Throughout all that time, even in the midst of the Y2K "crisis" when I was disparaged by nut jobs and profiteers while running the ZDY2K site, that vast majority of you have been very kind in your assessments and comments on my writing. When I wrote badly or made mistakes you pointed out the errors with constructive good spirit and I've appreciated it, even when kicking myself and, unfortunately, sometimes letting my temper show rather than directing it at the sole author of the problematic writing. A writer can only wish to do better as they hone their craft and to have understanding readers, like you.

We have agreed despite our disagreements, which is what makes all this worthwhile. Moreover, if it weren't for this blog, I doubt very much I'd be walking and earning a living. I've been very fortunate to be published here on ZD Net.

Since I recovered from my neck surgery last year, I've been increasingly focused on solving business problems for companies rather than writing. After all these years, I have decided to join a company that I have not started or helped to launch, because that's where the next steps in "the constantly changing boundary between media and social networks" will be taken (the quote is from the mission statement of this blog). Using massive amounts of information within an enterprise to create intimate and valuable connections with customers is the greatest challenge in publishing, and I've taken a job with just about the biggest company imaginable to tackle that problem.

I'll be continuing to blog at BooksAhead.com on the future of reading, there's even something new today. I can no longer promise even the infrequent contributions I've made here on other topics, because there is wide swath of issues about which I will not be able to write without seeming to represent my new employer's views.

Again, everyone, thank you very much. Write whenever you can.

Two interesting factoids emerge from the marketing verbiage: First, Kindle books outsold paper books on Christmas Day, the first time that has ever happened; Second, the Kindle is the "most gifted item ever in our history," according to Bezos. The first may not mean much, since Christmas Day isn't necessarily a normal shopping day, though the volume of Kindle books sold suggests that on that day a lot of new Kindle users started stocking up on e-books. The second, an aggregate figure that appears to reflect all gifted items over all time, may be very significant or mean absolutely nothing at all, as the increase in online shopping and gifting continues to dwarf previous "record-setting" gift sales by the law of large(r) numbers.

Nevertheless, it is clear that this was the Kindle Christmas. During the third quarter of 2009, I estimated that Amazon sold 289,000 Kindles on sales growth of 60 percent year over year. We can assume, given the disappointing availability of most competitors, that Kindle grabbed a very large percentage of e-book reader sales this holiday season. However, it was also a poor Christmas overall, in terms of retails sales, even if Amazon did sell more stuff than ever before.

So, how many more Kindles sold between the end of the Q3 and Christmas Day? Extrapolating from previous quarters, and assuming this was a break-out sales season for Kindle, meaning that it more that doubled over the previous quarter, factoring in the sales of Kindle books versus paper books as Christmas gift cards were redeemed yesterday, I estimate Amazon sold 419,000 Kindles in the fourth quarter, or 145 percent of the sales in Q3.

That would make the total number of Kindles sold to date 1,491,000. Kindle now represents approximately 65 percent of the hardware reader market despite the appearance of Barnes & Noble's Nook, which may reach 30,000 units in the quarter because of delays.

I still don't think Amazon is in the hardware business for the long term. It's all about building digital library lock-in.

Cross-posted to BooksAhead.com.

“Publishers are gatekeepers, who control the flow of knowledge. From the boundless variety of matter susceptible to being made public, they select what they think will sell or should be sold, according to their professional expertise and their personal convictions. Publishers’ judgments, informed by long experience in the marketplace of ideas, determines what reaches readers, and readers need to rely on it more than ever in an age of information overload.”

“Publishers are gatekeepers, who control the flow of knowledge. From the boundless variety of matter susceptible to being made public, they select what they think will sell or should be sold, according to their professional expertise and their personal convictions. Publishers’ judgments, informed by long experience in the marketplace of ideas, determines what reaches readers, and readers need to rely on it more than ever in an age of information overload.”

JooJoo carries the bad ju ju of litigation, over-promising and a high price compared to what was promised. The product name suggests it's all illusion. It's short history already sounds like the case of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, the Dickensian lawsuit that destroyed everyone it touched. There's not much to like in an otherwise appealing form factor.

Arrington will not let this device go to market without a sewer's worth of litigation to choke the channel (he promised this in his posting about the death of CrunchPad). The device is going on sale Friday, but has a ship date of "eight to ten weeks," according to various reports, which suggests it isn't really real yet—forget "ready for Christmas," this looks likely to remain vapor.

Finally, the price: A device with a potentially rocky legal footing that sells for twice what it was promised to by Arrington's CrunchPad marketing (it wasn't reporting, but marketing—something TechCrunch readers need to keep firmly in mind whenever they read the site). Many sites are reporting CrunchPad was supposed to be a $300 device, but one of Arrington's original "features" of his tablet was that it would cost $250. Pricing differences are probably the bone of contention between the two parties that will be blamed for the break-up in the pending lawsuits.

JooJoo comes to market at almost the reported price of a low-end Apple tablet, but because it has only browser-based access to the Web, will not offer the kind of robust application platform that Apple's tablet will, or any Windows tablet can today... or any Droid OS device. The blush is off this rose, if it can even bloom through the legal morass in which it will be engulfed, before it comes to market.

Bizarrely, we were being notified that we were no longer involved with the project. Our project. Chandra said that based on pressure from his shareholders he had decided to move forward and sell the device directly through Fusion Garage, without our involvement.

Later, Arrington insists other manufacturers have offered easy terms to him for the rights to manufacture the device and that he had "blue chip angel and venture capitalist investors in Silicon Valley waiting to invest in the company since late Spring. We were simply holding them off until we launched, to eliminate some of the risk." If he'd said they were holding off for better terms from VCs because the device had launched, I'd have found this plausible. The whole story is too nice to be taken at face value.

Because Arrington, a lawyer, discloses that he never controlled the intellectual property rights to the CrunchPad, other than the trademark, and apparently had very poorly formed business agreements around the project with Fusion Garage, his manufacturing partner, this has the look of a great deal of smoke around something he'd agreed he could market without understanding the business, design and development challenges. At one point, he suggests most of the project was "pushed to open source," but then why is it impossible to build it with another manufacturer?

Arrington claims that "prototype b" of the CrunchPad was completed by his in-house team. Certainly, it would have represented the major functional features of the design, which, if open sourced, should be available for his use in providing a functional spec to other manufacturers who could have come up with their own solutions with different components. Since he writes that his team had the release candidate device running Win7 and a version of Chrome OS, the components involved surely are commodities supported with well-documented drivers and toolsets.

