The gist of the story, Macmillan insisted that Amazon.com start charging between $12.99 and $14.99 for the Kindle versions of Macmillan’s books. Amazon has generally charged $9.99 or less, and wanted to keep it that way. Amazon stuck to their guns for a couple of days, going so far as pulling all Macmillan publications from Amazon.com. Well, today Amazon caved, and Macmillan’s new release Kindle books are now between $12.99 and $14.99. On the bright side, Macmillan promises that older books will reduce in price, to the $6.99 range. How good of them!

I for one bought Kindle books because they were cheaper than their hard-backed counterparts. All other things being equal, I’d prefer the physical book to the electronic one. So, when I’m not saving anything by buying the Kindle version, it’s not likely I will be buying the Kindle version.

You can bet that very soon other publishers will follow suit, and all new Kindle books will be roughly the same price as their paper equivalents. This is 100% due to the greed of the publishers. Electronic books are cheap to produce. Much much cheaper than paper books. There is no logical reason to raise the price of electronic books, and frankly, even $9.99 was more than they should have been.

What’s truly unfortunate is that this is Apple’s fault. They are entering into similar deals with publishers (to sell books in the $15 range), and publishers are undoubtedly playing this card against Amazon. “Do what we tell you, or we’ll enter an exclusive deal with Apple.” Amazon’s hands are tied, and we, the readers, lose.

Sorry Apple, sorry Amazon, I don’t intend on buying any ebooks as long as their cost is comparable to the physical book. Here the publishers win, because they know that we’re all suckers for new releases, and they’ll get their $15 one way or another. Ass holes!

Most of my problems with the iPad can be solved with software updates, and (you read it here first) will be solved by Apple before, or shortly after launch. The most glaring of which is the very iPhone-like home screen and “springboard”. Apple doesn’t do ugly, and the 4 x 4 icon arrangement with about an inch of padding around each icon is about the ugliest thing I’ve ever spied. This is a placeholder so they could get developers working on iPad software with the iPhone OS 3.2 SDK. The long-term home screen will NOT look like THIS!

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My other problems are decidedly hardware based, and I expect them to be fixed in 2.0. First, as you can see above, the bevel around the iPad screen is huge. It can be about 75% of that size, no problem, and probably will be in the next version.

Second, I’m VERY surprised that there is no camera. It doesn’t make sense. I’m sure there is some kind of technical reason for this that will be solved for version 2.0

Third, there doesn't appear to be a compass or GPS.  While these aren't entirely necessary for the most likely use (sitting on your couch cold chillin') it would be a nice to have for any location-based functions.

Finally, there’s no way (currently) to either use the iPad as an external display, or use an external display with the iPad. This might be solved with an adapter, but how cool would it be to use the iPad as a 2nd display for your laptop?

Of course, I could always play the “get 1.0 and then get 2.0 and give 1.0 to my wife” trick. It always works.

These books were Christmas gifts for my son. He’d been getting into Christopher Moore, one of my favorite authors, so I thought I’d get him a couple of books to feed his addiction. Unfortunately, they were the same two books that I had bought him 6 months ago. The exact same books. Oops!

I still had the Books A Million bag handy, so when we were headed out December 26, I grabbed the books, and the bag, and stopped by Books A Million with the intention of exchanging the books for 2 more books by the same author. No problem, right? Wrong!

When I got to the counter, both sets of books in hand, the mousy woman first told me that the only way I could exchange the books was if I was a Discount Card holder. I explained that I was, but that I had let my membership lapse. So she said, “Well, then, I don’t think we can do the exchange. Do you have a receipt?” I said, “I can probably dig it up if I have to, but no, I don’t have it with me. It’s an even exchange, if that makes a difference.”

She told me, “Oh, no, I’m going to have to get the manager. I don’t think we can exchange them without a receipt.” So she called her manager and I waited semi-patiently. While we were waiting, I said, “You know, I know it’s not your policy, but having a policy like this is libel to drive customers away. It seems like with price already being a compelling reason to turn to Amazon, you would at least have better customer service.” She replied with, “We’re not worried about that, we beat out Amazon 5 to 1”. She didn’t elaborate on that, but that’s about the time they lost me.

