Amazon Buy Stanza: the birth of an E-book market monopoly??

There has been a lot of noise about Amazons purchase of Stanza, the famous E-book reader application for Windows, Mac and iPhone.

To clarify the situation for those of you that don't follow the ebook market, there are currently a few major players: Fictionwise, Amazon with it's kindle and Mobipocket which runs on many PDAs and smartphones (but not the iPhone) and which is also owned by Amazon. the fourth sizeable player was Stanza, with it's excellent application supporting Mobipocket, Fictiowise and ePub formated eBooks, as well as allowing conversion of some books to Amazon's kindle. The success of Stanza clearly overshadowed the official amazon reader for the iPhone, which was not very advanced.

The problem in my opinion is that now Amazon controls most of the major eBook players both in the content and application space!

On the content field they have Amazon (of course), Mobipocket and Stanza. the only major player remaining is Fictiowise and a few "specialty" eBook providers like Baen who specializes in Sci-Fi.

On the application space they have the Kindle reader, the Mobipocket reader and now stanza. The only remaining competition is Adobe Reader and the Open source FBreader and Plucker (which should work on, the Palm Pré in emulation mode)

Why is this bad? because we might end up with a virtual monopoly, a situation where you can't really distribute an eBook if you are not supported by Amazon, and where you can't really offer eBooks on a device if Amazon refuses to support you. This situation is very problematic in any market or industry because it leads to stagnation, as it is not in the interest of the dominant monopoly to "rock the boat" with new ideas or innovation, and in the eBook market (as well as in other creative markets) we NEED innovation.

What does this means for the eBook consumer? That the pace of innovation may slow down, especially on non mainstream platforms. I expect that in the medium term only specialized device such as the kindle or very successful platforms like the iPhone will be supported with professional content, the other having to make do with open source readers and free content. On the flip side we may finally have only one consolidated library for all our commercial content.

For the writer the situation is not so clear. As long as Stanza and the kindle continue supports open formats it will probably still be possible to distribute your content from your own site as long as you don't want to use DRM. If you wish to be distributed by major sites you choices have been reduced dramatically: it is either a site owned by Amazon or Fictionwise, and that's pretty much it. If you get rejected by Amazon your prospect are not bright.

What I do hope is that this will not reduce the amount of eBook content that is mode available, as this would be a loss for both consumers and writers.

UPDATE: it looks like I am not the only one worried about this!

The Windows 7 compatibility mode: not for the rest of us.

Microsoft made headlines today by announcing that Windows 7 would include a new compatibility mode to run Windows XP applications. This "compatibility mode" would be in essence a copy of virtual PC with a complete Windows XP SP3 image running inside it.

This would means that you would have a whole second PC virtualized on you machine. This may look like a good news, but it is not for several reasons:

1) The "compatibility mode" will only be available for the professional, enterprise or ultimate versions of Windows . For the rest of us, no XP compatibility unless we pay for an expensive upgrade.

2) Microsoft's virtualization technology is much less advanced than Vmware or VirtuaBox. This means that important multimedia components such as 3D acceleration (DirectX, OpenGL), hardware Video processing and sound processing acceleration will probably not be supported, so don't expect to be able to run an old version of powerDVD, PowerDirector or DAZ studio. Same issue for games. Furthermore hardware connections such as USB ports are not always properly virtualized, meaning that using an older peripheral such as a printer or media player will be an hit or miss situation.

3) Resources usage of Virtualization is very high! Since you need to run a whole second PC in addition of windows 7 (already a memory hog) you will need to have a really large amount of memory. On vista most users reported that Virtualization only start to work acceptably with 4 GBs of memory, and becomes comfortable at 8 GBs. This rules out this solution for all netbooks and most existing PCs, as only recent motherboards will support more than 4 GBs of memory.

All in all it looks like Microsoft is trying to court enterprise customers while leaving the rest of us without a solution (unless we pay them more money). This is not the way to treat your customers! I would have much prefered that they continue to support the Windows XP family for home use instead of this.

UPDATE: The register made a review of Xp mode.

Read more in the Windows category.

Windows 7 on netbooks: not so fast!

One of the major beefs that many consumers have with Windows Vista is it's poor performance on low end hardware, especially the very popular "Netbooks" that sell in drove recently. At a time when people are not inclined to upgrade their machines because the current ones are already powerful enough for most of their apps, this is bad news, and Windows Vista was shunned by many consumers. The only version of Windows widely sold on Netbooks is Windows XP.