Why take apart the death notice like this? Tablets and e-readers are the hottest "category" in consumer electronics, with a glut in e-readers and many media tablets on tap for 2010, customers need to read between the lines of announcements that promise revolutions but may represent black holes for their money and time. In this case, Arrington has created expectations that a $250 touch-screen device can be expected to do what consumers want, to "surf on the couch." He created a baseline expectation that has proven to be out of line with what is possible today. It is certainly possible in six months or a year, yet customers don't need the noise of empty promises to add to the complexity of making buying decisions.

It sounded too good to be true and it was, yet there are plenty of people who want to buy the idea and will now say it could have been done if not for a legal showdown. Customers need real world class champions of products, not contenders who tell us they could have or should have won if only the breaks had gone their way. Customers' time and money is too hard won to expect less.

Cross-posted to BooksAhead.com.

This is the definition of "glut" becoming reality. We can see a glut of e-readers coming and there's no waving off the Kamikaze piloting most of those e-readers toward the deck. Will they blow up the fuel supply needed to get the next generation of e-reading off the ground? No, but the coverage will likely make it sound like e-reader failures mean e-book failure.

With excessive abundance comes failure, and that spectacular conflagration of hardware products, unfortunately, will dominate the headlines in this market next year as many, indeed most, of these devices are pulled due to lack of sales. They are ridiculously expensive for a market where the vast majority of customers buy one book or less a year—more than 180 million Americans don't buy a single book in any year.

Many hardware makers will retreat and e-books, not the glut, will get the blame.

Today's dedicated e-readers sell for roughly 10 times the price of a new hardback book. Most people don't buy hardback books, so for argument's sake, let's say the average price paid for a book by the 120 million Americans who buy a book each year is $12. Amazon Kindle2 and Barnes & Noble's Nook, both of which sell for $259, cost as much as 21.6 books, which suggests they break the book-buying budget for most people. I don't want to suggest there is a magic price for reader hardware, because we'll see some of the new e-readers announced this year selling for $59 next year, because retailers cannot get rid of them. That is a result of fierce competition, but leave it to the press and bloggers to turn the whole process into a mandate on e-books, not the expensive hardware.

This isn't a horse race, but a complex evolutionary event, that cannot be reduced to headlines. Consider: "T. Rex extinct, world awaits silence of lifelessness" would have made the papers, if dinosaurs had had their Gutenberg.

Yet, it's a short step from "people don't want e-readers" to "people don't want e-books," one that hardware manufacturers will avail themselves of to explain to enraged investors whey they are bailing out of the e-reader market. That simple syllogism will lead to the wrong conclusion.

The most optimistic estimates are that five million e-readers will sell in the next 12 months, with approximately one million flying from shelves to eager readers this Christmas. Noelle Skodzinski, editor in chief of Book Business, speaking during the Digital Content Day @ Your Desk conference last week (which you can view on-demand for three months), cites very conservative sales levels, Simba Information's estimate that only 500,000 Kindles will have sold by the end of this year. That's a low number, I think.

Nevertheless, even if three million e-readers sell in the next year, there can only be two to five winners among device makers. Nook, Kindle, and the Sony Reader all have sufficient market exposure to ensure they will remain standing, but most others don't stand a chance of hitting 30,000 units in sales. Dozens of these unshipped products will fail.

In the meantime, e-book sales and downloads will skyrocket relative to current levels, but still be capturing single-digit shares of the total book market. That will be progress for e-books.

For the device makers, it will mean we are getting closer to some kind of "iPod moment." Skodzinski's slides from the event compare Kindle sales to iPod sales in 2002, suggesting that we are on the steeper part of the hockey stick, but it's not the right comparison. iPod marked a departure from the first-generation of MP3 players, but we are still in the stage of the market that music downloads was in the late 90s. There is no iPod, no Walkman, no IBM PC, yet. Kindle1, Kindle2 and DX are likely to the breakthrough e-reader yet unseen what iRiver MP3 players were to the iPod, and that is not to say that a future Kindle couldn't be the "iPod of e-books," though my instincts tell me the future of reading is a converged device.

For the "winners" in the hardware smackdown, their prize will be merely the opportunity to duke it out in the next round, when devices will have to be much cheaper or pack substantially more functionality at today's prices.

Let's not get distracted by the creative destruction going on all around e-book hardware, reading is thriving and certainly migrating toward digital uses.

Cross-posted to BooksAhead.com.

Working from my previous estimate, 783,000 as of July 1, and building in unit volume growth of 60 percent—sales revenue gains in electronics in the U.S., $217 million higher in the first three quarters of 2009 than in 2008, seems to be driven heavily by Kindle sales—I estimate Amazon has sold 1,072,000 Kindles as of Sept. 30, 2009. That would be 289,000 Kindles sold during Q3.

The application offers a few enhancements compared to the Kindle device, including a larger number of font sizes and the ability to adjust the number of words per line and zoom capabilities on Windows 7 PCs, as well as supporting cross-device synchronization of last page read, bookmarks, notes and highlights.

Customers can sign up for an email alert that the software has been released at the Kindle for PC page. I've been predicting this for a while, and am not at all surprised to see it come two days after the Nook announcement. It will not be surprising, either, when Kindle books are available on the Mac.

It's all about making the customer library accessible across devices, so that Amazon—and BN.com, etc.—can keep a customer over the long term.

All in a week's brutal competition.

Matt asked the question of William Lynch, president of Barnes & Noble on a press call this morning and got the clear answer: Nook Wi-Fi will work in stores and on Wi-Fi networks operated by third-parties and on home computer networks to allow shopping in the BN.com store. I've been able to get some additional details and, to some degree, my criticisms in yesterday's article have been addressed. I'm going to leave that article up, with clarifications and corrections as part of the public record. I have confirmed it, as well, though only on background.

Nook Wi-Fi will work at launch anywhere you want to use it.

That said, I still think the Nook has some flaws, which are fewer and less bizarre than I thought.

I also received clarification of another important point I raised yesterday: Shopping in the Barnes & Noble e-books store is free via 3G, but it was not clear that Google Books titles would be accessible via free 3G service. That would have raised a lot of synching issue for customers who, frankly, don't want to synch as much as early adopters are willing to do it.

