eBooks on the iPod

July 23rd, 2006

Apple Interesting rumor about Apple working to put eBooks, or digital text on the iPod. My previous job was at the eBook division at Gemstar, coding content for the REB 1100 (formerly Rocketbook) and the REB 1200 (formerly Softbook).

Back then we were basically trying to create a digital store like the iTunes music store, where the users would buy their books and push it to the device. The Softbook model I think took a wrong turn where the store was put on the device itself. The Rocketbook model was similar to what is currently now the iPod and iTunes: manage content on your computer and use the device just for reading. But in addition to convining people to read on an electronic device, there was the issue of getting people to buy the devices and used to the whole concept of buying content and downloading it.

The second issue we faced was termed a “chicken and egg” problem: Consumer’s weren’t going to buy a dedicated eBook device until they knew there was loads of content to put on it, while publishers weren’t ready to invest money into providing their content until they knew there were loads of eBook devices out there ready to receive said content. I don’t think either of these issues was ever overcome by Gemstar and they closed its eBook division down.

Anyhow, the biggest advantage Apple has in terms of eBooks is that they already have a device in the hands of millions of customers (iPods), and they already have a store from which people can buy content (iTunes Music Store). The infrastructure is already in place. It won’t cost them much to add text reader functionality to it since it’s already proven the device can handle audio, video, still images, and text. The publishers will gladly hand over digital content since 1/2 of the “chicken and egg” problem has been solved: there are already millions of devices in people’s hands. So all that’s left is to convince people to download and read text content on their iPods, which if you think about it, won’t take much convincing from the iPod-addicted masses.

If Apple goes this route, they will likely offer current books for download, hopefully at a nice price. But they could also mine the world of magaines. One of my favorite projects at Gemstar was digitizing periodicals. We would recieve an XML feed of that week’s issue of TIME for example, and overnight a bunch of Perl scripts would parse the content, format it, and push it to people’s devices. The best part about it was that once set up, it was an automated process. Today, this is pretty much the idea of RSS feeds. So Apple could easily take existing RSS feeds and charge a bit of money for a subscription.

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