I hate books, and you should too

I hate books. I hate books.

Don't get me wrong; I love reading. I go through at least a couple of books a month, sometimes a dozen. So in one sense, I love books, as in long-form texts. But in the sense of bound stacks of paper printed with ink, as a mechanism to deliver said long-form texts, I absolutely despise them. There's so much to hate about them I wonder if one blog post is enough.

First, they're fricking huge. A single book is bigger than any pocket in most of my clothes. And they're heavy, I mean really heavy. I remember carrying textbooks around in a huge, heavy bag when I was in school, textbooks that could fit a million times over in something smaller and lighter than a key fob. I might just need one chapter from a couple of them that day, but I had to carry the whole damn lot anyway. Even the paperback books I carry around every day to read on my commute are the biggest and heaviest single item I have with me when I leave the house.

And that's just talking about the books you might need in a day, or a few days. Your entire collection? Some people have dedicated rooms. Hell, there are these places called libraries that are entire buildings that just store one or two copies each of a few thousand or million titles, when you can fit all of that in your average mobile phone.

You actually have to go to these places, physically, just to access a piece of text. And you're never going to believe this: When one person is reading one of these books, nobody else can! There's no easy way to make a copy. There's stores too, where you can buy them, but get this: Due to their ridiculous size and weight, every store can only carry so many titles. More often than not, they won't even have the one you're looking for, or someone else has already got the last copy! Then you have to order them from somewhere else and wait several days until they're delivered.

But that's not all!

Sometimes, especially for older or less popular books, they won't be available at all. Because get this, it costs real money, well over a dollar, to produce books in batches less than a few tens of thousands, so people just don't do it unless they're sure a lot of people will buy them. If you want one of these "out of print" books, you have to find someone who bought one before they went out of print, and actually convince them to stop having it so that you can have it. I mean, seriously, why?

Do you understand the ridiculousness of the situation? Books are actually unavailable. Get this: Many books don't ever become available because no one is willing to take the risk that at least a few thousand people read them.

We're not even close to being finished.

You know trees, those helpful organisms that consume carbon dioxide, produce oxygen, and generally contribute to a healthy and vibrant ecosystem? You have to cut them down and destroy them, by the millions, to make books. You actually have to destroy forests to make books.

I'm not kidding. It's true. Look it up. It's horrible.

There are 3.3 billion people in the world - more than half the population of this Earth - with a mobile phone, TODAY. The vast majority of these people have very limited access to libraries, bookstores or any other varied source of printed books. We have the ability, TODAY, to give each and every one of these people access to every book ever written, every book that will every be written, in any language. This is not some "5-10 years from now" technology that's "in the lab", it's in your pocket RIGHT NOW. And yet because of our unjust laws, it's impossible to give the world access to this information that can only make their life better, and all the while we're destroying our forests by the millions of acres to print more of these hateful anachronisms.

Let's stop this madness. I want my children to not be constrained in their knowledge by where they are or when they want it.

My wishlist for an e-mail replacement

E-mail is crap. By far the biggest problem is, of course, spam, but there are countless others. E-mail is one of those technologies that was designed by copying the functionality of a pre-computer system: Actual, physical mail, usually referred to as "snail mail". E-mail works like snail mail, except slightly faster. You write a message, send it off, someone receives it, writes a reply, sends it off and so on. It might be faster than snail mail, but it's not qualitatively better.

Instant messaging has come around to supplant this with equally flawed design. All IM applications I know of start out with a basic concept: "Who's online?" Straight away, to participate in any of these communications networks, the first thing you have to do is advertise to everyone that you're available. Most of them will even happily inform everyone on your contact list when you're away from your computer for longer than 10 minutes. The privacy invasion is horrific. Imagine if whenever you picked it up or put it down, your phone advertised the fact to everyone in your phone book. Most people just don't bother.