Barnes & Noble, through its PR firm, said that Google Books will be downloadable from the BN.com eBookstore. So, B&N is subsidizing its customers wireless access to free out-of-print books offered by Google, which is a very good thing indeed.

If you are visiting BN.com, you will have access to more than one million e-books, more than twice the total available at Amazon.com. There are issues of quality in Google Books, but the solution is for either volunteer or for-profit editorial fixes of those books. That means a lot less synching than I thought.

Finally, one of my disappointments (based on the potential for an Android device described in this pre-launch posting) was that the Android OS was not accessible to programmers (never mind the potential for cracking it, I want to see programming supported by B&N). It struck me as odd that, for example, there was no Android B&N e-reader client for smartphones with which a Nook owner could share an e-book downloaded on the Android-based Nook.

B&N, again via Fleishman, said that an Android e-reader client will be introduced soon. No specific date was given.

Several readers excoriated me via email, and they are welcome to criticize but not to deploy abuse. The process of reporting a story, especially as an unpaid blogger, is somewhat different than having a budget to fly to New York to attend a press event. So, I must rely in doing analysis on breaking news on what is written by people who do attend. The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and TeleRead all reported that Wi-Fi worked in the stores but not outside, based on comments made by B&N people at the event. You will have to forgive me if, in trying to find out the truth by treating FAQs with skepticism when they use very vague language that seem to create exception situations, I raise questions for which I do not currently have an answer. I tend to trust people who cover an event more than the company holding the event, because that is our job as customers, to question until the truth is perfectly clear. It wasn't clear yesterday and it is more correct today.

Having gotten clarification, I believe what I wrote yesterday, that Nook enters the e-reader race in a dead heat with Kindle 2 for anyone not currently invested in a Kindle library. That's pretty good for a first try, a triumph for Barnes & Noble. I don't think it is a revolutionary device, particularly because an almost identical dual-screen Android-based device, from Spring Design, was announced the day before.

In addition to yesterday's non-Wi-Fi related criticisms, I'll add: Nook should allow books to be loaned more than once. It should be using the Web features of the Web-centric Android OS, it ought to open Nook to third-party development that could substantially enhance the reading experience. And, ultimately, all these hardware devices offered by booksellers are transient devices whose primary purpose is to get readers engaged with a bookseller's library management services.

In the long run, this is not about selling hardware but all about selling books. The Nook and Kindle will not likely be what we use to read in five years. We will, though, still want and use access to the titles we buy on those devices today.

Cross-posted to BooksAhead.com, which is where I blog about the future of reading.

It would be nice to say, as Matt Miller has, that the e-book and e-reader market was revolutionized today. It simply got more interesting. A careful reading of the $259 Nook's features, and the comparison offered by B&N to the $259 Amazon Kindle 2, reveals that, while it packs a lot of new ideas, Nook is a combination of innovation and the extraordinarily conventional.

Highlights:

• Two screens, one 3.5-inch LCD for navigation and purchasing and a six-inch E-Ink display for reading;
• Virtual keyboard via the LCD display
• ePub and PDF formats supported;
• Free 3G connectivity when shopping via BN.com;
• Sharing of books, across Nook, smartphones and PCs;
• Wi-Fi built in, but with strange limitations at launch(see below);
• Synchronization of location, notes and annotation across multiple devices;
• Audio is supported, though only MP3; Audible books not supported.

There is much I like about this device, but I am not at the announcement today, where I would be asking a lot of questions I have not seen answered in any coverage, so far. Here, with the apparent downsides first and foremost, is what is known to me at this moment.

An e-reader designed to get you into the physical Barnes & Noble store. This, and the question of how to get non-BN content onto the Nook, represent the most backward features of the Nook. When you visit a B&N retail store, you'll receive offers and, soon, the ability to read some e-books in their entirety while in the store. Everything deleted below, while part of this critique has been clarified and extended in this posting.

There, however, is the rub. I'd pointed out before that wireless services for browsing the 500,000+ titles available for free through Google Books, a notable feature of the Nook, probably wouldn't be supported over the built-in 3G wireless service. It isn't. You'll need to download and synch the Nook with your PC, via a USB connection, to move any content not sold by BN.com onto the device. From there, it gets bizarre.

According to The New York Times's Motoko Rich, the built-in Wi-Fi networking works only inside Barnes & Noble retail stores:

With the market for electronic readers and digital books heating up by the day, Barnes & Noble sought to differentiate itself with the wireless feature that consumers can access in any of the chain’s 1,300 stores. Outside of the stores, customers can download books on AT&T’s 3G cellular phone network. (emphasis added)

A review of the BN.com tech specs for Nook adds the caveat that free wireless service is available "from Barnes & Noble via AT&T." Note that they are saying you get free wireless service when buying or browsing Barnes & Noble, not when accessing other sites or services. Put this and the quote from the Times together and you get: Free 3G service anywhere, when buying from BN.com. Free Wi-Fi in Barnes & Noble stores, but no Wi-Fi connectivity outside, where you can shop wirelessly on BN.com.

Comments from riffraffy in TalkBack point to this section of the Nook FAQ, which I read but still find very vague, since they refer only to travel and Wi-Fi:

Q. Can I use my nook while traveling abroad?

A.Yes, when you travel abroad, you can read any files that are already on your nook. You can connect to Wi-Fi hotspots that do not use proxy security settings, such those commonly used in hotels, and download eBooks and subscriptions already in your online digital library. You cannot, however, purchase additional eBooks and subscriptions.

Q. Will new issues of eNewspapers and eMagazines be downloaded to my nook while I'm traveling?

A. Yes, if you are traveling in the United States, or if you are abroad but connected to a supported Wi-Fi hotspot, new issues are delivered to your online digital library in both cases. When travelling abroad without Wi-Fi access, new issues are not downloaded to your nook (automatically or manually).

Two things:

In the first answer, they specifically say that you cannot purchase eBooks or subscriptions over an international Wi-Fi connection. That suggests it is not a fully functioning Wi-Fi connection. Maybe because you are connecting from overseas, maybe not. If you had full Wi-Fi access and a valid BN.com account, what should stop you?

What is a "supported hotspot" in the second answer? If they mean an AT&T hotspot, my concern remains.

I wrote that I hoped I was wrong. I think the language here and in the announcement is strangely vague (having seen a lot of strangely vague FAQs turn out to bear bad news) and would have liked to be present at the announcement to ask.

