In a joint announcement, Austin, TX-based Freescale Semiconductor and Cambridge, MA-based E Ink–which makes the “electronic ink” displays used in the Amazon Kindle, the Sony Reader, and other e-book devices—said today they will work together to integrate the electronics that control E Ink’s displays with Freescale’s MX processors to create a single “system on a chip” for future e-reading devices. The collaboration “will enable several new markets, including e-newspapers and e-textbooks,” E Ink vice president of marketing Sriram Peruvemba said in the announcement.

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Northwest tech giants Amazon and Microsoft have joined a coalition of companies, nonprofit groups, and individuals to work against a proposed settlement by Google regarding its thousands of scanned books according to an article in yesterday’s New York Times. The group, which includes new Microsoft ally Yahoo, will work to derail the settlement between Google and groups like the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers about Google’s right to digitize and publish books from libraries online. Google was first sued over its book scanning in 2005. The settlement reached sets up a way for Google to display and sell books online but is of concern to antitrust lawyers including some in the Department of Justice. The coalition against the settlement is tentatively being called the Open Book Alliance.

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Akademos, a Norwalk, CT-based startup that sells used college textbooks and course materials through online bookstores, has raised $2.5 million in equity funding, according to documents filed August 4 with the Securities and Exhange Commission. Kohlberg Ventures of Portola Valley, CA, provided the funding, according to a press release circulated today, and Kohlberg partner Bill Youstra has joined Akademos’ board, along with former eHarmony marketing executive Scott Eagle. $190,000 of the $2.5 million found will go to repay debt owed by Akademos to its CEO, Brian Jacobs, according to the filing.

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A few random rumblings from around the tech community today:

—Some notables from the Seattle startup scene are heading to Las Vegas next week to compete in the World Series of Poker. Dave Schappell of TeachStreet, Andy Liu of BuddyTV, Davis Bae of the Bae Law Group, and a few others will be bringing it on at the Rio Hotel & Casino against thousands of competitors. It’s $1,500 buy-in, no-limit Texas Hold ‘em (probably better odds than raising money from a VC these days). Schappell says his money’s on Liu to go the farthest.

—Luis Salazar of Bellevue, WA-based GMI (he’s also an entrepreneur-in-residence at Voyager Capital) published a children’s book in February called Chin and the Magic Stones. The story is about the adventures of a young boy and his dog in the town of Kirkland. The book has been moving up the Amazon.com charts, and recently made its publisher’s top ten bestseller list (iUniverse).

—Jeff Lawson, co-founder of Twilio, is moving from Seattle to San Francisco next week. That means Twilio, the cloud-based phone service that raised venture funding in March, is shifting the majority of its operations to the Bay Area (where two of its founders are). “I’ve been hiring and building the company more and more in SF,” Lawson said in an e-mail. “But we’ve still got a couple people who’ll continue to work from up here.” Here’s hoping Lawson and his team keep their strong connections to the Seattle community.

—As if to balance that news, Gaurav Oberoi, co-founder of Bill Monk, has returned to Seattle from the Bay Area, as TechFlash reports. Oberoi is working with his business partner Chuck Groom on a stealthy Web startup here. Groom and Oberoi apparently left San Francisco startup Xmarks just last week.

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On a desk, two magnifying glasses lie atop a small stack of books bound in a style reminiscent of a stately Victorian library. In any other video game company’s office they might seem out of place, but Bellevue, WA-based Her Interactive makes video games based on the written adventures of girl detective Nancy Drew, whose adventures have been published since the 1930s. So magnifying glasses and old-fashioned books seem as appropriate as the computers on company president and CEO Megan Gaiser’s desk.

Her Interactive is one of the fastest-growing computer and video game companies you’ve never heard of. Its product line—nearly 30 games for three platforms (with five new releases this year), and 7 million units sold in 11 years—comes from making the most of an oft-ignored niche in video games: girls and women who want interesting games that don’t patronize them. It’s a sound strategy, judging from the 20 percent of the adventure-game genre market Her Interactive has captured, according to market research firm NPD. The company grew from 25 to 55 employees in 2008, aided by the 1.6 million games sold last year, and has been profitable since 2002. “Each new game outsells the last,” Gaiser says.

