Sullivan's Almanac 2014

Last year I made some suggestion on how 2013 might pan out in the weird and wacky tech, social networking and ebook worlds. Not surprisingly I didn't get everything right and in the time honoured tradition of making forecasts out of nothing more than a misguide sense of my own opinions, I have decided that history was wrong and that I could do better this time. All I need is for my version of the truth to be accepted and for that time machine that I've been working on to give me the edge this year.

But not everything I forecast last year was wrong. I guessed the stock values of Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook and Twitter would rise and fall. They did, if not in that order and heck, Twitter wasn't even listed back then! I did consider that Google or Amazon would rule the planet by this time this year, so I guess I was right after a fashion. Google didn't build the time machine I've been working on, or if they did I haven't noticed the temporal tear as they attempted to go back in time to invent Facebook. Or perhaps it was the other way around and the timeline has been rewritten. I guess I'll never know.

So what does 2014 hold in the tech world? Well we'll see the demise of the dedicated eReader. I've mentioned this a few times this last year, but this holiday season will be the last time significant amounts of these fine devices will be sold in quantity. The rise of tablet computing, with the attached benefits, has made the dedicated eReader all but redundant, especially as you can now buy basic tablets for under £50 and reasonably well specified models for just over £100. The trend is going to continue, we'll just accept the daily routine of charging our tablets and learning to read in the shade - a no brainer in the UK thanks to the clouds. There will be a small surge in sales of dedicated eReaders as companies holding stagnant stock offload them - that'll be me at the front of the queue making sure I've secured a spare for a knock down rate. Just in case the sun comes out.

Apple will have a crisis of confidence mid year when they realise that they are losing market share big time. They've translated a loyal and essentially niche customer base to the general population, not realising that real people are less forgiving than the long term Apple aficionados. To be fair, if they hadn't made such a mess of iOS 6 then upset nearly everyone with iOS7's new layout, they might have got away with it. But of course they still only provide one size of phone, two sizes of tablet and everyone knows they make over 65% of the product price as profit. Arrogant we can take, arrogant and greedy - taking the Michael surely? I know of people seemingly locked into the Apple environment seriously considering turning their backs on Apple next time they replace their tablet or phone - especially the phones with their outrageous lock in periods - aiming to adopt the cheaper and more varied Android devices. They'll probably keep their old Apple devices limping along to access the content they've bought on iTunes, but it's a slippy slope for Apple. If they're smart, and they do seem to be a bright bunch over there, they'll allow others to make devices that can run iOS, which might just turn sentiment around, but I doubt it. They've crashed and burned from a stellar position before and this time Steve Jobs won't be back to save them.

Google are going to have a rough year, along with Facebook. Normal people will start to realise that the NSA snooping on our emails to try and keep the majority of us safe from the evil minority is nothing compared to the shameless way these guys cut, dice and hawk our personal data. The Snowden scandal will have its second wind as journalists start to ask the real questions. Such as why Facebook saves the text we choose not to post. There's a background rumble about the way these organisations accumulate and sell on information about us, it could turn into a backlash this coming year. Of course we all accept that search engines and social media is here to stay, but expect alternatives to surface this coming year. Perhaps they'll have a model that doesn't involve stripping every piece of data out of us just for interacting with them.

Amazon will come under fire internationally as governments start to realise that the downside to a phenomenally successful company investing in their country is that it cuts the legs from underneath the small and medium sized traders who cannot compete with the likes of Amazon. When the politicians realise that Amazon employ less potential voters than they displace, and the tax revenues from the failed home-grown companies lost is greater than Amazon's less than generous tax avoided donations to the exchequer then things might get a little awkward.

So my forecast for next year is that between the people and their governments the excessively large players in the tech world will have a stormy ride. They'll survive it, of course, and may well come out stronger than ever. But I suspect there will be plenty to blog about this coming year.

If we don't meet before 2013 is out, have a happy New Year. Unless you're a tech giant.

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For Whom the Bell Tolls

I've been an advocate of the dedicated eReader device for some years, having owned and used a Kindle as my portal into the world of eBooks.  In fact, it was the Kindle that made me realise that the three novels I had written over several years could be made available for a much wider audience.  It introduced me to self publishing and has provided a means for myself and thousands of other frustrated writers to put our literary works 'out there' for the world to judge.

That original Kindle is now showing signs of wear and age - the half life of these kind of devices is probably fairly short and the version I have, with the lower third occupied by a keyboard and navigation buttons, is probably more likely to develop a mechanical failure of some sort due to the amount of moving parts, even if the buttons do glide over a membrane.