Here's my wish list for a possible replacement for both of these useless technologies. Yes, I know Google Wave probably does most of what I ask for, but until the boys at Mountain View deign to give me beta test access I can only fantasise.

1. It has to seamlessly support multiple public identities

By public identity I mean an address through which people can reach me and a small set of optional information that I may choose to publish along with it like a name, a job title, an organisation I belong to or a physical address. All users should be able to have multiple identities - one for close personal friends, one for websites that only need the most basic information, one for work, on for your second job - as many as they want and need for their particular circumstances. When I say "seamlessly" I mean it should be possible to view, search and organise communications from all your identities in one place if you wish to do so; your identities should be completely separate as far as other people are concerned, but you should be able to manage them all from one place.

2. It has to support conversations in a native way

People don't send solitary e-mails, they're almost always part of a thread, or a conversation if you will, that consists of several messages and may involve more than two people. Support for this in e-mail and IM is very patchy and hacked-in; mail software will try and organise e-mails into threads, but most of the time it's just guessing that two e-mails with the same subject are part of a conversation, and it often gets things wrong. Most mail software tends to quote (copy) the entire message when replying, sending the same information out again and again while making it hard to actually get up to speed if you join it later on. And of course, if you want someone to join an active mail thread, the best you can do is copy them on your reply, but that doesn't let them look at the previous messages nor does it notify other people in the conversation, who may forget to include him in their replies.

What I'd like to be able to do is start a conversation with someone, add messages to it without having to copy all previous messages in every new one, and whenever I invite people to the conversation they can just browse through what was said before. I should be able to easily split a conversation at any point, or merge two conversations into one.

3. Users should be able to slip into and out of live chat seamlessly, without advertising their presence

If I want to have a live chat with someone, whether as a new conversation or continuing an existing one, all I have to do is click a button that will send a request to those in the conversation. They may accept, they may be unavailable, they may ignore me, or they may reply with a quick message saying they're busy. You shouldn't have to pre-emptively advertise your availability to all and sundry just because you want to talk to one or two people. Your instant messages and your longer, pre-composed messages should blend in seamlessly in the conversation.

4. It should require encryption and cryptographic signing

All messages and conversations should be cryptographically signed so that you can verify with absolute certainty if two messages are coming from the same source. Getting your public key signed by a well-known, trusted source can also verify that you are who you say you are, but you should also be able to use a self-signed certificate for anonymous work. Making this a basic requirement of the system and making the user interface for it a first-class item for any implementation is important if we're ever going to get end users used to using cryptography for their own security.

AT&T asks you to pay so it can use your broadband connection

AT&T announced the availability of its new "3G MicroCell" device in the U.S. this week. It does something fairly simple, frankly self-evident: you hook it up to your broadband connection and it acts as a mobile phone mast in your home or office, offering excellent coverage in an approximately 40-foot radius. Anyone with an AT&T mobile phone in range of the MicroCell that makes or receives a call will have it routed via your broadband connection. Verizon and Sprint have similar devices on the market, but this is the first UMTS-compatible femtocell to hit the market from a major carrier, with carriers in the rest of the world are sure to follow soon.

This kind of device appeals to me; I was recently forced to install a landline in my house because of poor mobile reception, but as I've complained of before, this just leads to hassle. If I had a penny for every time I've said "I can't hear you very well, call me back on my landline" the past few weeks, I could probably afford to check my voicemail while roaming. If I was living in the States I could get Google Voice and have one number for both my mobile and my landline but unfortunately Google Voice won't be coming to anywhere outside the U.S. any time soon because people outside the U.S. aren't used to paying for incoming calls and text messages.

However, what really got me is that AT&T is actually charging you for the use of this device. It costs $150 to buy, and you are essentially letting AT&T use your broadband connection to extend its network (not just for you; any nearby AT&T customer can route their calls through your femtocell). You also have the option of paying $20 a month to get unlimited calls while in range of the femtocell - but other people still get to share your broadband connection whenever they happen to pass by your house.

