Book Retriever iOS app identifies titles by reading level

Publishers Weekly reports that Book Retriever, a $0.99 iOS app launched by St. Louis-based K-8 educational distributor Classroom Library, matches children's reading levels with 136,000 titles in its database. The app uses a proprietary database of leveling information based on four leveling systems that was developed by Benjamin and Marla Conn, Classroom Library's founders.

Parents can use a built-in ISBN barcode scanner to determine whether a book is appropriate for their child's reading level, and teachers can use it to create reading lists for their students. The barcode scanner can also be used to build a database of a home's or school's books. The app can also print ISBN barcodes for titles in its database that can be applied to a home's or school's books.

RRKidz releases Reading Rainbow iPad eBook app

TechCrunch reports that RRKidz, co-founded by LeVar Burton and producer Mark Wolfe, has released a Reading Rainbow iPad app. RRKidz licensed the Reading Rainbow trademark and content from public television station WNED in Buffalo, NY. The app gives children access to eBooks from publishers including Little, Brown Books for Young Readers; Holiday House; Charlesbridge Publishing; Kane Press; Sleeping Bear Press; Peachtree Publishers; and Shenanigan Books. The eBooks feature interactive features, quizzes and narration. The app also includes videos shot in the style of the original Reading Rainbow television series.

The Reading Rainbow app is free and comes with four eBooks and videos. Parents can then subscribe to the service for $9.99/month, which gives them unlimited access to content.

Amazon and Apple's dramatically different strategies

Today's announcement of three new black & white Kindle models, plus the Kindle Fire tablet, have shaken up both Amazon's competitors and a number of industry observers. The Kindle 4 models (the Touch, Touch 3G and just plain Kindle) each set new low price points for eReaders with their functionality. The Kindle, at $79, will be a stocking-stuffer for the coming Holiday season. The Kindle Touch Wi-Fi, at $99, provides comparable functionality to Barnes & Noble's Nook for $40 less, and the Kindle Touch 3G adds always-on wireless connectivity. for $149. (All these prices are for Kindles with Special Offers, or in other words, advertising. Add $30 to the Kindle and $40 to the Kindle Touch models if you don't want ads.)

The Kindle Fire tablet, at $199, is cheaper than any brand name Android tablet except Lenovo's forthcoming A1, which comes with front and back cameras and GPS, all of which Amazon leaves off. However, Amazon has built its own user interface on top of Android that's designed to make the Kindle Fire much easier to use than Google's standard Android. Amazon has also built its own browser, called Silk, that uses Amazon's cloud services to pre-render web content for better performance.

Everything about the Kindle Fire demonstrates how radically Amazon's and Apple's strategies differ. Apple uses software to sell hardware; the iTunes Store and App Store are there to increase demand for Apple's hardware. Apple makes money from software and content, but it's a drop in the bucket compared to its hardware revenues. Amazon, on the other hand, uses hardware in order to sell its goods and services. It's likely that the new Kindles, including the Kindle Fire, are all being sold at close to break-even or possibly even at a small loss, in order to generate more sales of other goods and services. Amazon sees the Kindle Fire as potentially being as stimulative for music, movie and television show sales, as well as Amazon Prime subscriptions, as the black & white Kindles have been for eBook sales.

There's not a lot of daylight between Amazon and Apple for competitors to exploit. Amazon is setting price expectations at the low end and is trying to dominate the content market; Apple dominates the developer community, and the iPad will continue to have a much bigger selection of apps than any of its competitors. Can competitors sell more expensive tablets than Amazon with a mediocre selection of content, or less expensive tablets than Apple with a mediocre selection of apps? I doubt it.

This would have been a great opportunity for a radically different tablet, like Microsoft's Courier, that could compete in a completely different market segment, but Microsoft killed the Courier, and there's nothing on the horizon from first-tier competitors that can forge its own path. In hindsight, HP was probably right to kill the TouchPad, and I wouldn't be at all surprised to see other companies rethink their entire approach to the tablet market. Cloning Apple or Amazon won't work; competitors need radically different products.

Is there a hidden reason for Apple's in-app payment policy changes?

Apple's announcements about its in-app purchasing policies have ignited a firestorm of criticism from booksellers, publishers and app developers. First, a little more than two weeks ago, Apple announced that apps for eBooks and similar products had to have in-app purchasing. They could continue to link to an external website and price products on those sites however they wished, but they had to enable and pay Apple 30% of in-app transactions. Also, they couldn't disable all purchasing capabilities in the app in order to avoid the 30% fee. These rules were to go into effect on March 31st.

Yesterday, Apple announced its subscription processing system, and announced a new, more restrictive set of rules. There cannot be any links within an app for purchasing subscription content from outside the app--only in-app purchases are allowed, for which Apple gets 30% of each transaction. Further, the price charged inside the app must be as low or lower than the price charged for the same subscriptions sold anywhere else (for example, a publisher's own website.) The subscription rules go into effect June 30th.

There's considerable confusion as to whether the new subscription rules supersede Apple's earlier statements about eBooks, or if there will be separate policies for content sold one time, such as eBooks, and content sold on a subscription basis. If the former is true, Apple has closed the loopholes and made it impossible to sell content on an iOS device without paying Apple 30%.