But I've been watching the rise and rise of tablet computers too, and have forecast that the dedicated eReader's day is strictly numbered, although judging by the number of model upgrades by Amazon and Nook, for example, it would appear that the manufacturers seem to think that there is life in the old dogs yet.  I disagree; while the dedicated eReaders have a few tricks up their collective sleeves including phenomenal battery life, the ability to be read in direct sunlight and increasingly a backlit screen to allow them to be read in bed without putting a main light on, the economics of dedicated eReaders just isn't stacking up.

I reckon in the last three years I've read over two hundred eBooks - probably a middling amount compared to some readers, perhaps more than others, however I do spend a lot of my free time writing books and the occasional blog entry as well as holding down a full time job, so I guess the total isn't too tardy.  It's certainly more than I read in the three years before I got my Kindle - the economics of buying paperbacks in quantity and the logistics of storing them (or recycling them to the local charity shop) mitigate against random speculative purchases.  Some of the books I've waded through in the last three years have been, shall I say, challenging but in the main I've read a lot of good books and learned a lot along the way.  And my bookshelf is holding its own these days, despite the extra books that have passed through my hands.

Critically the majority of those eBooks I've read have been read on an Android tablet - the self destructing Nexus 7 with a screen that costs more than the device new - and on my Microsoft RT.  The Kindle does come out of its drawer now and then, but increasingly it doesn't.

So eBooks, for me, aren't going away but the way I read them has changed.  The way I look at it, if I'm electing freely to use my tablet computer to read eBooks when I've got a perfectly suitable dedicated eReader, albeit one with a tendency to have sticky moments on the keypad these days, why would someone entering the market choose one over a multi-purpose tablet?  Arguably three years ago the main option was an iPad or a Kindle, with a price differential of three to one; today you can pick up a reasonable seven inch tablet capable of surfing the web, dealing with your emails, playing stupid games and carrying your holiday snaps around on, plus usable as your eReader in all conditions except direct sunlight for 80% of the cost of a dedicated eReader.

Right now, those who are looking to fill Christmas stockings up with mid priced presents might be weighing up the pros and cons of dedicated eReaders and low end tablets and I think most rational people will choose the tablet route.  The tablet they choose, especially if for someone else, may not be the best model on the market but will almost certainly be an acceptable device, but will provide all the benefits of a dedicated eReader with the added bonuses of a tablet, generally for less.

As in Ernest Hemingway's classic, For Whom the Bell Tolls, the end credits for dedicated eReaders is being played out with the hero facing certain death, pinned down by his horse as the enemy approach.  The manufacturers of the dedicated devices must know that this is the last year they can hope to sell significant numbers of dedicated eReaders, especially at the price points they are marketed at, but I suspect that in the final analysis there will be a lot of Nooks and Kindles left on the shelves after Christmas Day.  This year will be the watershed and I expect that most suppliers will want to dispose of this technology to get it off their inventory, so expect some interesting bargains in the sales.  If they do, and the price is right, then I'll be queuing up to buy a low cost dedicated eReader for the opportunity to replace my fading one for those infrequent occasions when they really do differentiate themselves from the tablets.

But if they don't discount them I won't lose any sleep.  Dedicated eReaders are good, but it's not like they make the Earth move.

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Colour Kindle on the Way?

Some innovations burn brightly for a brief period, then disappear from view, often forever.  Take solid rubber tyres on bicycles, for instance.  For a very short period they were seen as the be all and end all of technology, providing a drastic improvement on the solid metal rims that the earlier bikes had run on.  Then a smart guy named Dunlop figured that using an inflatable rubber tube inside a rubber housing would give a smoother ride and solid rubber tyres never made a come back.

It's probable that dedicated eReaders, with their e-Ink displays, will go the way of solid rubber tyres.  I think that will be a shame in many ways - their superior readability in broad daylight, the extended battery life and the almost limitless amount of eBooks that can be stored makes them a must have device.  In a peculiar way the fact that they do one trick particularly well and pretty much no other tricks at all is a compelling feature too.  They do do some other tricks, like surfing the net and playing simple games, but not very well.

Amazon in particular have added other features that are just pure novelty or just difficult to fathom.  Take the  text to speech feature that makes Stephen Hawkins sound like he's a trained vocal actor.  Then there's the underlining of phrases in books - I'm guessing that previous readers have underlined the passages in their copies and Amazon have passed that data to all new copies.  Where's the context? What is it achieving?  Some books seem to be virtually a continuous underline, which makes me wonder what is being said by whoever did that.  Or maybe I'm just grumpy as I haven't worked out how to underline, or even found a reason why I'd want to.