Femtocells are one way to achieve what I've been calling for in this blog for ages, i.e. to allow third parties to extend mobile coverage to areas where there is none instead of waiting for the major carriers to put up a mast nearby. In my view, AT&T should be paying you for using your bandwidth, not the other way around. Not only would this compensate you for when a random passer-by starts using his (up to 3.6Mbps) 3G data service to gobble up your bandwidth, it would also offer an incentive for enterprising companies to get an Internet connection and stick a femtocell (or a bigger device with slightly larger range) on the end of it to places where there is demand for mobile service. AT&T gets more calls and customers, the participating companies get a share of the connection fees, and suddenly there's a market - and an incentive - for truly ubiquitous coverage.

Somebody who works at a major carrier has to make the conceptual leap sooner or later. I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop.

T-mobile/Orange merger indicative of the mess that is mobile

After months of speculation about T-mobile UK's future, a merger deal with Orange was announced today. Pending regulatory approval, the two carriers should start merging their operations within the next few months. Executives from both companies are trumpeting the increased efficiency that the merger will bring to their customers. The two companies can now shut down many of their overlapping antennae, customer service centres, retail shops and offer their customers better service at lower cost. It makes sense if you think about it. Instead of running two networks with mediocre service, they can run one smaller network with excellent service.

If you accept that merging the two networks will bring increased efficiency, then it follows that the current set-up - two separate networks and operations serving two separate sets of users - is inherently inefficient. If you accept that, the question that immediately presents itself is, if merging these networks will bring increased efficiency and lower costs for everyone, why stop? If reducing the number of networks from five to four will increase efficiency, why not go further?

At some point, of course, the anti-competition watchdogs will start barking because of their very simplistic view of competition, the belief that if you just make sure companies don't own too much of a market, any market, everything will be fine. You need to take a step back and look at the big picture to realise how fundamentally flawed the whole system is.

The inefficiencies are real. Here I am, in the middle of the City of London, and a simple glance at Ofcom's Sitefinder tool shows that I am in range of about ten different mobile phone masts, yet the reception I'm getting is rather poor. If I pop outside and hop on a train from Liverpool Street station, I will immediately be out of range while in the tunnels, and even once above ground in the open countryside I'll mostly be getting poor reception, and not a hint of 3G. And yet, if I pop my Greek SIM card into my phone and walk around, suddenly the picture changes. Five bars everywhere, 3G coverage throughout. What happened? Well, with my foreign SIM card I'm suddenly free to roam on all five networks. Suddenly it's obvious that we have a ton of masts around, more than enough to cover everyone, except that we insist that each phone use only one of the networks. All this time, money and effort expended to build five times the infrastructure (and then expended again to upgrade it to 3G, and soon to be expended again to move to LTE) and we insist on making each phone use only a fifth of it. What's more, the existing carriers are currently busy upgrading this infrastructure when they should be concentrating on expanding coverage to areas were there is none - rural towns, the countryside, underground, public transport.

The carriers are not to blame for this situation; unable to take advantage of existing infrastructure, they each have to build their own, separate networks in the primary areas before they expand into the fringes. To understand why this is the case, it's important to realise that the market for mobile communications is one defined and created by the state. In order to offer mobile phone service, you need to own a license to transmit radio waves at specific frequencies. These licenses are given out by the government, but you can't just apply for one; there's a specific number, they are perpetual, and they have all already been auctioned off for billions of pounds to the carriers we all know and hate.

The government is squarely to blame for this mess. It has created five different networks, each with an identical mission to create infrastructure, yet unable to share resources for fear of being punished for anti-competitive behaviour. The situation, frankly, is quite ridiculous. We have a government-mandated, perpetual oligopoly, all in the name of the free market and competition.