The manager came to the register and confirmed that, indeed, they would not, could not, take an exchange without the receipt. “The machine won’t even let us do anything without a receipt!” I said, “I can go home and dig up the receipt if it’s really necessary, but am not real happy about doing that, given the weather.” He said, “Well, I’m afraid that’s what you’re going to have to do. Well, I guess if you remember the exact date and time that you bought the books, I could probably look them up, but it might take me a couple of hours to find your receipt in our system.”

Not wanting to wait around for 2 hours, gambling on the off chance that I may guess the correct date and time of my purchase, I headed home and dug up my receipt.

I then returned the books, with receipt in hand, and got a full refund, and ordered the replacement books from Amazon.com right there from the Books A Million register.

Oh, and if you live in the Joplin area and need some books, give me a holler. I may be able to add your order to mine and get you free shipping from Amazon.com. Anything to help put another nail in Books A Million’s coffin.

It’s not so much the bailout. While I would personally rather the government didn’t spend our hard-earned tax dollars to bail out some fat cats that made some bad decisions, I admit that my knowledge of all things economic is pretty limited, and trust that the “experts” will make the right choice. So, while I don’t want it, I could tolerate the bailout.

What I can’t tolerate is all of the earmarks the shoved into this thing. If this bill was so important, and so urgent, why the hell couldn’t our friends in congress just write a bill that did just what it was set out to do; bail out the banks. Instead it’s filled full of crap such as (and I’m not making this up!):

• $6 million for producers of kids’ wooden arrows. (Unless those arrows are going to be used to punish the fat cats, they have nothing to do with the bank crisis!)
• $192 million to Puerto Rican and Virgin Island rum producers! (I’m thinking that this “crisis” probably has those that drink drinking a lot more rum these days, so this one was truly unnecessary. The rum producers will be making a killing anyway, along with the tobacco industry and the beer industry.)
• Some undisclosed amount to...wool research! (Sounds a little dirty)
• $128 million to auto-racing tracks. (Um...why? As big as NASCAR is these days, I’m thinking they can afford to make their own damned tracks!)
• $33 million to companies operating in American Samoa. (Hey, cool!...no...wait...not so cool, but certainly better than rum or auto racing)
• $10 million to small- to medium-buget film and television producers. (I’m not sure what kind of movies $10 million can produce, but my guess is that we just purchased a stock in the porn industry.)
• $233 million as...get this...tax benefits for fishermen who’s livelihoods suffered as a result of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill. (This was clearly a way of buying the vote of Alaska Rep. Don Young. I wish I could get a break for my suffering of 20 years ago! As a starving college student, life really sucked about then. I consumed roughly $192 million worth of rum, too, hmmm...it’s all coming back to haunt me now...I definitely need $233 million for my suffering.)
• $3.8 billion (with a B) for health care provisions that force insurance companies to provide mental-health treatment coverage. (While I see a connection between mental health and this bill, I don’t think this bill is the appropriate place for this.)

Why the hell do we let this happen? How can we prevent it?

For those of you that are supposed to be representing us in Washington, shame on you.

(source: NY Post, via Drudge)

I thought that I had finally found that excuse with the introduction of iTunes Movie Rentals. What an awesome idea! I can sit down, on a whim, and just start watching a movie (after a brief delay while I wait for the download.) Instant gratification! It's the American way, baby!

Alas, I will likely never buy an Apple TV, because I will never use the rental feature.

The hell you say? You heard me right, sucka, I will never [again] use the iTunes Movie Rental feature...not in its current incarnation anyway. Why? Because I'm not in the habit of throwing my money away...much.

I have the same problem that a lot of folks are complaining about (see articles from Mark Bozsko, Glenn Fleishman, Rob Griffiths, David Pogue, Michael Rose). The movie industry is more interested in shooting itself in the foot than taking part in a true entertainment revolution.

Whatchu talkin' 'bout? Well, I'm going to tell you! If you rent a movie from Apple, you have a very generous 30 day period in which to start watching that movie. Once you start, however, you only have 24 hours to complete it. Mark Bozsko has an almost workable technique for getting around this, but even it sits a little outside of real life.

So what's the problem? Well, like those listed above, I lead a busy life that includes very little time for a couple of things: entertainment and sleeping. Sometimes my wife and I try to squeeze in a little entertainment time only to have sleep decide it is more important. So we'll get about half way through the movie and one of us will say, "how about we stop here and finish this later?" This isn't an occasional happenstance, this is the norm. This is my life. Welcome to it.