Her Interactive was originally a division of American Laser Games in Albuquerque, NM, and was the only part of that company to survive bankruptcy, relocating to Bellevue in 1997. Gaiser joined that year as creative director, before becoming CEO only a year later. Gaiser had first moved to Washington in 1994, after 11 years of film making, to work on multimedia projects at Microsoft.

At first, Her Interactive had trouble getting games into the market. In 1999, when Gaiser attempted to sell the first Nancy Drew computer game, publishers told her, “Girls will never play video games because they’re computer-phobic.” Unable to get a publisher to accept the game, Her Interactive took …Next Page »

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The newest face at Seattle-based Voyager Capital is a familiar one to Northwest techies. Voyager is announcing today that Geoff Entress, one of the region’s most active and prominent angel investors, has joined the firm as a venture partner. He will focus primarily on consumer Internet and digital media investments in Washington state.

Entress was a venture partner at Seattle’s Madrona Venture Group for eight-plus years before leaving last June to focus on angel investing. His previous investments include Isilon Systems (NASDAQ: ISLN), Seadragon Software, The Coffee Equipment Company, Shelfari, and World Wide Packets. Entress’s current portfolio includes notable Northwest companies like BuddyTV, Elemental Technologies, Liquid Planner, Pet Holdings (ICanHasCheezburger.com), Geospiza, Pressplane, CultureMob, and Sandlot Games. He is also on the board of drugstore.com (NASDAQ: DSCM).

In the past few months, Entress (an Xconomist) has spoken with us on a wide range of topics, from trends in angel investing to why startups fail. In an interview yesterday, he and Voyager managing director Erik Benson spoke about Entress’s new role (he started last month) and what it means for both parties. Bottom line: it sounds like a strategic hire that will make Voyager more competitive, as well as increase Entress’s reach and influence among entrepreneurs and the startup community.

My initial reaction to the news, however, was that angel investing is in trouble—because of what Entress’s going back to the VC world might signify. But he strongly downplayed that notion. “Angel investing is hurt, but it’s not dead. The dollars will go down, the number of deals will go down,” Entress says. “I’ll continue my angel activities.” He adds that when he left Madrona in June, “it was to focus on my own investments. I didn’t know I’d go back to VC…but I realized, hey, I can do both because it’s beneficial to Voyager.” Entress also says the recession played no role in his decision.

There have not been many cases of VCs switching firms in Seattle—in part because there just aren’t that many firms. “We have a longstanding relationship with Geoff,” says Benson, who adds that Voyager started talking with Entress last summer. “It took a while for him to be in the right place, for us to be in the right place, for the stars to be aligned…What Geoff does as an angel sets up nicely for what we do as a venture firm…and his expertise is complementary to other partners here.” The two got to know each other while working together with Portland, OR-based Elemental Technologies, a video-processing software firm in which both Entress and Voyager are investors.

As for the strategic implications of the hire, time will tell—but it certainly looks good on paper. “Great foundations are built in times of distress,” Benson says. “We’ve been building our team over the past year.” Indeed, Voyager has been adding new staff up and down the West Coast—the firm announced the hires of managing director Daniel Ahn in Silicon Valley and venture partner Diane Fraiman in Portland last summer.

Lastly, I asked Entress what he’s finding most interesting in the tech community these days. He mentioned a number of local startups, including some, like Gist (led by T.A. McCann), that offer new kinds of messaging and online-information services. He also said he’s been playing around with his new Kindle 2 e-book reader. “I’ve been thinking about business models for the Kindle,” he says, intriguingly. “I think books are going to disappear.”

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Seattle-based Amazon is planning to make its Kindle e-books available on mobile phones, according to the New York Times, which cited an Amazon spokesman. Yesterday, Google said it had made 1.5 million books available to read on the iPhone, T-Mobile G1, and other devices. Amazon is expected to roll out a new version of its Kindle e-book reader next week.

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Seattle-based Amazon announced its sales for the 2008 holiday season were its best ever, peaking with 6.3 million items ordered worldwide on December 15. Best-selling items included the “Wall-E” DVD, Nintendo Wii video-game platform, Microsoft Office software, and, of course, the Amazon Kindle e-book reader.