So, what's the solution? Actually, I've already mentioned it: Roaming. Domestic roaming. Every mobile phone should be allowed to connect to any carrier's network in its home country just as it does when it finds itself abroad. Only then will the competitive forces of the market truly work their magic. First of all, this will allow small start-ups to serve the low-margin areas that the incumbents refuse to go near, where coverage is lacking. It will make it possible for companies to build masts in rural areas, on the London Underground, on overland trains, make a modest profit from the roaming revenues while the big boys keep their existing, lucrative inner-city infrastructure. Now you can have real, proper competition; if a company starts charging exorbitant rates for using their masts, a competitor can just stick up another mast and drive the price down towards the cost. Suddenly all the money being spent upgrading the existing infrastructure - which is more than sufficient to provide everyone with perfect coverage in heavily populated areas - will be shifted to expanding the infrastructure to where it's needed the most, and a vibrant market of enterprising companies serving niches in the market will thrive.

Please, let's stop this madness. Write to your MP. Write to Ofcom. Let's stop building five times too much infrastructure in major cities while letting the countryside languish in obscurity. Let's make it possible for enterprising people to get us coverage on the tube, on the train and anywhere else where it's needed. Let's make mobile sane.

Skype and Google Voice: The black sheep of the VoIP family

In case you haven't heard, eBay is selling Skype.

Most technology pundits are just going "I told you so" and a glance at the reports of the original, $2.7bn acquisition from 2005 will quickly show that everyone was scratching their heads trying to figure out why an online auction house would want to buy a loss-making VoIP company (Voice-over-Internet-Protocol, for the buzzword-challenged, which basically means a telephone that works over the Internet).

I have very few hopes for Skype in the long run, or for any other VoIP firm for that matter. Looking into my crystal ball, I can tell you that in the distant future (let's say 20 years from now) there will be no such thing as a telephone company, because routing telephone calls over the Internet means routing them over a network you've already paid for, so what exactly would this telephone company be selling? You see, VoIP is one of those unfortunate technologies that will undoubtedly benefit all of its users but not make anybody any money. It's all about using a tiny portion of your Internet connection, which you've already paid for, instead of an additional telephone service - except every telephone company in the world, fixed or mobile, is fighting it tooth and claw because it knows it will make them obsolete, and there's nobody (of any consequence) fighting the other corner. Yet.

Your ISP doesn't really care, since you already pay them for your Internet access - frankly they could do without the hassle of supporting VoIP on top of that. Anyway, these days, half the time your ISP is also your telephone company, so it would rather you still paid them some ridiculous amount per minute to call abroad, thank you very much.

The only money to be had in the VoIP transition is in facilitating calls from VoIP users to traditional phone lines and vice versa, but guess who the gatekeepers are there? Yup, that's right, the telephone companies. If you want to call a traditional phone line from your VoIP phone you have to pay the phone company, and it's no surprise they're not in a hurry to let you do that on the cheap. This is still Skype's one and only business model, and it's unsurprisingly not managed to make it an appealing package.

Is there hope on the horizon? Perhaps, mostly coming from Google and Apple. Pay no attention to the bickering about approving Google Voice for the iPhone, I'm here to tell you Apple would love nothing more than to allow the iPhone to work with Google Voice - except not as a separate app, but as a full-blown replacement for the carrier's voice service. Apple's agreements with AT&T and its other exclusive carriers are running out and it must be looking at the figures that show that it's selling a hell of a lot more iPhone in countries were users have a choice of carrier, and I'm sure their PR guys are tired of fielding constant complaints about the approved carriers' lacklustre service.

Sooner or later Google, or Apple, or both, are going to come out with a device that's going to go around the phone companies. You'll sign up for an unlimited data plan with a carrier (and I predict it'll be Verizon first with its brand spanking new LTE network) and the phone will just route all your calls over that. The phone companies will moan and whine and probably sue, but either of these companies will soon have the clout to make them accept the new world order.

Wishful Thinking: iTunes subscriptions on 9 September?