Now Microsoft claimed that Windows 7 would be all different, that there would be a cheap version for netbooks (which is limited to opening 3 application at the same time) but that all versions would run fine on netbooks. It turns out that this is not really the case, especially on netbooks with SSDs

Actually what transpired for the original Netbook demonstration done by Microsoft what that the sample machine had it's ram and storage upgraded from what was commonly sold at the time (and what is still sold now). It now also appears that running Windows 7 ultimate on a netbook is not really a good idea performance wise. I am not surprised since Windows 7 is only an optimized version of Windows Vista, and optimization can only go so far.

It seems now very possible that Microsoft limited the amount of application that Windows starter edition could open simultaneously to 3 because Windows 7 is such a memory hog that opening many application degrades performance dramatically on Netbooks with only 1 GB of memory. The situation is made much worse on machines with SSDs, as these usually don't have a paging file.

My personal experience is that once you have installed an antivirus, firewall etc... on a netbook running even Windows XPperformance will already be inferior to the same netbook with Ubuntu (which doesn't require antivirus). This loss of performance is somewhat acceptable if you really want to run a Windows application however. On the other hand, if the performance loss with Windows 7 is bigger than with XP, it may not be justified so much anymore, as it would then probably be better to buy a full-fledged sub-notebook to run the app.

Netbooks are supposed to be small, cheap convenient machines for surfing the web and enjoying your media, not full-fledged mini-laptops. I suspect that Windows 7 runs well on the most powerful netbooks, but for me these are already mini laptops!

On the other hand the latest version of Ubuntu, Jaunty Jackalope, contains all drivers for most existing netbooks natively, and it boot and performs quickly even on older equipment and entry level netbooks.

For me the choice is a no brainer: if you don't absolutely need a specific Windows app, go with a Linux netbook. If you absolutely need windows be sure to get either Windows XP,Windows 7 starter or to buy a higher end machine with a large amount of memory (2 Gb minimum!), an hard drive and a maybe decent graphic chipset, not the typical Intel 945 found on 99% of netbooks! Another thing to keep in, mind if you go for starter is that Upgrading to the full version of Windows 7 is NOT a good idea unless you have the hardware to match.
Image cc by Taller_Hikari

Tech-no-media: what is it about.

The name Tech-no-media may surprise, so I will explain what it means in the context of this blog. The "no" in the title shouldn't be understood with the English meaning but with the Japanese meaning (I am a big fan of Anime). This would pretty much mean "the technology of media".

So what does this means in the context of this blog and what is this blog about?

This blog aims to cover my opinion and advice on new technology from the angle of new media consumption. From the latest hardware and software (Linux and Windows) that allow you to access the internet from anywhere and enjoy the free digital entertainment available online to informed opinions on the state and the future of the technology and media industries, you will find it all on this blog.

The technology and media world are unavoidably linked together, from the invention of the printing press to the internet, cheap computers and free open source software. This blog aims not only to inform you with useful advice on technology but also to present you with some analysis and opinions on the direction that this technology is taking. I will often make predictions on the future and try to start a discussion.

But the Tech-no-media network is not only the main blog but also includes "From Windows to Linux for the average Joe", a blog about Linux for the absolute beginner, and "Online Video Producer", a blog focused on creating and publishing videos and podcasts for the web.

If this piqued your interest don't hesitate to subscribe to this blog's feed to see what's coming.

Media review: The cursed countess trailer

Today's web media review will not really be a review for a change but will be shameless self promotion ! Let it be known to the world that Studioerlik has released the trailer for it's new cg animated fantasy web series: The Cursed Countess fantasy adventures.

This trailer covers in fact the first 3-part adventure of the Cursed Countess and her lively sidekick Sondra the thief. Each part is roughly 5 minutes in duration (well, yeah, 3D animation does really take a long time to render).

The story in the first adventure covers the meeting of the two main characters: the first is the countess, a sexy warrior of ages past afflicted, by an ancient curse and now unable to kill or die. The second is Sondra, a young thief with a good heart (sometimes), a quick sword (well, she is still alive) and a very short temper (unfortunately). The story escalates to the dramatic explanation of how the Countess became cursed and immortal. A second story is already in preparation and should (I hope) be released before the end of the year.

The show is available for download in High definition (HD) on the series website (rss), and available for streaming or download in SD on the Blip.TV page of the series.

I will keep you updated on the series progress, and for all of you media creators out there I will try to make posts relating my experience in publishing the series (subscribe to Tech-no-media to be sure you don't miss them).