UPDATE: Paul Biba, who attended the event, added this to his report, which seems to answer clearly the question whether the Nook provides ad hoc Wi-Fi access:

Wifi can only be used in store for events and in store content. Plan to open up later on.

B&N should enable ad hoc Wi-Fi access at launch, or disclose more clearly that it will not be available in order to avoid disappointing all the people who are expecting to be able to use Wi-Fi at home or elsewhere not served by an AT&T Hotspot. To do otherwise would be doing damage to the credibility of a very impressive piece of engineering.

The rest of the content you want to put on the Nook will have to be downloaded via a PC and synched to the Nook. That's a step back from what the promise of built-in Wi-Fi would lead a buyer to expect—particularly because Nook is advertised as providing access to 500,000 Google Books titles that, in fact, aren't accessible through the device, but must be synched.

I hope I am reading this wrong or, that if this is correct, B&N changes the Nook to support ad hoc Wi-Fi access to Google Books. It would be a blunder, forcing readers into retail stores when we want to get away from them, into virtual stores with much broader inventories.

UPDATE: Google Books, per the updated posting here, can be downloaded free of charge over 3G and Wi-Fi connections.

Synching is cumbersome and, frankly, what keeps most people, the non-early adopting masses, from using dedicated e-readers. The popularity of smartphone e-reader apps, which outnumber dedicated e-reader unit sales by a factor of at least three, is a clear testimony to the perceived convenience of downloading content to a multi-purpose device. If you're going to synch, the device has to be extremely useful—and most smartphone apps piggyback on customers' wireless data plans to make direct downloads easy. Dedicated e-readers that require PC synching will strike most readers as cumbersome, yet Nook still requires synching.

Cover-flow is all the LCD supports at launch. Apple does cool stuff and lots of people like the Cover Flow interface in iTunes gets a lot of applause. Barnes & Noble has added a 3.5-inch LCD touch screen to the "traditional" e-reader E-Ink display to facilitate iTunes-like shopping. Google's Android operating system drives this capability, which I think points to some interesting design opportunities. TeleRead reports that during the Q&A at the press conference, B&N execs said there will be an announcement on Android programming access sometime in the future. Nook, however, doesn't take advantage of any of the other features of Android, such as the potential to browse the Web while reading, and retaining one's place in, an e-book. There is also no Android e-reader application, closing the door on Google Editions—after all, BN.com will make more selling an e-book directly than the share of revenue allotted by Google Editions to a retailer.

There are no social features, either, besides lending of books, which we'll get to in a moment.

Given the wireless limitations, this makes sense. B&N doesn't want to subsidize a lot of Web browsing costs due to Nook owners use of the AT&T network. Nor, apparently, does B&N want people using their own Wi-Fi networks to do so.

The cover-flow interface is also the library management interface, based on comments in all the coverage. That could be problematic with any library of significant size, especially if the Nook does not take advantage of the larger E-Ink screen to list the titles on the device. Scrolling through screens of book covers to reach something not read recently or alphabetically deep in the library is not efficient. That is why iTunes also lets users view their libraries as a list, with small icons and so forth.

Lending! I speculated yesterday that lending a book will prevent the user from accessing the book, and that is the case. However, the ease of lending is fantastic, based on the claim that all one needs is the lendee's email address in order to share. In addition to Nook users, PC, Mac, and many smartphone users can borrow a book. All loans expire after 14 days, when the owner of the book regains access.

Some writers I know have said in various venues online today that sharing is bad for their potential revenues. Bosh! It is the best form of marketing a writer or publisher could ask for, since it allows hand-selling by enthusiastic readers to their friends. The limited access by the owner during the 14 days of the loan is a catalyst for purchases, since friends will want to keep the book beyond the time of the loan and, potentially, want to buy the book in order to return it early, because the owner wants to loan it to someone else. This is a Very Good Thing to the degree that people are willing to embrace DRM-protected content in the first place. We'll not open that barrel of DRM monkeys at this time other than to point out DRM has not prevented iTunes nor Kindle users from active purchasing.

Head-to-head with Kindle. Barnes & Noble begs for this comment, because it pits Nook against Kindle in a side-by-side features comparison. The top-line assessment, based on reading with a Kindle and reading about Nook is that they are roughly equal as devices. Both are still too expensive for most normal readers, who buy one to three books a year. They each have strengths, most notably Kindle's wider use of the Net, such as providing simple browsing, which BN.com will certainly be able to offer in an updated or upgraded version of Nook. Color navigation of books is not a big win for Nook. If Nook is opened up to Android developers, however, it has far more untapped potential because of the combination of the color and E-Ink displays.

Even with its massive physical retail presence, I think Barnes & Noble will have a hard time catching Amazon, since Amazon is exactly what made virtual retailing work for so many consumers in the first place. That said, having 1,300 retail locations doesn't hurt. I believe, though, that this will be B&N's challenge: To listen to the customers at retail who don't buy, and to redesign rapidly in response. I hope B&N has organized itself to capture this feedback so that it doesn't go to waste.

B&N's plan to bundle hardcover and e-books, reported by TeleRead, makes a lot of sense. That will win customers at retail.

I am glad to see Nook includes a Mirco SD memory slot, which will allow the device to hold up to 17,500 books, according to Barnes & Noble. I think the value of a device like this is its ability to search a massive library at one's fingertips. I keep all the old copies of the newspapers and magazines I read on Kindle to search later, eliminating a lot of piles of paper and filing I used to do—search makes large archives useful. Amazon should put the expansion slot back in Kindle or I will eventually be ready to sacrifice one year's newspaper and magazine archives for Nook or an alternative that caters to my data pack rat tendencies. All magazine and newspaper publishers should be thinking about selling archives and cloud-based archive access to e-reader (hardware and software) users.

On Day One of the Nook, it's in a dead heat in competition for customers new to e-readers. Existing Kindle users are not likely to convert based on this one device, which is likely temporary, as BN.com is aligned with several other e-reader hardware developers, including Plastic Logic and iRex, all of which will support ePub files, making the books sold by BN.com portable across all such devices (though only through manual synching in some cases). It's only a matter of time before Amazon adds ePub support. Maybe just days.

Cross-posted at BooksAhead.com.

Now the wireless providers hawking those Internet-enabled mobile devices are experiencing the digital equivalent of being proprietors of an all-you-can-eat buffet: It seems like the perfect business until the sumo wrestlers show up.