So what's the big deal? Finish the movie the next night, but start watching it a little earlier. If only it were that simple. Ok, lets pretend we're in the DVD world, using a little service called NetFlix. Tuesday night we manage to get the kids in bed, and get our real-life commitments taken care of, by 9:00 PM, and we sit down for a nice romantic evening of American Gangster, a movie that happens to be nearly 3 hours long. About an hour into the movie, my wife says, "I'm really enjoying the violence, but I'm pooped. Can we finish watching this tomorrow?"

So, along comes Wednesday, and we go through the same routine, and manage to sit down to finish the movie a little earlier, at 8:30 PM. We watch another hour or so and my wife cuddles up to me and says, "All of this violence, pervasive drug content and language, nudity and sexuality has got me randy baby, yeah!" So off goes the TV and sleep soon follows.

Thursday we finally manage to make it through the rest of the movie and shove the DVD in the mailbox Friday morning.

How does this jive with the iTunes 24 hour restriction? It dunt!

No doubt, though, that I can start and finish any movie within 72 hours. I'm good like that!

This isn't an Apple problem, by the way. It's the dumbass movie studios. Those robots are just incapable of thinking like real people, apparently.

I've got an idea. Go and grab a pen and paper, and I'm going to tell you how to be a billionaire. The first one to the finish line gets to loot. (Apple, I hope you're paying attention, 'cause this will work, and I'm rooting for you! You already have most of these right, after all. I know you're going to have to convince the studios of all of these items, but if anyone can do it, you can!)

How to hit a home run with on-demand movie rentals:

• Price at $2.99 to $3.99 for standard resolution movies, and $3.99 to $4.99 for HD. (With the occasional "special" of $0.99 or $1.99 to suck people in like the drug dealers you are.)
• Allow me to transfer movies to and from my computer, iPhone, iPod, and Apple TV. But also allow me to transfer a movie I rented in HD on my Apple TV to my iPhone to finish watching. How? Download both the HD and standard versions to my Apple TV, and transfer only the standard version. (Duh!)
• Allow me a 72 hour window to watch a movie from beginning to end. 72 is the magic number. I don't want to have to pay extra for this, either. On this, there is no negotiation. And this is the tipping point. The company to implement this will win the on-demand rental wars. Of this there is no doubt.
• Allow me to transfer a movie while I'm off-line. Yes, there is some technical weirdness you'll have to figure out, but when I'm on a 16 hour flight, and I'm watching a movie on my MBP but the battery is about dead, I should be able to finish watching it on my still-charged iPhone, and if I turn on my wireless, by golly I might just crash the plane.

I'm easy. If I get the 72 hour window, I will go out and buy an Apple TV and will be one step closer to being an Apple home. I'll be happy, Apple will be happy, and even those crusty old movie studio types will crack a hint of a smile. You want on-demand movie rentals to take of? Put the consumer first. It's amazing how effective that can be.

Doing commercial consulting, you're given a really huge toolbox...and a Sears credit card. See a new and shiny tool that's perfect for the job you're trying to accomplish? Super! Go out to Sears and buy one! (But not everyone needs a cherry stoner.)

Doing DoD consulting is a bit different. Our toolbox is roughly the size of a shoe box, and consists of a hammer, a few screw drivers, a couple of Vice Grips, and if you're real lucky, some spackle. Every once in a while we get the opportunity to buy a new tool, but we don't have a Sears credit card, we have a WalMart gift card that is usually delivered at about this time of year. What do we usually buy? Stickers to put on our hammer.

Is it possible we are to comfortable with that hammer? It feels so good in our hands. It is such a versatile tool. Not only can I hammer nails like the tool was designed to do, but if I'm real creative, I can screw in a screw...or hammer in a screw, or pound the crap out of the square peg until it fits into the round hole.

People love their hammers. Just try to take one away and see what happens. They'll kick and scream and tell you, "All I need is a hammer!"

Ok, I'll admit that the hammer is a very versatile tool, and you really can accomplish almost any job with that hammer. But when you start to try to paint a fence with that hammer, it's time to pull out that WalMart gift card and buy yourself a power sprayer.