The popular ebook reader, Stanza, has now been updated for iOS 5, but new owner Amazon says that this is the last update.
I stopped using Stanza, formerly my reader of choice, because it was unusable on iOS 5. In its place, I started to use Apple’s iBooks, which turns out to be a remarkably capable and polished reader. I’m downloading the new Stanza update, but I’m not sure I’ll go back to Stanza.
Like the lady said, “you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone”. iOS 5 seems to signal the end of the line for Lexcycle’s excellent free ebook reader, Stanza. Stanza was mostly solid on iOS 4, but if you run it on iOS 5, it vomits error messages and dies.
There’s not much hope of a fix, because Lexcycle has been acquired by Amazon, who have an e-reader of their own and small interest in developing a competitor. Kindle for iOS is fine in its way, but it’s no Stanza.
Incidentally, I seem to be running into this purchase-and-kill a lot lately. Another of Amazon’s victims was online music store Amie Street, which Amazon bought up and promptly closed. Similarly, Getty Images has taken over free stock photo site stock.exchange. The site still proclaims itself to be “the leading free stock photo site”, but this is apparently some interesting new meaning of ‘free’ that actually means ‘give us all the money’, because as far as I can tell nothing about the site is free at all. But I digress.
So, no more Stanza. Alternatives that I’ve looked at so far include the Kindle app (free) iBooks (free), the Chinese-made ShuBook (ad-supported, or $1.99 through in-app purchase), Bluefire (free), and GoodReader ($4.99). Two I haven’t tried are i2Reader ($4.99) and MegaReader ($1.99), which both get mixed reviews.
ShuBook fell at the first fence when it choked on the first ePub that I fed it. It’s also designed according to what I think of as a common Chinese aesthetic, which says that something isn’t beautiful until looking at it makes your eyes bleed. Look at a Chinese newspaper sometime and you’ll see what I mean. It’s not just that being an ignorant gweilo I can’t make sense of it, it’s that every morsel of space must be packed with information and, preferably, bright colors as well. So, ShuBook goes.
GoodReader doesn’t do ePub at all (but it stays on my iPod because it does an awesome job of displaying PDFs). Kindle doesn’t like ePub either: I could probably feed it .mobi versions of the books that I’m interested in, but it’s not particularly special as an eBook reader, and it doesn’t have the ability to group books into categories: you end up paging through one long list.
So the two front-runners seem to be Bluefire and, amazingly enough, iBooks. Bluefire does a nice job of displaying eBooks; it’s responsive and crisp, seems stable, and it’s free. You can also download content in-app from Feedbooks (my favorite free bookstore). The downside is that, like the Kindle app, there’s no way to organize books into sets.
iBooks has a strike against it because of its hideous and space-consuming faux bookshelf interface. I assume this was the brainchild of whoever was also responsible for the fake leather travesty imposed on iCal and Address Book in OS X Lion. I don’t know who it was, or why the perfectionist Steve Jobs signed off on these abominations, but they need to go. My hope is that at some point Jony Ive will walk whoever was responsible behind the Apple Store and put a swift, merciful iBullet in them, so Apple can go back to designing interfaces that work, rather than interfaces that oh my God, it looks just like a real bookshelf, isn’t that the cutest thing?
Anyway, despite its ugly UI, iBooks has some real strengths. You can display your books as a relatively unadorned list, hiding most of the nastiness of the fake bookshelf. It handles PDFs, categories, and user-managed collections. Display is quick and crisp. It has bookmarks, table of contents features, direct control over brightness, and search, both within collections and books. Somewhat to my surprise, I’m finding that iBooks may actually be the best alternative to Stanza out there.
So iBooks is going into the coveted spot on my homescreen formerly occupied by Stanza, and Stanza is being removed (forever?) from my iPod. So long, Stanza, and thank you.
Here’s a question for you: have you ever used Ping, Apple’s ‘social network for music’? OK, here’s another: are you still using it? Right, didn’t think so. Here’s a third question: do you have friends who use Foursquare, and flood your Twitter feed with constant updates on their location? Right. And do you have other friends who spend all day long retweeting everything that they see? Of course you do.
So why am I asking these questions? Because I think they reveal some problems with the micro-blogging ecosystem, and they might just have a common solution.
