply the exported epub-like output of that software. I have the book itself for sale lots of places (Amazon, Kindle, Nook) but those books were authored with software other than iBooks-Author – which means Apple has no say in those books. There are little contracts abut pricing in various channels – but that is a contract and not the “dreaded and much maligned EULA for iBooks Author”.

I think you are quite right that this will evolve based on how Apple sees the market develop and how it sees competition develop. But the rantiness of my post is because I think the market will *not* respond with the “MP3 of eBooks” and a good set of authoring and publishing tools – leaving Apple to own the future market and interchange format all on its own. The rest of the market is too gutless to rise to the challenge because it would require companies to get out of their comfort zone. They would prefer to pretend Apple is not a problem, huddle in their comfort zone and hope that they have retired before Apple puts their company out of business.

Comment on IBooks Author: Here Comes Apple – The Publishing World Ends in 2017 (rant) by George Kroner

George Kroner — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 21:50:02 +0000

So Chuck – about those pieces critical of the EULA. Now that your book is offered for sale (instead of for free), does this prevent you from offering your book through any other distribution channel? I’m confused myself over the wording, if this applies to the actual content of the book or to the entire packaged-up file, and how Apple would even go about enforcing this. Getting the legal and policy aspects right in my opinion is as important as getting the technology, user experience, and business/distribution model right. I’ll add that in my opinion the distribution model also isn’t quite right, and we will likely eventually see “Apple iBook reader” offered as an app on Kindle, Android, desktop app, etc. (Kindle and Nook definitely beat iPad when it comes to sustained reading of text – much easier on the eyes. If iPad3 doesn’t address this, I think there is still room for one of the others to maintain an edge, at least on the device end, for some time.) My guess is that they’ll also choose to do this over using a fully-open content format at first, then be forced to open up their format like they did by offering MP3 files through iTunes later down the line (also giving a chance for these standards/formats to more-fully develop and take hold). Interesting insight and predictions nonetheless. Thank you for your post.

Comment on Comparing Amazon S3 Pricing to USPS Pricing by Charles Severance

Charles Severance — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 04:51:38 +0000

Nick – Cool article. Blu-Ray would make it more practical. In fact it would be just right probably as it is scaled for 2 hours of HD video and likely the consumer burners will give us half that – sort of like DVD. Now we need a manufacturer to jump in :)

Comment on Comparing Amazon S3 Pricing to USPS Pricing by Nick Terrible

Nick Terrible — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 23:01:37 +0000

Chuck,

In a few years the cost of Blu-Ray might have dropped enough to become a possible solution…

On the Tera- scale Microsoft (Jim Grey) started looking at this ~2002.

http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=64570

Total cost & throughput makes FedEx the most cost efficient method.

Just shoot more video. :)

Cheers,

– Nick T

Comment on IBooks Author: Here Comes Apple – The Publishing World Ends in 2017 (rant) by Jerry Kolnick

Jerry Kolnick — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 04:06:01 +0000

Dear Charles Severance;

I just finished your blog on publishing with iBooks Author. It could have come at a better time for me. I am planning to create an iBook of some of my photographs, and I plan to use iBooks Publisher and iBooks to publish my eBook. I have been looking for a simple but elequant way to create an ePub without having to learn HTML5 or WordPress. Thanks to Apple I have that tool. Please if you have any advise on publishing and marketing it would be very appreciated.

Sincerely

Jerry Kolnick

P.S.

You can check examples of my work at flickr.com/photos/jkolnick

Comment on IBooks Author: Here Comes Apple – The Publishing World Ends in 2017 (rant) by Charles Severance

Charles Severance — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 17:32:30 +0000

Florian, Thanks for the comment. You hit the nail on the head. I *am* an open guy and wish for high quality open solutions in spaces that I care about (i.e. teaching and learning). If I were not an “open guy”, I would have joined a big company a long time ago and got my “pay off” and sat back and attended meetings wearing a suit and tie for the rest of my career for a large six-figure income and administrative assistant to arrange my travel. I prefer to fight the good fight rather than cash out the progress to date. What makes me angry is that the open community and those who would fund open innovation will not react to this, continuing instead to fund and give keynote speeches about dull, failed, well-funded, recycled ideas. I would like nothing better than to work with a worldwide open community to take on this problem work with Apple to define a glorious future where open was a part of it. But it is hard and needs a lot of resources – one guy in a faculty office with a few months of spare time in a summer will not get there. This is where funding is needed to speed things up and give the “open” a fighting chance. But it won’t happen because people who think they are visionaries are oh-so-often mere followers focused on kissing a** to get their next funding chunk rather than being real leaders and taking real risk. Since I have no resources and am too curmudgeonly to kiss the necessary a** to get resources, I write a vitriolic blog post, and simply join the Apple Borg and happily float along with the rest of the teachers and authors, breathlessly waiting for Apple to release its next innovation. At least in 2017 I can tell the world that “I told you so” :) P.S. I already have an OLAT Tattoo! It will be featured on the cover of my next book! Of course that next book is a few years out so by then, you will need a iPad to read it since there will be nothing else in the marketplace :)