Copia, the long-awaited amicable getting more information stage denounced at CES in early 2010, is live. It won't be strictly voiced until next week, and it's still coarse around the edges. Call it a open beta, call it a let go candidate; it's at last ready for readers to see for themselves what it's all about.
I've outlayed a lot of time with Copia's in isolation beta, that has vanished by a handful of iterations office building up to this let go candidate. The thought at the back it - to bring the amicable aspects of sites similar to Facebook and the store + customer model of applications similar to iTunes to books - is great. But it's really tough to obtain all of those tools working good on their own, let alone working good together: as a result the delays, and a few shortcomings in the final version.
This video from Copia explains the truth really well:
To try to make this prophesy real, Copia's stage has 3 parts:
a social-networking website , where you link up with friends and other readers of the same books to confer what you're reading, share recommendations and ratings. To make joining a small easier, you can pointer in with a Facebook account, or emanate a well-defined Copia account. Once you're in, Copia can link up with LinkedIn and Twitter, too.
a desktop e-reading customer for Mac and Personal Computer where you can purchase books by the Copia store (EPUB with Adobe DRM, so you'll need an Adobe account) and read those books on your desktop or laptop. You can moreover read PDFs or DRM-free EPUB files in the client.
An iPad app that similar to the desktop, includes both your e-book library and the store.
Originally, DMC Worldwide, Copia's primogenitor company, had programmed to let go a apartment of multi-size e-readers in conjunction with Copia. Now, their outline is to spread their program stage to multi-part devices, from the iPad to OEM partners.
So let me rapidly travel you by the conventional Copia experience. You obtain an account on the website and beginning joining to friends. These may be biased or two-pronged follows, similar to Twitter; so you could, if you wished (and users longed for to share) follow what a preferred writer is getting more information or recommending.
You download one of the 7 giveaway books Copia's done existing to new members. Some of these are flattering good - hey, EM Forster's A Passage to India ! we do not have an e-book duplicate of that. Now, even even though you can purchase or choose it from the site, you can't obviously download it. You have to open up the desktop customer for that.
So you download and setup the desktop customer and come in in your ID. Now you can download. Unfortunately, if you picked a few books to increase to your library (say, you longed for to confer The Complete Turing with a friend) that you didn't obviously purchase from the site, uncanny things will come about when you try to double-click it. Basically, the app assumes you're perplexing to download the book, can't find it in your purchase list, and spits out an blunder message. OK.
When you open up the e-reader, it's flattering conventional stuff; there's no full-screen view, and wizz in/zoom out doesn't obviously appear to wizz anything, but it does change your perspective from, say, one mainstay to two. It handles annotations and records that we can then lamp up to the mothership in the website and keep synced opposite my devices. So long as we recollect to press the large "Sync" button. It can't auto-sync anything.
The iPad app offers probably the smoothest experience; you can browse, download and link up without ample of a hitch. But again, you must be actively sync your calm between the website and desktop client, and there's a bit of a loiter between syncing a book and it looming on the iPad. If you've used iPad e-book applications similar to Nook or Kindle, there isn't ample here that's new.
Copia obviously turns out to be a really exegetic box of because companies with great ideas and a coherent prophesy do not always finish up shipping the most appropriate products. It's not for insufficient of chic people, good design, or good code: it's about control.
Copia doesn't manage any of the ends of book prolongation or distribution. It has to attend to the book publishers, Adobe (who creates the DRM), the companies who make the devices, the App store who has to authorize getting your program on a device (over that you have 0 manage of the date they at last authorize an app for release). If you wish to enlarge your scope, to offer a wider operation of formats on every device imaginable, that increases the drawback by powers of ten. To try to make all of those partnerships stick and still emanate a single, coherent stage without the determined interaction or selling poke to beat everybody in to figure is scarcely impossible.
E-reading is a quite disruptive marketplace to try to make a project similar to this work. Book publishers are if anything more regressive than their counterparts in the film and song industries. They've been at this longer, and they've seen bad deals, unsuccessful formats, prevalent piracy.
Book readers, too, are more regressive in their draw close to these objects. They similar to simplicity. Amazon and Barnes Noble have been the most successful in this space because they offer one store, one brand, one experience. Sony, for instance, creates great consumer hardware, inclusive great e-readers - but haven't been able to fissure the alertness in the way Amazon and Barnes Noble have, because they aren't related with books.
In the year given Copia was announced, Amazon and Barnes Noble responded to the problems that Copia sought to residence and integrated their own however-limited amicable functions in to their products. They've done it with partnerships with existing amicable networks: Twitter, Facebook and Google. The NOOKcolor is arguably only as amicable as Copia already, precisely because it allows readers to offshoot in to these lengthened amicable networks and full list of Google contacts, and do it sincerely seamlessly, correct inside of the e-reader.
That's the model both the calm administration companies and the amicable networks are pursuing, and it took them a long time to obtain there. Don't dehydrated to jam as well ample calm in to the amicable network: bring the amicable networking logins and profiles to where people are using their content.
Likewise, do not outlay most of your appetite office building amicable networking features in to your calm site. Let Netflix be Netflix and let Twitter be Twitter. No firm should outlay as well ample time and resources perplexing to do something it doesn't have the skills to do improved than any person else.
Even Apple - the chief of determining an end-to-end answer - has had to uncover this with Ping, and to a obtuse border with iBooks. Steve Jobs only isn't all that meddlesome in pity things about himself on a amicable network, and he might admire to read, but he's not all that meddlesome in the edition industry. Steve Jobs likes The Beatles. Let him have The Beatles.
I'm certain that in iteration after iteration, Copia will take all of the services beneath its manage and make them work seamlessly with each other. And the large thing that it will force e-readers and e-book companies to do is to regard hard about how they wish to confederate amicable components in to their devices.
Will it only be tweeting, "Hey! we read this, examine it out!" Will be an open standard, similar to the draft OpenBookmarks horizon , that enable readers to share their annotations and bookmarks with each other no matter what gadgets they're using? Or will customers wish richer connectors - a space for practical book groups, the capability to obtain to know strangers formed on their common affinities, crop their friend's libraries, ponder their purchase recommendations? Could Amazon, Barnes Noble or Apple exercise something similar to this? Would they wish to?
As it is, Copia isn't the future of reading, publishing, e-retail or anything else. (All of these claims have been done at assorted points heading up to its launch.) Right now, it's two things:
a plain frontend customer for Adobe Digital Editions;
a really good proof-of-concept for how far you the social-network model may be lengthened in to amicable reading.
That is not bad. If you're a reader, you should examine it out; see what works, and see what doesn't. If you're entangled in this business in a few other capacity, see what you can use - or what another, hungrier firm might use to try to take you down.
See Also:
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