Let’s take Ping first. In its present form, Ping is probably not long for this world. Apple tried to create a social network in a walled garden, which is like opening an invitation-only shopping mall. If that wasn’t bad enough, Ping is a usability nightmare: it’s tucked away like an afterthought in a corner of the iTunes interface, hidden behind a set of menus that look as if they were slapped together by the summer intern on his last day. When it launched, you couldn’t even send pings about any song that wasn’t available in the iTunes Store (that restriction seems to have been lifted). Micro-blogging is all about responding to the impulse of the moment, but the way Ping is built it’s absolute death to spontaneity. For that reason alone, I think it’s doomed.
What Apple really wanted was Twitter. Twitter is there, it works. People have Twitter clients open on their desktops and they know how to use them. It takes a second to switch to your Twitter client and fire off whatever’s on your mind right now. (This is not always a good thing). Your friends are there, the bands you want to follow are there, everything that Apple wanted from Ping is already on Twitter. Ping should never have been a separate network: it should have been a layer over Twitter.
On Monday, Apple announced that iOS 5 will come with Twitter deeply hooked into it. You’ll be able to send tweets from the Camera app, from Safari, from Maps (feeling nervous yet, Foursquare?), and from third-party apps. There’s no mention of the Music application, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the ‘walled garden’ version of Ping was eventually allowed to wither quietly away, only to be relaunched as what will be essentially a highly-specialized Twitter client.
The downside, of course, is that if Ping starts flooding Twitter with notifications, your Twitter timeline is going to become even more unreadable than it already is. You already have, I would guess, a handful of friends who flood you with Foursquare check-ins every time they cross the room or go outside for a cigarette. You probably also have at least one friend who automatically announces all their other online activity (Facebook status updates, Tumblr posts etc) on Twitter. Then there’s the Retweeter, who generates an apparently unending stream of retweets. And the chatterers, who use Twitter as a kind of public chatroom, having cosy little conversations that happen to be broadcast to everyone who follows them.
If you’ve been exposed to any of this behavior, you’ve probably longed for a way to filter all this stuff. You want to see what your friend X has to say, but you don’t want all his Foursquare checkins. You want to stay in touch with Y, but you could do without all her retweets. And so on. You want some of what each person chooses to announce, but not all of it.
So far, the only aspect of this that has been addressed are the retweets. If one of your friends is a problem retweeter, you can actually turn off their retweets, so that you only see their original messages. That’s an implicit recognition that a retweet is a different type of thing from an original.
Something similar happened on Facebook. People got so sick of being deluged with Farmville and Mafia Wars updates from their friends that Facebook provided a way to hide specific kinds of updates.
Maybe what we need is a more general notion of ‘typed tweets’.
At present, Twitter and other micro-messaging systems serve as a channel for undifferentiated packets of information. Problems arise because this single channel carries not only low-volume, high-interest announcements (personal tweets) but also high-volume, low-interest information (music pings, location check-ins, chats, retweets, activity updates), and the interesting stuff is easily drowned out in the noise.
The first thing we need is a way to differentiate the different kinds of information. It’s too much to hope that your garrulous friend will tag their latest ‘LOL’ message with a marker that identifies it as chaff, but anything that is generated semi-automatically by an application - location check-ins, music player pings and so on - can easily be categorized. Now, instead of a single channel, you have a set of parallel channels and you can dip in and say exactly which ones you want to pay attention to at any given time.
The high-volume content isn’t always low-interest. If your friend A lives five states away, their location check-ins aren’t interesting, but if your friend B lives nearby, the news that they’ve just checked-in at the bar down the street is high-interest information. You don’t want to throw all the high-volume stuff away (although you could), but you do want to control what you see at any given moment.
A single-channel Twitter lets us subscribe to our friends’ lives: a multi-channel Twitter would let us subscribe in a much more fine-grained fashion to the specific aspects of their activity that interest us.
Twitter is looking increasingly like a protocol, or a platform, if you prefer. Just as the basic platform of the World Wide Web grew to support blogs and shopping sites and social networking and all the rest of it, Twitter - or micro-messaging services, if you want to be more generic - can grow to support a whole host of similarly diverse applications. But it can’t do that on a single-channel model, not with every new device or application begging to be allowed to pour a flood of updates into that single channel.
In the short-term, tools will probably emerge to create implicit ‘types’ by the use of more or less intelligent filters: essentially, spam filters in your Twitter client that throw away the Foursquare check-ins and the “I’m listening to …” announcements. But that’s the wrong way to go about it. The right way is to start building the notion of information typing into the protocol.
If I were Twitter, I’d already be working on Twitter 2.0, with typed messages built in from the ground up. Because if they don’t build it, someone else will.
