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You can transfer audiobooks
from Audible.com to your Kindle.
That is, unless, you use a Mac.
Here’s some big news for audiobook listeners (I’m one): Amazon has announced this morning they are buying Audible.com. If you’re an audiobook listener, you probably already know that Audible serves as the back-end for audiobook downloads for Apple’s iTunes Store. However, as I’ve said on this blog before, it’s crazy to purchase audiobooks via the iTunes Store rather than directly from Audible.com as the direct purchase allows re-downloads of any books you buy — and the iTunes Store doesn’t. Amazon.com has a similar “library” backup feature for digital media purchased there (except MP3s), like Kindle eBook files.
I have some problems with audiobooks via Audible.com, however — some problems Amazon could solve. First, audiobooks are incredibly expensive — just like the inflated cost of eBooks before Amazon stepped in with the Kindle and a price around $10 for best-sellers. An audiobook of a bestseller is more likely to be more expensive than the print version — and in the same range as the cost of an audiobook you’d purchase on a CD in a bookstore. To get around such inflated pricing, I have a subscription plan on the service that provides one book credit per month. I never go over the limit as the per-book cost can be stratospheric — as in, provide me all the incentive necessary to drop by the Nashville Library and check out the book on a CD. Oh yes, and on a CD, those audiobooks don’t have all the DRM one finds on the same aduiobooks one downloads from Audible.com. Let me translate this: I can drop by the library and transfer DRM-free audiobooks to my computer. Gee, that sounds like the same issue Amazon.com fixed when they started offering music downloads recently. Hmmm. Dear Jeff: You can do it dude. Cheaper audiobooks. No DRM — just like the same books on CDs. Hey, you da man.
Speaking of audiobooks and Amazon and Audible, here’s a suggestion for Amazon: Quit locking out Mac users from using their Kindleto listen to audiobooks from Audible.com. Here’s what I mean: The only way to transfer an audiobook to the device (precisely, a DRM-ladened audiobook purchased from the leading online retail sources of audiobooks — Amazon, Apple or Audible.com) is via a computer. The only computer operating system with which one can authorize a Kindle to play an audiobook purchased from Amazon, Apple or Audible.com, is with software available only on the Widows operating system.
How did I discover this? I have both an iPhone and an old-school iPod nano for listening to audiobooks, so I hadn’t previously taken much of a look at the audiobook capabilities of the Kindle. And frankly, while the device has a headphone jack for listening to audiobooks, that feature wasn’t heavily touted in the roll-out of the product. After a bit of struggle recently, I can now understand why this little-touted feature is so little touted.
The first problem has been noted and is what the pundits would call “the elephant in the room”: While you can store the text and black/white graphics from 100+ books on the 256 MB of a Kindle, the number of audiobooks is considerably less — say, less than one, in some instances. In my experiment, on a Kindle with about a dozen text books already loaded on it, I was limited to one Audible.com file containing an eight-hour recording.
However, I couldn’t listen to any of that file, as I discovered the following message buried in the directions found on Amazon.com regarding using an Audible.com file on a Kindle (something allowed) if that file is transferred to the Kindle using a Mac:
“In order to play audiobooks on the Amazon Kindle, you must first activate the device to your account (using the Windows software, AudibleManager)…If you are a Macintosh user, you need to connect your Kindle to a Windows-based computer running AudibleManager to authorize your Kindle using the above instructions. You may be able to authrize your Kindle running AubibleManager on Windows on your Macintosh is you have your Macintosh configured to run Windows. Once authorized with your Audible credentialis, you can then use audible files downloaded through Audible Manger under Windows or itunes by copying them to your Kindle via USB.
Uh, no thank you. I’ll just use my iPhone.
Sidenote — a positive word about the Kindle: As I’ve written before, I have one and despite its god-awful hardware design and some of the most incredibly bad user-interface ideas I’ve ever witnessed (see earlier review), I like the convenience of having dozens of books in my briefcase and I especially like the think-it, buy-it instant-shopification features it offers with an EVDO-powered access to the Amazon store. Oh, yes, and I’m big fan of the way your ebook purchases are backed up on Amazon.com. Unlike most badly designed things — say, the QWERTY keyboard — the Kindle’s bad features never get easier to use with experience. Almost daily, I’ll pick it up to put it away to discover I’ve advanced dozens of pages in the process. It boggles me that its designers failed to take into consideration how people hold a book when they read it.