Apple had to know that these policies would result in charges of price-fixing and anti-competitive behavior. The company is very profitable and is sitting on one of the biggest cash reserves in U.S. business, so it doesn't need the money from transactions. So, why is it pursuing policies that are guaranteed to cause friction?

One possibility is that Apple is trying to get Amazon to stop its "most favored nation" pricing policy, which requires that any publisher or author who sells through Amazon insure that Amazon's prices are as low or lower than any other reseller. Apple's argument could be that if its pricing policy is anti-competitive, so is Amazon's, and conversely, if Amazon's policy is legal, so is Apple's.

Another possibility is that Apple is planning to make some pricing changes that will lower the profit margins on its iPads and iPhones. There have been a flurry of rumors recently about an "iPhone nano" that would sell at a significantly lower price than the existing iPhone 4. This new, less-expensive iPhone will make less money per unit and could cannibalize some sales of the iPhone 4 and forthcoming next-generation iPhone. In addition, Apple may be planning to bring out the iPad 2 at a lower price, with commensurately lower margins. By increasing its transaction revenues, Apple can subsidize these lower prices and maintain its overall margins.

It makes sense for Apple to announce its new in-app sale pricing policy before the next wave of iPads and iPhones is launched, and to give vendors (and the market) more than four months of notice. If Apple doesn't need to launch its new products with lower margins (which is looking increasingly likely on the tablet side), it can rescind or modify the in-app pricing policies. Or, if antitrust litigation pressure from the U.S. or E.U. gets too great, Apple can change its policies before announcing prices for its new products.

In any case, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple modifies its new policies before they go into effect, but neither would I assume that Apple will change its mind.

Are apps the future of media?

For more than 15 years, we've been trying to get people to pay for content via the Internet. Companies have tried to sell subscriptions to newspapers, magazines, music and video, pay-per-view services and the like, and with a few exceptions, they've failed. Consumers equate the Internet with "free"; they pay once a month for Internet access, but everything else is included. If someone does try to charge for media, consumers will almost always find an alternate source that's free.

Cable television in the U.S. is in a similar situation. Cable operators have figured out how to get consumers to pay (grudgingly)  for tiers of service that contain multiple channels. The premium channels that are sold on a monthly basis, like HBO, Showtime and Starz, have themselves evolved over time into packages of channels to keep viewer interest (for example, HBO East/West, HBO2, Signature, Family, Comedy, Zone and Latino.) Service providers have to offer discounted packages in order to obtain subscribers, and cancellations rise when the discounts expire.

Video service providers outside the U.S. have experimented with a la carte pricing for individual channels, but the results have usually been disappointing; the operators find that they can make more money by offering pre-packaged tiers of programming, and consumers rarely protest the lack of choice.

Perhaps apps, rather than the Internet, are the future of media. Consumers have shown a great willingness to buy apps, if they're inexpensive. The micropayment schemes that failed so miserably on the Internet work beautifully for Apple's App Store, which takes all the friction out of transactions.

Consumers will pay for eBooks, magazines and newspapers in the form of apps. They've made the Apple iTunes store the world's largest retailer of music. They're willing to pay for content, if it's an app, works on a mobile device and is cheap. In this model, the Internet is (sometimes) the channel of distribution and the app is the medium.

As much as many of us have been railing against "old media" companies for bringing their business models to the app world, it seems to be working a lot better than anything they've tried on the Internet. I don't think that we're ever going to be able to erase the perception that "everything's free on the Internet." By comparison, consumers aren't just willing to buy apps, they eagerly buy. If we want to sell content, the most likely way to do it is as apps.

Is Apple backing itself into a corner?

On Monday, when Apple made the release candidate of iOS 4 available to developers, it released yet another variation on its iPhone Developers Agreement. This time, it barred developers from sharing analytic data with advertising services owned by companies that either make mobile devices or offer mobile operating systems. That means that Google, Microsoft, Nokia and any other company that competes with the iPhone, iPad or iOS can't get analytic data, which will make it impossible for them to track viewership or clickthroughs. (Keep in mind that this applies to apps; developers can use any advertising service they want for web content.)

Once again, questions are arising about antitrust violations on the part of Apple, and once again, the simple answer is that Apple doesn't have enough market share in smartphones, mobile phones or tablets to warrant action. The simple answer may no longer necessarily be true, however. Apple has been engaging in a series of actions to close down access to its platform, from controlling which apps get into the App Store to banning cross-platform development tools and cross-compilers, to dictating which programming languages can be used on the platform, to now banning advertising from services run by Apple's competitors. Any one of these actions, taken on their own, would probably get a pass, but put them all together and it spells trouble.

At this point, I wouldn't be surprised if the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and/or Justice Department formally open an investigation of Apple. Either agency would have to demonstrate that Apple's actions are causing harm to consumers. The argument could be made that the overall effect of Apple's decisions limits consumer choice, in that applications and features that they could otherwise get are being kept from them by Apple. Consumers have a high switching cost if they want to move to another platform, especially for mobile phones. They could be locked into the Apple iOS platform and be subject to Apple's restrictions for as long as two years.

