Technology

I don't like Apples "everything must go through us" model, whether that's "file transfer only through iTunes" or "apps only through app store".

The article How HTML5 will kill the native app had some interesting-to-me "historical" information.

The iPhone’s beauty was manifold, but first and foremost, it allowed developers to build applications and sell them for a fee — to users who could conveniently tap their iTunes account to buy things through the iPhone’s App Store. This bypassed the control of the carriers, which had long dictated what phones featured on their “decks.”

So that is part of why people put up with the walled garden thing - they're comparing it with having no options at all!

I have a mobile phone. I occasionally use it for calls. If you exclude spam by my provider, I've received maybe a dozen text messages, and wrote less. I spend a lot of time at my computer, though. So, when I look at a smartphone whose main functions include accessing the internet, I compare it not with a mobile phone, but with a computer. And the thought of Microsoft getting a 30% cut of any software purchase I make just because my OS is Windows sounds ludicrous.

Still doesn't mean I'd want to buy Apple products, but at least the lack of upset in other people makes more sense to me now.

I've started getting into ebooks, and there's a whole lot of anger all around about things like piracy, DRM, ebook quality, geographic restrictions, pricing, publishing dates...

Now, I don't want to post a long rant, but yesterday and today I made my first experiences with buying books with DRM, and would like to illustrate one particular problem.

These are four different books. The series is named "The Sharing Knife", and that name is written in rather big letters on the covers, but in addition to that there's "Volume 1: Beguilement", "Volume 2: Legacy", and so on, respectively.

It makes HarperCollins look not exactly competent when they distribute books like that. (The first book had dozends of minor (presumably) OCR-caused mistakes - double quotes split into a pair of single quotes with a space in between -, which doesn't help.)  But what adds insult to injury is that the title would be easy to fix for the customer, if not for DRM making the books uneditable.

There are a few authors whose books I like enough to buy even if the files are DRM-infested, but when it comes to looking for new authors to try out, I'll concentrate on ones with publishing houses that don't use DRM. Or who self-publish.

For the sake of fairness, I have to say: At least HarperCollins is trying. Those ebooks seem pretty well structured, including a table of content with links, and not including boilerplate text about stripped covers.