But that’s not what I wanted to rant about this time.
Technorati Tags: amazon.com, audible.com, kindle
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Author (and blogger) Jandos Rothstein hearts Jane Froelich’s art direction of the NY Times magazine. Me too. It’s why I pay extra for that hunk of paper containing stuff I can read free online.
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Okay, people: This is what I’m talking about. Quote - Make magazine has announced the creation of a new position—a Flickr photo pool curator.
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Quote - Monkey truly blends old and new media design conventions in a way that is both appalling and appealing. Observation - I haven’t actually, ahem, downloaded the, ahem, magazine myself.
Most of the time, when people talk about the network effect, their focus is on its benefits — As new people join a network, the network grows exponentially in value to the next person who joins. While in reality, the “value” of something is ultimately determined by whatever someone is willing to pay for it on eBay, people who discuss theories about things like the network effect have been know to suggest the theoretical value of a network is supposed to be proportional to the square of the number of users. But you knew that already, I’m sure. Less noted are the downsides of the network effect. These relate to its diminishing value as each new person joins — if the resources necessary to the maintain the network do not scale appropriately. This is especially true if the network includes a critical mass of early-adopting tech bloggers. This phenomenon, which some people are beginning to call “the Twitter syndrome,” can be illustrated thusly.:
Bonus link:Mark Evans points out another event that will test Twitter’s mettle - Super Tuesday.
Technorati Tags: twitter
 First, a confession that comes as no surprise to anyone who reads this weblog: I’m a Flickr fanboy. And for me, being a fan has extended way beyond merely using Flickr as a personal photo-sharing service, but also looking for ways to use the site’s API on our company’s website and for other ways to use Flickr as platform for marketing, storytelling and business-related networking.
Second, another confession that comes as no surprise to anyone who reads this weblog: I’m a Make magazine fanboy. Since the magazine was first announced, I’ve used it as an example of how and why a print magazine still works in this age of whatever-we’re-calling-it-this-week (digital?). The technology-centric publishers of Make magazine know why they launched a print magazine and not something called a magazine that was online. (Although at first, they used the goofy word, “mook.”) The publisher (O’Reilly) completely and thoroughly understands everything there is to know about the economic potential of print publications that explain digital phenomena — they are masters of that category in book publishing. The “print” versions of Make are highly anticipated by their subscribers. Their readers bookmark articles and would no more throw away an old copy than your grandmother would throw away an issue of National Geographic. The Make magazine folks — especially Phillip Torrone — are also some of the most natural blog-savvy, social media people I’ve ever encountered. The readers of the magazine know the people who work for the magazine — and they are a community — not merely the word community magazine publishers often use as a faux-term to describe a database containing the names of all their subscribers. How do you know your brand is a community? When your readers refer to themselves as something other than “reader” or “user” (as in, Makers) and they look forward to hanging out with each other at the “faire.”
So it should come as no surprise that I’m over-flowing with kudos for Make’s newest savvy move in hiring a Flickr photo curator who will help discover some of the how-to gems being constantly added by Make readers (oops, I mean, Makers) to its Flickr pool.
When I write about magazines and community and conversational media and all that other stuff I drone on-and-on about, this is what I’m talking about.
Technorati Tags: flickr, makezine, make magazine, puppy
I grabbed this screen shot last night to go with a post I was going to make today, asking, Hasn’t it been two weeks since Steve Jobs announced that a free Apple TV software upgrade allowing movie rentals would be available within two weeks. Thanks to arstechnica.com, I got my answer before posting the question: Sure, enough, it has been two weeks but Apple is now saying (buried in a back-patting release), that the new Apple TV software will be available “within two weeks” of today.