But tablet computers that can be read like a dedicated eReader while surfing the net in a meaningful way, play real games, send and receive emails and many other things are being offered at a variety of price points, with some very good models being not a lot more expensive that your average dedicated eReader.  In the absence of a sensible price drop in dedicated eReaders this is putting a real squeeze on the e-Ink devices, with many potential eReader purchasers digging a little deeper and buying a tablet computer instead.  OK they can't be read in sunlight, but how big a deal is that for most of us?  And so they have to charge the battery every night, but that's just a routine like the one they already have with their mobile phone and that's hardly onerous.

However Amazon, the company that has probably done more to popularise dedicated eReaders and eBooks in general than anyone else, is hanging on to the type of device where other companies might be considering a tactful retreat.  Instead of backing out of the market, or even reducing prices to make their dedicated eReaders more attractive, they've been adding new models to the product line and it looks like they're gearing up to introduce the next step.

They've bought a colour e-Ink company from Samsung and given the way they are still pushing e-Ink devices it's a fair bet that Amazon will be launching a colour e-Ink eReader sometime soon.  Perhaps Samsung have decided that the market for such a device is too limited, but maybe not.  The kind of books that have traditionally benefited from the use of colour - apart from the cover maybe - have been encyclopaedias and children's  books.  Obviously the internet has made encyclopaedias almost obsolete, but of course the one group we don't want to have unrestricted access to the net are kids, for the twin sound reasons that they may be exposed to stuff we would prefer they didn't see and, of course, the net's not always (ever) right.

So a colour e-Ink device that housed a child friendly encyclopaedia and also run suitable colour children biased books could be a game changer.  Put parental controls to restrict what the kids can access over the internet and you've got a great educational tool that can travel anywhere and, assuming colour e-Ink displays don't reduce the battery life too much, can be used for days on end.  Maybe we haven't seen the end of this particular solid rubber tyre after all.

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Kobo Launch Hi Def eReader

Kobo, the eReader and eBook company owned by Japanese company Rakuten, has announced it's launching a high definition eReader to compete with the Amazon Paperwhite eReader.  It's being pitched at about £30 more than the Paperwhite, so perhaps the word 'compete' is stretching the concept a little.  There is some speculation that it may be a better choice for 'coffee table' style eBooks and children's eBooks.

According to some reports Kobo is now firmly the number two seller of eReaders after Amazon and its Kindle range, but that may not be as remarkable as it might have been.  Since the launching of multiple tablets to challenge the iPad range in the last two years the meteoric rise in eReader sales has translated to a more representative meteor trajectory.  Down.  Given the relatively high price of dedicated eReaders compared to multi-functional tables such as the iPad (full fat and mini), the Kindle Fire, Google Nexus and quite a number of me-too devices it is less compelling to buy one of the dedicated eReaders.

It's not that eReaders are without their attractions - the lack of  multi-functionality can be seen as a blessing in disguise.  Less distractions from your reading and less chance of the device being 'borrowed' - owners of tablet computers who are parents to teenagers might recognise that benefit.  Other attractions include the extended battery life of the eReaders, usually between one and two months in-between charges for most of the main brands, often less for the lesser known makes.  Most tablet users will be used to the discipline of putting their tablets on charge overnight, every night, but go on a long transatlantic flight - and I'm not aware there are many short ones - then the eReader battery life starts to look very attractive.  And currently nothing is as good for reading in direct sunlight.  We had some sunlight the other day, the first this year, and the forecast is that we may see some more later in the year.  I would recommend everyone has an eReader at their disposal - your books will load across multiple devices anyway, so if nothing else it can be your lending library when you have an unexpected overnight stopper, however I would wait until the prices drop as they surely must soon.

Although I have no reason to doubt Kobo's assertion that they are the number 2 eReader seller and their  additional claim that the increase in sales has boosted their eBook sales, I doubt they are the number 2 eBook seller.  Given that the eReaders generally sell at cost, it's the eBook sales that make the money.  Amazon have long been the leader in that field, but it is understood that Apple are rapidly catching up.  They are almost certainly number 2 in that race.  Perhaps Kobo is number 3?  Maybe, it's probably between them and Barnes and Noble.  Or Sony, who still plug away like they are the market leaders they used to be.

I'm sorry that the eReader market peaked and sank as quickly as it did, I think eBooks will be the poorer for its rapid decline.  But eBooks are here to stay, that's for sure, and we'll all need devices to read them.  However we can't ignore the rapid adoption of tablet computers and personally I'm happy that the technology became affordable as fast as it did, even if it has rendered the eReader market almost obsolete in one stroke.

If you're still in the market for an eReader, especially for one with better resolution than the average model, then this may be worth a look, but for most people the money being asked for is painfully close to the price of the entry level tablet computers from Kobo.

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                                                          Visit my Book Website here

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        Join me on Facebook -  use raysullivan.novels@yahoo.com to find me