Well, forgive us, AT&T, for buying your dog food. And, yes, I do hold telecom carriers to the promises they make. I only seem to pick on AT&T because I am a customer who has covered the company through years of over-promising and frequent under-delivery. AT&T has been selling its 3G services for years and only now is claiming it can't make an adequate profit (because, get set for the PR spin: AT&T is positioning to raise prices in this Fortune article).

Unfortunately, the reporter didn't think to check into AT&T's claims by, for example, comparing AT&T's assertions that users are overtaxing its 3G network to the Federal Communications Commission's definition of 3G networks, the spectrum for which the agency freed up to serve data-intensive applications for mobile handsets: "Key features of 3G systems are a high degree of commonality of design worldwide, compatibility of services, use of small pocket terminals with worldwide roaming capability, Internet and other multimedia applications, and a wide range of services and terminals."

Specifically, the carriers asked for the bandwidth in exchange for: Fixed and variable rate bit traffic; Bandwidth on demand; Asymmetric data rates in the forward and reverse links; Multimedia mail store and forward; Broadband access up to 2 Megabits/second (my iPhone 3G typically delivers about 700 Kbps throughput, not 2 Mbps). Customers haven't even got MMS on the iPhone, but AT&T is angling to justify higher prices well before it delivers improved network service.

AT&T's CTO, John Donovan, is quoted saying "3G networks were not designed effectively for this kind of usage." Not much of a CTO, if you ask me, unless CTO is an acronym for "Liar." Mr. Donovan, please read the FCC's definitions of 3G technology, review AT&T's own promotional materials, and answer one question: Why does AT&T promise all these '3G' features and services if its network cannot deliver them? If your network cannot provide 3G services, don't charge as though they do. I get a bill for 3G services every month.

The next section of the article, which labels the top five percent of data plan users as "problems," according to a remark attributed to AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson, sets the stage for price increases for 3G, because "4G systems won't be available for years." That AT&T would describe its most active users as "problems" is ludicrous, but the complete lack of any alternative perspective on the question in the article is outrageous.

The problem lies with AT&T, not its customers.

The Moleskine, a venerable notebook made by Moda & Moda of Itally, and a Rotring fountain pen (either the classic Rotring 600 or the more recent Initial) make the best system for collecting ideas and notes anywhere I travel. Compared to the many PCs I've owned over the years, the Moleskine notebooks have never crashed and I have every single note I've ever made stored on a shelf in my office. Moleskines can be labeled and shelved for easy reference. If I need notes on a particular topic, such as e-books, which I am working on these days, I keep a notebook about just that topic. I also have general notebooks stored by date, so that with a little idea of when I had a discussion, I can quickly find the notes.

I keep two to five Moleskines, each dedicated to various topics or the current date, on my desk at all times. I pick which notebook to take to a meeting based on the topic to be covered. While I haven't tried it, the Moleskine can now be pre-printed with your own templates, making the book completely personal from unwrapping.

Email archives, which I have dating back to 1998 (the previous mail accounts, back to 1988, were lost along the way), are a distant second in personal record-keeping. The fountain pen, which works reliably and never wears out—Rotring's steel nibs could be used as a lethal weapon, then to write a graceful couplet—is always ready to record a thought. The Moleskine's archival-quality paper ensures that, even after I am dead, someone will be able to excavate my thoughts. I'll be writing in one of these notebooks until the very end.

Facebook needs to recode their ads... It's one thing when the ad for singles waiting for me is accompanied by a picture of my lovely wife... Its another when the pic is Mitch Ratcliffe!!!

I am married. Facebook knows I am married, because it is in my profile. Yet, the company feels free to use my picture to promote singles ads under the headline "Local singles are waiting for you." I confirmed that this was the situation with my Facebook friend—you can see the thread here.

Moreover, I have never given any company my permission to use my image in advertising. Someone owes me money.

Finally, I don't think my wife, her friends, my family or anyone who knows me would be pleased to see that I am apparently trolling for dates on Facebook. The numbskull at Facebook who thought of using member photos in this way should learn that "transparency" in our lives does not make our life story malleable and changeable by commercial interests. In a way, this is a libel (a written slander), since it associates my name and image with a perceived act of adultery.

Facebook, if you are listening: Stop using member photos for any commercial purpose they do not explicitly endorse. If I see or hear of this use of my image again, I'll be thinking about calling a lawyer.

The abuse of personal data is only beginning. Companies that offer everything for "free" are extracting a huge price from each of us in the form of information, images and private records that they intend to "monetize." It is time to stop letting these companies see how far they can get before someone gets angry.

Russ forwarded me your note. Thanks for your interest. To answer your question, there is no limit on the number of times a book can be downloaded to a registered device (i.e. Kindle, Kindle DX, iPhone). In the case where the publisher has chosen to apply DRM, there may be limits on the number of devices that can simultaneously use a single book. If a customer has upgraded or replaced their device(s), they can delete the content and deregister any device(s) no longer in use, which enables the customer to download to new registered devices.

So, to reduce the answer to its component parts:

• Buyers may download an unlimited number of copies of a Kindle book title they have purchased to a registered Kindle device or iPhone (and, future supported devices) that are associated with the buyer's Amazon account,
• unless a publisher has decided to impose a limit on the number of devices that may simultaneously have access to the title,
• in which case, the user may go to their Manage My Kindle page and "deregister" a device to allow for downloading to a device that does not currently have an access to the book.

Publishers, not Amazon, make these decisions. Customers need information about device limits when buying, it should be displayed on the product page as a courtesy to customers. I still believe setting a higher limit than six is essential to making a book useful to a family.

I have asked Drew several follow-up questions and hope to have a bit more soon on how customers can identify books with limits and whether there is a system-wide default limit on number of devices.

A usability note based on this information: The Manage My Kindle page does not list either the number of devices on which a title may be accessed, nor the devices on which the title is currently is readable. Both would be helpful information, the latter because it should be possible to deactivate a device's access to a single title without wiping out the device's library—this is doubly important because only some of the titles in the Kindle Store come with simultaneous device limits.

I may want to make a book accessible to my son's iPhone, for example, which would be the seventh registered Kindle device in our household, by taking it off my daughter's Kindle. If I disable all the titles on my daughter's Kindle by deregistering it, she'd be pretty disappointed, when all she wanted to do was share a book with her brother (not that she'd be in the mood to do that very often).