Why I care? I’ve been planning a brief video demonstrating how the AppleTV is a great example of emerging new channels for mediacasting by companies and associations. In other words (Apple-groupies), I was merely trying to be an Apple fanboy evangelist.
A long-standing complaint of mine with business-to-business media is that too often they focus their coverage on the transactions of business rather than leading readers to a deeper understanding of more critical issues related to their industry. Don’t get me wrong: the transactions of an industry are important news and it is a requirement that a serious B2B media company break those stories — who’s buying whom, who’s got what new account, personnel moves, financial deals. It’s just that too often, those become the primary focus of a medium — and there’s lots more news out there than who’s getting fired or bought.
A long time ago, I claimed that I don’t blog about transactions unless I’m personally involved or I am friends with someone involved or I believe some highly-visible party involved in the transaction deserves what’s happening — good or bad.
I was reminded this morning what my problem with most B2B transaction stories when I saw this story from my friends at Folio: magazine called: Why Randall-Reilly Sold to Investcorp.” Nothing earth-shattering in the story, but it attempts to answer to the question I — and I’m sure at least 2 or 3 others — had yesterday when I saw the news about the sale — the question we always have when we get news that seems to be pulled straight from press release. Going past the press release quotes to attempt to answer the question “Why?” is what good B2B media does.
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The “rogue trader” who caused Société Générale to lose $7 billion told investigators: “All he wanted was to be respected, and to earn a big bonus.”
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Quote - While (usage problems) reveal troubling capacity issues that Twitter will need to deal with, this is the surest sign that the service has gone mainstream in a way not anticipated by its founders.
 On October 8, 2003 , I first wrote on this blog how strange I thought it was that people actually slept through some of the more bizarre and strange ideas of the late 90s like the CueCat. That was my first-ever post about the re-emergence of Cue-cat-esque ideas that use cell-phone cameras to read bar codes because, and I’m guessing here because I’ve never really understood why, people apparently can’t type in URLs.
On January 31, 2006, I wrote about another CueCatesque cell-phone TV barcode reading solution to a problem that doesn’t exist.
Fast-forward to today and, well, every old dumb thing is new dumb thing again. And just because it’s Google this time doesn’t make it not dumb.
That said, I must admit that I found myself in a bookstore recently where I snapped a cover of a book with my iPhone so that I’d remember the name later. It sure would be convenient if I could go ahead and snap that barcode and have Amazon deliver me the book the next morning. (That was a joke, people.)
Technorati Tags: cuecat
 Frank Baker, media educator, has posted a “media literacy lesson plan” for teachers informing them How to Use Super Bowl Ads In The Classroom. Apparently this lesson plan is designed to help improve the “media literacy” of children so they’ll understand better how media works to influence them into making decisions like purchasing stuff they don’t really need. While I agree that such literacy is important (my children will tell you that when they were pre-schoolers, I would often ask them after watching or hearing an ad, “What were they trying to sell us?”), I’m amused (alarmed?) that Mr. Baker does not see the irony of this plan if its goal is to encourage students to be less influenced by the media.
Here’s the lesson plan:
Here are some questions you might have your students ponder before the game:
1. What do you know about the Super Bowl game? Where did you learn it?
2. Why does the game get tremendous media attention every year?
3. What makes advertisers want to put their ads on this once-a-year sporting event?
4. Why do the ads cost over $2.5 million for just one 30 second ad?
5. Who decides what order the ads air during the game?
6. How do advertisers create buzz about their ads, even before the game is broadcast?
7. Create a chart listing the known advertisers and their parent companies.
8. How many ads are for: alcohol? Why is this so?
9. Which ad(s) are you looking forward to viewing and why?
10. How do advertisers make money from their Super Bowl spots?
11. Might you find ads inside the stadium? If so, where? Be on the lookout for not-so-obvious ads during the broadcast. (Students might want to create a list)
Here are some questions to consider after the game:
1. What ad(s) did you find most entertaining, and why? (students should be specific and give details here)
2. What ad(s) did you find the most dull, and why?
3. Which ad(s) did you think were most effective, and why?
4. Which ad(s) were you most willing to share (email) with a friend?
5. Which ad(s) featured well-known personalities? Why?
6. Which “techniques of persuasion” were used in each ad? (teachers might want to print out a list and have students match the ads with those on the list)
7. Calculate the total cost to the TV network if each ad costs an estimated $2.7 million.
8. How do Super Bowl advertisers get mileage for their message after the game is over?
9. How many ads did you spot inside the stadium?
I’ve developed some follow-up lesson-plan questions of my own:
Here are some questions to consider about this Super Bowl lesson plan:
1. How many hours before, during and after the game did this lesson plan assign students to spend watching and discussing Super Bowl ads?
2. What does it communicate to students that two days of classroom time should be devoted to discussing beer ads appearing on a football game.
3. How many minutes of beer ads were the students assigned to watch and discuss by this lesson plan?
4. Discuss why and how lesson plans like these — even clever and creative ones — frighten parents and other citizens who are concerned with the state of the nation’s educational system.
5. Create a chart listing any possible connection there might be between this lesson plan and something beneficial to a student (other than reinforcing how important drinking Budweiser must be to the nation’s economy because they can afford more and funnier ads than anyone).
6. Calculate the total cost to the nation’s economy of wasting valuable classroom time on lessons plans like this.
I’m posting this because I know that one day I’ll be blogging on the topic of why the term “business model” is so useless (like the word “content”) and I’ll want to point back to this quote from Martin Sorrell: “If there’s a phrase I loathe, it’s ‘business model…In my company, we have 102,000 people working in 106 countries. Our world is made up of revenues, costs, profits, and cash flow….Can each panelist precisely say what their revenues, profits, and cash flows are today, and what they will be in a few years?”
Here’s my take: My bank has yet to accept a deposit from me for something called a “business model.” The only business model I care about is one that results in something that, at the end of the day, will be accepted as a deposit by my bank.
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In a move that might come to be known as the Al Gore rule, Apple is paring back the freebies for its outside directors.
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While the headline says “real,” the video is of a model prototype. Nonetheless it does help me with my 2008 goal of having more links to news about flying cars. (Thanks, Britt Blaser.)
 Never has there a been a week like the week we’re entering — a perfect storm in which three or more well-formed fronts of hot-air will be colliding for a solid 7-9 day period. In the coming days, hundreds of hours of airtime and millions of inches of editorial space and terrabytes of server storage will be devoted to filling the black hole known as “the week leading up to…” of 2008.
Normally, this is merely “the week leading up to the Super Bowl” with its non-stop carpet-bomb coverage of a four-hour sporting event (actually, a three-hour sporting event with a really long half-time) that will not be played until next Sunday afternoon. Despite that reality of quantum physics, the pre-game show has already begun.
It would be bad enough if there was just a football game that needed to be talked about for the next 24/7, but alas, that four-hour slot has also become the marketing event of the year, so we’ll also be subjected to a week-long barrage of paint-by-number stories about Super Bowl ads (how many animal spots? can GoDaddy get some more spots banned? how much does a second of Super Bowl time cost?).
But wait, there’s more this year. This is also “the week leading up to….” Super Tuesday, or, please god don’t make me say it, Super-duper Tuesday. A week from Tuesday, when about half the country’s states will hold their presidential primaries and neither party has a clear front-runner. This is unchartered territory, as there’s never been a primary day with so much to talk about — and so many people desperate to do the talking. All week long, every American who’s ever voted will be able to appear on MSNBC, Fox or CNN or Politico.com or the Huffington Post discussing their theory on why Bill Clinton is spreading the rumor in Birmingham that, if elected, Barack plans to make people there start calling their state, Alaobama.
Oh yeah, and another thing: We’ve still got a volatile market that needs an endless parade of analysts and economists who can point out how on one hand the economy is not really that bad off while on the other, we should all be dusting off that dried food we stocked up in 1999.
This is a week pundits and talking-heads live for.
This is a week during which I read a novel.
Later: David Carr on how Fox plans to mashup coverage of the Super Bowl and Super Tuesday.
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