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History books are mostly filled with the doings of kings and presidents and generals, and we often think that’s what history is. But the everyday lives of people are more profoundly and permanently changed by technology than they are by laws and wars and palace intrigue. Technological changes usually get overlooked because they tend to move slowly and pass through many hands. There are, however, exceptions…. [T]he entire personal computing industry is aligned with his vision… [Y]ou’re using a Steve Jobs product whether it has an Apple logo or not.

— Dr. Drang

Greg Cox at Expletive Inserted explains that frustration over the iPhone 4S’s hold-over form factor makes sense because most consumers don’t see software as real.

Apple, perhaps more than any other technology company understands this misguided conception of computing. It’s why they insist on wrapping those gorgeous baubles around OS X and iOS. The only way to get mass market appreciation for these fundamental products is to convince people to focus on the sleek physical design and packaging of computing as objects.

If Jony Ive and Co. weren’t so masterful, fewer people would appreciate the magic in their pockets and on their desks. Perhaps App Store experiences will change this psychology, but with Google, Facebook, and so many other Internet services presented as free of charge, I doubt anything will change in the near future.

Watts Martin, a committed ebook reader, still has plenty of legitimate concerns:

I do not have to worry if, thirty years from now, there will still be hardware and software capable of reading them. That is not solely a DRM-related concern, as there are few data formats other than pure ASCII that have survived since 1978—but of course DRM does matter, as it sharply reduces what I can do with a digital copy, and no format using it has yet lasted a full decade

Text files > PDF files > …. > just about everything else.

Marco Arment:

Patents are a good idea. The rules of the patent system were well-designed and have been refined for hundreds of years, mostly for the better. But if they’re not going to be properly enforced, it’s hard to argue that the system is anything but fundamentally broken. And if the rules can’t be properly and consistently enforced, I don’t see how it can be fixed.

If you haven’t listened to “When Patents Attack!” (Episode #441 of This American Life), shame on you.

The Next Web reports that last week, John Siracusa’s 27,300 review of Mac OS X Lion for Ars Technica (which I shamefully still haven’t read) made $15,000 to date at Amazon’s Kindle store. Sure, that’s probably most of the sales that will take place there, but that doesn’t include the ad revenue from people who read the review for free on the Ars website or the $5/month subscription fees paid by those in return for ad-free browsing or a downloadable PDF (via Stellar and @mediagazer). Ars should consider listing the past Siracusa tomes as ebooks too.

Of course you’re an awesome kind of nerd (evidenced by the fact that you’re reading this right now), so you listen to Siracusa every week as he co-hosts the devastating and scathing technology and tech-related culture podcast Hypercritical with Dan Benjamin on 5by5. So you know that Benjamin and 5by5 gave Siracusa a lot of well-earned promotion. I wonder if he could have made another $15,000 selling a much abbreviated review and transition guide? Or if many fewer sales would have been made without 5by5?

The old physical books won’t sell, but there might be new innovations in ebooks worth real money that we never even considered before. If you’re writing a book the questions you should ask are

1. why do you want to use a traditional publisher?

2. why are you writing one that’s longer than 100 pages?

I think there are good answers to both of the questions that would keep someone away from self-publishing a novella length ebook. I’m not saying anything new, but more and more long form writing, particularly non-fiction and academic research, will start looking much more like Siracusa’s review or at least Tyler Cowen’s The Great Stagnation. And that makes me happy.