My roughly hewn mock-up of what this should look like in the Manage My Kindle library is displayed to the right. There is ample room in the Your Orders listings for a book to include a device listing that allowed per-device registration of the title. By checking the red box, one could deactivate the title on just one device, in this case "Dad's Kindle."

Without per-device control of titles, the system effectively limits the number of devices a customer can use conveniently to the lowest number of devices on which they may want to read a DRM-limited title. That needs to change. And it is good that Amazon is listening.

Cross-posted from Booksahead.com

Keeping up with news about the future of publishing is a full-time job. I'll also be reproducing e-book and publishing-related articles from Digital Media: A Seybold Report, which I edited way back when, when e-books were only eight years old (which is longer ago than you think).

Seriously. Think about that.

AT&T is the template for the future of the American automotive industry.

This may be the worst business decision ever. It will surely come back to haunt the Obama team. AT&T is monolithic and has grown increasingly less innovative since the 1990s. Whitacre has only confirmed his indifference toward customers with repeated decisions on privacy, net neutrality and executive compensation that defied a commitment to delivering the best service at a reasonable price.

As an example of an egregious lack of corporate fiscal discipline, his $158 million retirement package from AT&T, which included country club memberships, makes plain that Whitacre is the wrong leader for GM's business today.

At AT&T, Whitacre led a company that under-performed compared to its industry and the S&P 500 during his term as CEO. AT&T shares are trading in the same range today as they did earlier this decade, before Whitacre took over, and in the 1990s. Today, the company trades for 67 percent of its enterprise value.

All those strategic merges that Whitacre's supporters tout have not paid off.

AT&T, a company Whitacre said is "all about scale and scope," which was rebuilt largely on limiting customer choice, is not what Detroit needs. What the automotive industry needs is innovation and streamlining of every aspect of its logistical and manufacturing systems, in addition to a healthy dose of transparency. Those are not Whitacre's strengths. From deals to that rebuilt most of Ma Bell, reducing local competition in many regions of the United States, to locking sales of Apple's iPhone to the AT&T network—as well as the generally lousy quality of AT&T service—he has emphasized big and unresponsive as the basis of his business. Whitacre has subdued more innovation than he's enabled, relying on his ability to bully regulators on behalf of AT&T, which he insisted was under attack from all sides. In his home state, Texas, Whitacre's companies, SBC and AT&T, have consistently attacked public wireless initiatives, trying to prevent them from operating through legislation instead of trying to compete with or enhance those services.

Additionally, Whitacre fought shareholders seeking to limit his compensation throughout his years at AT&T, ultimately being forced by the SEC to allow a shareholder vote on a watered-down board proposal.

I ask you, again: Is this the right model for a revived GM? Instead, it's is a fairly complete description of the dying GM.

Whiteacre is an engineer who has built his reputation and wealth through leveraged buyouts of companies, always paying a premium price and, ultimately, paying the cost with a poor stock performance compared to other telecommunications companies. Forbes called him "tall, smart, driven, and sturdy as a telephone pole." He obviously does have a high estimation of himself, and the clout to get board members to go along with his self-assessment. His pay rose dramatically while he slashed more than 30,000 jobs at AT&T. This pole looks unconnected to economic reality from any angle.

Because the government owns the majority of GM, each of us should have our say about it. This is my two cents. Appointing Whitacre on the recommendation of a hold-over GM board member is not a smart move by the Obama team. They wanted outside perspectives on the automotive industry, but hired the ultimate insider regardless of what industry he's in.

In fact, this is a decision the courts probably should review, because of the public investment involved. Informed shareholders should not buy off on Ed Whitacre running General Motors. Let's see some real breaking of boundaries, not an executive shuffle based on insider connections.

Correction: Thanks to reader Jim Gillan for pointing out that I misquoted Forbes, writing "seasoned as a phone pole." The corrected quote, "sturdy as a phone pole," is now in the story.

Google is talking about a "digital book ecosystem," which is essentially a closed system that depends on authentication of users, caching of limited numbers of HTML books on a device, and a security regime that probably will discourage any deep linking or social features for the time being. Google's current book downloads, consisting of about 500,000 out-of-copyright and a few tens of thousands of copyrighted books available only in "limited preview" and "snippet" sample forms, uses a "My Library" approach to collecting books and providing repeated access access to them. Books downloaded from Google Books are presented in PDF format, different than the reported formats discussed by Google this week.

Think the music subscription approach that Microsoft takes with Zune Pass, where ongoing access to the service is required if you are going to keep using your library. One of the primary benefits of the Kindle, at least for people I've talked with, is the ability to access their books locally rather than over the Net. For all the proprietary issues Kindle-formatted books have, they do the one thing readers want well: make e-books useful anywhere. The same is true of books downloaded onto various mobile phone and PC platforms.

Moreover, the Google service will apparently rely on some form of authenticated HTML access to books purchased, rather than the PDF format it currently uses for downloadable books in Google Books. Not the ePUB format, which the entire industry should be adopting (and adapting, because it needs work, too), nor any of the downloadable formats, such as .MOBI or other formats compatible with the popular Stanza reader from Lexcycle, now a subsidiary of Amazon. Adoption may not rely on downloading a new reader, since Google's service will reportedly work in a browser, but so many people have installed these other readers that there will be some perceived migration cost among users.

The battle may take the form of a price war, though I think it will not end until e-book data is standardized enough to work across hardware and software platforms is over. That means that after the shake-out is over, most of the e-books purchased by now and during the e-book wars will likely be obsolete and unreadable sometime in the future. Compared to books, which are infinitely useful, that's a big step down. And for publishers, who will likely face readers' wrath without Google's help, that's a reason to think twice before doing a deal that allows Google some input on pricing.

Accounts vary as to whether Google will set prices or whether publishers will—I tend to believe the publishers will have control of prices for the most part, as the private briefing Google held with publishers during BookExpo America this week would have turned into a bloodbath if they'd tried to dictate prices, as Amazon has.

I'd only point back to my recent posting on the curation of e-books being a significant value-added service as a way of advising publishers to think twice before moving forward. Facilitating social connection through books is an extremely viable way to support profits. The privacy concerns raised by Richard Koman are also a concern, though I don't think Google will display ads in the books it sells. It will, however, harvest more personal data from book usage.

All in all, the field is only being set for a showdown, one that is going to produce upheaval in publishing (a good thing) and a lot of wasted spending by readers (which is a bad thing).