This argument might not prevail in court, but Apple's reputation could be severely damaged if it's charged with monopoly actions. That might be enough to get Apple to backpedal on some of its recent decisions.

Attention 3D filmmakers: Here's your $300 iPhone app

Want to calculate parallax and lens separation for shooting 3D film and video? RealD has the iPhone application for you--the RealD Professional Stereo3D Calculator. It does lots of great stuff, including automatically calculating the settings for each shot that will keep parallax within preset maximums. But that's not why I'm writing about it.

The reason I'm writing about it is...well, let's do it like the voiceover for a movie trailer: "In a world where iPhone apps cost $9.99 or less, RealD has released a $299.99 iPhone app! They dared to mark it down from $300! Directed by James Cameron and featuring 10-foot-tall, blue, furry iPads that don't cost much less than RealD's application, and Munchkin-sized iPhones that cost much less, the RealD Professional Stereo3D Calculator with improve your parallax and lighten your wallet!"

It may be worth the money, but it seems expensive to me. Any bets on how soon we'll see a comparable application in the App Store for under $30?

Apple's iPhone review process: It's not a walled garden, it's a prison

Apple's recent decision to forbid usage of cross-compilers and intermediate development platforms for iPhone OS application development has been widely covered, as has been Apple's decisions not to approve new apps or to remove existing ones for a variety of content-related reasons. Yesterday, I wrote about Apple's decision not to approve an app by Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Mark Fiore because his cartoons disparage public officials. As the Columbia Journalism Review put it, that's the job description of an editorial cartoonist.

The iPhone OS environment is looking less like a walled garden and more like a prison, where Apple carefully screens everything and removes anything that it deems offensive or dangerous. Whether through hubris, paranoia or internal miscommunication, Apple is making decisions that are starting to backfire in a big way. The company may have had good intentions originally--insuring that applications met minimum performance and UI standards, and that truly salacious content didn't get into the App Store--but the decision-making process has gotten completely out of control.

It's a lot easier to say "no" than to say "yes"; the personal cost to the reviewer of approving an app that's found to be offensive is likely to be much greater than rejecting the app in the first place. So, a lot of perfectly good apps get kicked to the curb in order to avoid risk.

I'm sure that Mark Fiore's app will get approved, just as other cartoon apps that were rejected initially got approved after Apple was sufficiently ridiculed, but the fact that this keeps happening indicates that Apple's review process is broken. My opinion is that the entire process needs to be turned on its head: Apple should be looking to approve applications unless there is something functionally wrong with them (in other words, they simply don't work.) It should use the comments feature in the App Store as a guide to identify apps whose content is offensive, and even then, Apple's position should be to protect free speech.

Apple's app approval process is completely out of control, possibly because it's simply overwhelmed by the volume of submissions. If that's the case, Apple should fix the process, whether that means adding reviewers, changing the review criteria, or inviting community participation into the review process. Apple's increasingly draconian rules on development platforms and content are the biggest threat that Apple currently faces, not any competitive products or services. If the iPhone platform runs into trouble, it'll be Apple's doing, not Google's, RIM's, Microsoft's or anyone else's.

Why the App Store may be less important to the iPad than it is to the iPhone

I was reading an interesting post a few days ago that argued that a big reason for the popularity of App Store apps on the iPhone is how hard it is to use web apps on that device. Make no mistake, Safari on the iPhone is a very good browser, and the iPhone is a very good web environment. However, it's almost always easier to use a dedicated iPhone app than a web app.

The iPad may change that equation. The iPad's bigger screen size, bigger on-screen keyboard and better performance should make web apps much more viable on that platform. Web apps can be written in far more languages than iPad apps, they should work on multiple platforms (so long as they're not written in Flash), and they don't need to go through the App Store approval process. There will undoubtedly be a healthy market for native iPad apps, and I'm in no way against native apps. However, I believe that web apps will work much better on the iPad than on the iPhone or iPod touch, and you're going to see a lot of them.

Is Jobs's "Reality Distortion Field" fading away?

Today's "big" announcement by Apple just ended--new versions of the iPod Nano and Touch, and a new version of iTunes, plus some new headphones and a lot of chest beating about the App Store. Almost everything had been leaked weeks ahead of the presentation, and even if Apple had kept a lid on it all, there would have been nothing all that exciting.

The new pricing for the iPod touch isn't going to drive sales (if you're even mildly interested in the 3G iPhone, you're crazy not to buy one of those rather than an iPod Touch.) The revisions of the iPod Nano are nice, but no one is going to be lining up to buy one; at best, it'll be a good replacement for previous-generation Nanos. Apple seems to think that the new "Genius" feature in iTunes (a ripoff of Pandora) is going to generate more sales, but I disagree.

The net of all of this is somewhere between "feh" and "so?". Any other company would have made these announcements with a press release, and perhaps, a press conference. With an announcement like this one, the very fact that Jobs was involved actually increases the disappointment level.

The last really important announcement that Apple did was the original iPhone; compared to that one, today's announcement doesn't even merit a footnote.