It's more or less confirmed that Apple will be hosting one of its events on the 9th of September. The ever-present Tablet rumour mill flared for a bit when this was announced, but it's becoming clear that Teh Steve will not be announcing anything of the sort; instead, we're looking at music-related product announcements. Most probably, refreshed iPods (including an iPod Touch with a camera and microphone, which should delight a few App Store developers) and iTunes 9.

What exactly will be in iTunes 9 is a bit of a mystery; rumours abound of a service called "Cocktail," the details of which are sketchy, though some sources have reported it will aim to promote full album sales at the expense of single track downloads.

Now, this is a bit of a puzzler for me since most studies I have seen show people are very much still in the habit of buying full albums from the iTunes Store and would need little prodding to continue to do so; iTunes already has "album-only" features (so you get some album-only songs, and possibly music videos and digital booklets when you buy a whole album) that seem to do the trick.

What I'm thinking (though, to be honest, mostly hoping) is that Apple will be the first to announce a subscription download service. A recent survey for UK Music by the University of Hertfordshire has shown that consumers would flock to such a service, and I have already talked of Virgin Media's announcement of a similar service, planned for a holiday launch. All that's missing is the agreement of the music labels, and if Apple has proved one thing with iTunes, is that it's good at getting what it wants from them. Perhaps they will beat everyone to the punch, and put streaming services like Last.FM and Spotify out of business in one fell swoop?

I have no inside sources, only a hunch, but going on the quality of most Apple rumours that's better than most, so, you heard it here first: Apple will announce a subscription service on 9 September that will give you the ability to download a set (I'd say unlimited, but that's just pushing my luck) amount of music every month for a fixed fee.

The iPhone may be the last jack of all trades

(Everybody's been complaining that my posts are too long, so I'm trying to keep them short and to the point from now on.)

This device is friggin' amazing, I'm still astounded by how it's changed how everybody thinks about ubiquitous computing. Everybody and his brother are stumbling over each other to clone it and improve on it in any way they can.

Still, I was handling a Nikon SLR camera and an Amazon Kindle e-book reader (sadly still a rare sight for me as it remains unavailable outside the US) in the past few days and I've been thinking about how the iPhone and its ilk will be obsolete in a few years. The iPhone (and other similar touchscreen smartphones) is great at being the one device that covers all your needs adequately, but the next few years will see the basics - phone service, a multitouch screen, a micropayment system for content transactions, and a wireless Internet connection - be included in every device, from our digital camera to our large-format e-ink screen. These devices should (and soon will) be interchangeable, with different trade-offs in form factor according to your needs. The only thing that's missing is the software infrastructure that will allow us to carry our Digital SLR or our e-book reader instead of (not as well as) our smartphone depending on what meets our needs better at the moment, the only functionality change we see being whatever is dictated by the physical characteristics of the device. The iPhone makes a particular compromise in the trade-offs of the quality of the camera, the screen, the keyboard, the speakers and the microphone on one side, with the weight, size and battery life on the other. Different times in one's day call for different types of compromise, but now this means carrying a whole bunch of devices around, which most people are loathe to do.

Seriously, the number of people I know who carry around a Blackberry or similar and a "personal" phone is stupefying. They all hate having to do this, too. Don't get them started on the half-dozen chargers that go with this gadgetry.

I want an iPhone built into every device I own! And so does everyone else, even if they don't know it yet.

Of course, a lot of people know this. I'm excited about what they're about to come up with. I think we all know for a fact that Steve Jobs has gone up a mountain, and we all know what the last famous guy who did that brought back with him. Amazon has the right idea with the Kindle, selling a device and a service for other devices with the two loosely coupled. I wonder who will get on the bandwagon with high-quality cameras first? Sony has the right expertise, but with their track record I bet they come up with something that has its own memory, wireless and cable standard that they will try to get everyone else to adopt before you can use their product. Yuck.

Greetings from the sunny Greek islands (which might explain the lack of posts recently).