Steven Johnson's essay in The Wall Street Journal last week, about his e-book "'aha' moment" describes a number of new forms for the book. A worthwhile read. Johnson focuses on the unit of consumption, including the possible bundling of chapters of different books to facilitate sampling and the potential for a "global book club" about any word or sentence within a book, not just a focus on the whole book.

I think the deep change that will change what we think of as reading and "the book" will be the end of the idea of the finished book. It was only in the 18th century, when binders stopped adding extra pages for notes in the books they produced for individual customers and standardized binding, that writing in books became a taboo (despite many notable rebels against that trend), and before that using notes in books was a widely recognized form of social communication, according to author H.J. Jackson's Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books.

Last fall, I started researching the future of books and am now working on a book about the future of books, because a market research report about e-books would miss the real challenge faced by authors and publishers, along with their readers: How to see past the ideas we have about the artifact we call a "book." After the jump, I'll share an excerpt from the book that summarizes why cryptographic features, which could easily be tossed out with DRM, are the source of one of the most important potential reservoirs of value for publishers in The Age of Glosses, when readers share ideas through books and the idea of a finished document is not obsolete, but is increasingly rare.

Curation: Going beyond format

The assurance that you can reconnect to a backup of a digital document, such as a book, adds value that can be a significant differentiator in a world where content is supposedly free. Preventing viruses from coming along with a download is often offered as the benefit of paying for a book or song versus downloading a copy from an anonymous FTP or BitTorrent site, but that is small fish compared to the “curation” an online library gives book owners; the backed up library becomes a browsable collection, just as books on a shelf do, providing the satisfaction of ownership and the possibility of rediscovering a book without paying for it, again. On top of keeping copies for customers, Audible upgrades those books from older formats to new ones as they become available. Since Audible launched, it has introduced four upgrades, each providing better audio quality or compatibility with new listening technology—books are updated, so customers can get a better listening experience for free.

Audible’s new parent company, Amazon.com, has embraced this with a “digital collection” of the titles and products bought on the site. However, while titles may be downloaded multiple times, Amazon has not made electronic copies of books available across formats, so one must buy an e-book for Kindle and another that can be read as an Adobe PDF file on a computer. For example, in order to have access to a copy of The Cambridge Companion to Kant, a book I’ve read along with the works of the philosopher, I had to buy the paper edition ($29.50 retail), the Kindle edition ($28.42) and the “Amazon Upgrade” PDF version ($7.39) in order to access the book physically, through the eBook reader I own and the PC I use, respectively. Netted out, I spent $65.31, or 2.21 times the price of the paper book—and the copies are completely separate, isolated from one another. Notes made on the Kindle don’t appear in the PDF version, and neither of the electronic versions is linked to the paper book efficiently. The Kindle version reflows the book’s text without maintaining any page location, so I can’t make a note in the Kindle version and, when reviewing those notes, refer to a page in the paper book.

Format obsolescence, alas, seems to have been proved a viable business model by the movie industry, which has happily sold “versions” of the same movie on VHS, Laser Disc, DVD, and Blu-Ray, as well as for playback on computers and handsets, such as the iPhone. Hollywood sells a new copy at a different price, for each of the formats, rather than one ongoing connection to the film. Readers, thankfully, are not quite as gullible as movie-goers or, at least, they like to think they aren’t going to be suckered by publishers.

Now, think about that in relation to the way we purchase software. Many companies, such as Adobe and Symantec, to name two big firms, offer a choice of download or packaged copy (on DVD) of their products. Additionally, they offer ongoing access to download over a year or two for an additional fee. This lets the buyer decide to handle keeping a backup themselves or to, in essence, by insurance in the form of access to a downloadable copy of the application for an additional five or 10 dollars.

The software model justifies higher prices with “curation” of the customer’s software. A movie or book that is read once is, from the consumer’s perspective, worth less than something they want to keep and reuse. The DivX movie model, of selling one-time access to a movie, after which the DVD becomes unplayable, has not worked well. This is the case not because the distributor promotes one-time play, but because consumer ought to have the choice to extend their access without making a second purchase. If offered the chance to download and read a book once, or for a month, for a lower price than getting access to that book forever, which may carry a nominally higher fee, readers can choose their approach to a book—more importantly, if they change their mind and want to keep a short-term book, let them do it without downloading a fresh copy.

Here’s where cryptography can add a tremendous and novel value. Audible doesn’t maintain millions of different copies of the same book, each for a unique customer. A master file is encoded on demand and, by communicating with the Audible server, the customer’s copy can be updated with, specific to audiobooks, bookmarks and last-point-listened data. Granted, when Audible makes a higher fidelity version of the book available, the old copy on the customer’s player/PC must be replaced, but the cryptographic signature could also carry forward bookmarks and the most recent location in the book. However, note that in each case, the master copy is also common reference copy against which the bookmarks and last-time-listened could generate data that readers might use to find other who want to talk about the same bookmarked passages or who have read about the same part of the book.

The features of an e-book facilitated by cryptography, which is the same technology that underlies the much-despised “digital rights management” that many users protest against, are myriad. If only publishers would recognize that limiting reading with DRM was the greatest barrier to their enhancing the reading experience.

What’s so great about cryptography, without going into obscure technical detail? The simplest answer is that, using cryptography, we can identify an individual reader’s copy of the book, as well as their bookmarks, highlighted text, where they last stopped reading, and, if they book is linked to a network, what contributions the reader has made to different discussions about the book. Generally, publishers of music, movies and books have used cryptography to limit access to a single copy of a creative work, but the same technology opens new vistas if the limits are taken off and novel experience, even simple ones like mapping the location of a bookmark in an electronic copy of a book to the same location in a print edition, allowing readers to refer back and forth across different displays of the same title. Recall that Amazon’s Jeff Bezos said Kindle owners purchase approximately 1.7 times as many titles as they do printed books—at this early stage, it’s fairly safe to assume many of the books sold for Kindle use are copies of printed books the reader already owns, to extend the opportunity to read.

Cross-referencing of information in books, though it sounds like the dry purview of librarians and indexers, is the foundation of the conversation that is literature. Writers make literal references to other works in the main text, footnotes, endnotes, indices and bibliographies. Without a master copy of a work against which electronic copies that might be arranged in thousands of different layouts based on the size of the screen or application window in which it is displayed, e-books become unreferenceable. They also defy the primary benefit of networked computing, the ability to hyperlink, to make logical connections between texts that can be navigated. Because the e-book exists alongside the printed book, and will for the foreseeable future, such referenceability needs to extend from digital to analog versions so that all literary, scientific and professional annotations can be followed across formats. Cryptography can be of help here, too.

But where the cryptographic tricks become magical is in the potential for layering different versions of books or different “glosses” created by previous readers one atop the other, for use and comparison by readers. Imagine, for example, being able to select annotations to Joyce’s Ulysses made by a leading Joyce scholar or, in my ideal scenario, Joyce’s own notes or those of another author deeply influenced by Joyce: being able to juggle the different notes, bookmarks, highlights and hyperlinks provided by multiple commentators is the facility cryptographic tools bring to a text, because they identify each “layer” of the book, keep them in a manageable order, and, in conversations, even lets the reader engage securely, privately, even anonymously with other readers over the network from within the pages they are reading—regardless of how the pages are reflowed from one device to another.

This may sound like both nitpicking and wonkish thinking about how to read books, but consider a time when you were talking with a friend on the phone about a book or magazine article. The page number is essential to finding the common reference point. You said “turn to page 32 and look at the first line of the fourth paragraph” (which, if my memory serves, is the page of the paperbook edition of The Godfather, by Mario Puzo, that every kid in my junior high wanted to read—Sonny is having sex with the bridesmaid on that page). At the other end of the line, your friend said, “I found it.” That simply, you are literally on the same page. Were you reading on an e-book reader, the Amazon Kindle, for example, and your friend had a printed book, you have no common reference point, because the Kindle repaginates the book based on the size of the screen and the size of the font selected. Hence, if I turn to the beginning of chapter four of A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Gdel and Einstein, by Palle Yourgrau, my Kindle gives the “locations” 609-11, it does not present the page number in the printed book (Page 51 in the paperback edition from Basic Books). Even if you both have Kindles, but one of you reads in larger text, it is inconvenient to find a common reference point, except, perhaps, at the start of a chapter, if the book has chapter bookmarks. For example, the page location cited above appears when the Kindle font is set to “3” and locations 609-610 with font size “6”, which contains far fewer words than page composed in the smaller font. Granted, printed books change page layouts, as well, but they do it consistently, in separate editions that can be compared. E-books must do better.

In full flower, the e-book should be able to relate notes added in different editions to common locations, because master copies of editions can be compared and calibrated to allow consistent placement of annotations. If they did not, the result will be like getting a copy of a movie you know well that has the soundtrack out of synch with the image. E-books, because they support computational features, can harmonize information across generations. And not just so people can share the “good parts” of the The Godfather with their grandchildren or share notes with themselves at different ages as they revisit a book during their lives. These kinds of anchors make bibliographic annotation of any book possible, and will make entering the community evolving through a book a powerful addition to the reading experience our children expect when considering what they will read next.

First, the "teabaggers." These folks are protesting taxes in the nation with the lowest taxes in the developed world. They are mimicking the actions of their forebears, who were protesting taxation without representation—less than six months after the most participated-in election in at least a generation. They are not idealists, nor do they have any idea what they are talking about, but talk away they should so that someone might engage them in discourse and collectively we learn something.

Ultimately, it costs more money to reinvest in a developed economy than in a growing first-generation industrial economy. That's why we have taxes. The problem with our taxes is that, for the past 30 years they have been invested in the wealthy, which is why the United States and Great Britain, the forebears of Reagan-Thatcher top-down economic planning now suffer the largest wealth differentials between the average citizen and the richest one-percent of the population of any developed countries in the world. Instead of protesting taxes, these people should be protesting the indifference toward the middle class of the past 30 years and demanding even greater investment in schools, basic science and other seedings of future prosperity than the Obama Administration has imagined. That doesn't mean lots more taxes—we could do the same by simply cutting wasteful stupid spending returning half-way to the old top-income taxes of the past—it only means the priority becomes investment in the people, not a class that will save the people.

As for Mr. Kutcher, he seems like a nice enough guy. As a celebrity, he strikes me as the perfect attention zombie, stumbling through our screens to eat our brains. But the fact a television news network even bothered to compete with a B-grade actor over their popularity is a sign of how low we will stoop to conquer anything that can be defined as "high ground." Now, with Oprah glomming on to Twitter, we are seeing spamming by celebrities desperate to retain their mass-media reputations. Oprah touts more than 100,000 followers in less than a day because so many people auto-follow, whether using a program to do so or simply because they are flattered by Oprah's follow—that's a spammer strategy.

In both cases, teabaggers and Twitter follower races, we're seeing the aping of past behaviors, the Boston Tea Party and the popularity contests of high school and Entertainment Tonight!, turned into events that supposedly enact meaning, but are merely empty gestures. Tea baggers aren't patriots, they are people convinced they are paying too much in taxes (just about the only obligation this country asks of its citizens), when the debate should be about how taxes are spent, what to cut and, if more money is needed to make the world a better place for our children, who among the current beneficiaries of that system should pay higher taxes.

Oprah, Ashton and Ev (Evan Williams, CEO of Twitter), I will not be following anyone who for all intents and purposes is a celebrity bot seeking to claw some of my attention away for themselves. I am sure that today marks Twitter's high-water mark. Oprah's endorsement is like being on the cover of Fortune, which, surely, Twitter and Mr. Williams will soon be.

The utility of a social ecosystem is destroyed by false followers and other aggressive species that suck the air away from the genuine exchanges of ideas and information by individual members.

But, Doc also wishes out loud that he wants the media and bloggers to write more about the transition from pre-movable type book production to the post-Guttenberg galaxy, a remarkably long, slow and, often, low history that I've been re-reading lately. Did you know, for example, that book printing and binding were largely separate industries for several hundred years? Books were shipped from city to city in bales of unbound pages—and we think developing a business model is taking a long time. Early printers didn't even recognize that packaging their loose pages into an edition made sense.

That said, here are a few excellent sources of information on the transition from scholarly and professional transcription of books to the thing we know today as "book publishing":

The History and Power of Writing, by Henri-Jean Martin.

The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, by Elizabeth L. Eisenstein.

The Book Before Printing: Ancient, Medieval and Oriental, by David Diringer.

Unfortunately, bloggers have written much more on the actor Steve Guttenberg, his body of work and appearances on Dancing With The Stars, than old Johannes the printer. History is still best found in books.