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In the shopping spirit of the season, I thought it might be useful to give a quick update on what the year’s best-selling tech gadgets have been on Amazon.com, and how Amazon’s own foray into gadgets is going. Probably too late to help with your own shopping list, but nevertheless here are a couple notable items from the blogosphere:

—Forget Blu-ray players and iPhones. Wired’s blog notes that four of the top 10 best-selling electronic gadgets on Amazon this year are GPS devices from Garmin. That includes the #1 item of 2008, the Garmin nüvi 350 GPS navigator. Who needs maps anymore? (OK, I do.)

—Amazon’s own gadget, the Kindle e-book reader, is apparently sold out for Christmas, and its stock as a search term on Google spiked in October to nearly triple its level during the summer, according to TechCrunch. Google searches for the term “Kindle” have since fallen off somewhat, but remain high. The Kindle faces competition from Apple and Sony, and it will be very interesting to see what all this means for the future of books.

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Seattle-based Amazon announced it has completed its acquisition of Victoria, BC-based AbeBooks, an online marketplace for used, rare, and out-of-print books. The deal was originally announced on August 1. With the purchase, Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) also owns 40 percent of LibraryThing, a literary social site based in Cambridge, MA, which competes with Seattle-based Shelfari, another recent Amazon acquisition.

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The biggest development in the digital media world this week, by far, was the settlement of a pair of class-action copyright-infringement lawsuits brought against Google in 2005 by the Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers, and several publishing houses. The compromise agreement, which was announced October 28 and now awaits approval by the federal courts, could eventually result in improved access to books, especially the millions of books that are no longer in print but are still covered by U.S. copyrights. It promises to free Google to move forward with its ambitious library digitization effort, which will put a vast collection of literature at the fingertips of students, researchers, and at least a few public library patrons. It should also placate the Chicken Littles in the publishing industry, who have spent years using every available means, including the Google lawsuit itself, to obstruct the sharing of knowledge enabled by the digital revolution.

But for readers—the group whose interests are closest to my own heart, and the only major class of stakeholders in the lawsuit whose interests weren’t being protected by a team of well-paid attorneys—the Book Search settlement contains some major disappointments. I should emphasize that I am not a lawyer, and I have only spent a few hours studying the settlement agreement. (It’s 323 pages long, which may explain why it took the parties more than two years to negotiate a solution.) But I’m saddened by the gap between the level of open access to literature that was considered possible when Google first launched its project to digitize millions of library books and what we’re probably going to get as a result of this agreement.

Specifically, the settlement seems to put an end to hopes that the Google Library Project would result in widespread free or low-cost electronic access to books that are out of print but have not yet passed into the public domain. These books—and there are millions of them—are in a painful state of limbo. They’re deemed commercially non-viable by their original publishers, so you can’t find them in most bookstores. Yet no one else can republish them without getting permission from the original copyright holders or their heirs or assignees—and for many so-called “orphan works,” these rightsholders can’t even be identified or located. So the only way to read one of these books is to find a copy at a used bookseller, or figure out which public or academic library owns a copy, and then physically travel there.

The hope was that Google—consistent with its stated mission to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”—would simplify access to these out-of-print but still-presumptively-copyrighted books by sharing their full text over the Internet at little or no cost to readers, the same way it does with the public-domain books it has digitized. (Under U.S. law, the copyright on all works published before January 1, 1923, has irrevocably expired, and Google lets readers peruse and download these books for free. If you click here, for example, you can read my favorite novel of all time, E.M. Forster’s 1910 masterpiece Howards End.)

If Google had chosen to take the lawsuit to trial and prevailed, it might have been at liberty to do this, monetizing the practice (just as it monetizes all of its other services) through keyword-based advertising. Such a service would have been a great boon to readers everywhere. Indeed, when I interviewed a bunch of librarians about the Google initiative back in 2005, before the lawsuit, most of them were ecstatic: they’d been waiting for years for someone to come along and help them put their collections online. I bet Google could even have charged a little something for the service—after all, nobody else is trying to scan so many library books (7 million of them so far).

Alas, the nation’s authors and publishers organized a campaign to stop Google. Letting avarice run roughshod over common sense and the common good, the plaintiffs in Authors Guild et al. v. Google and McGraw Hill et al. v. Google argued that the very act of scanning an in-copyright book without the rightsholder’s permission is an egregious copyright violation. Even the short snippets of text that Google Book Search serves up among its search results were too much for these groups to stomach. (This despite the fact that the courts long ago ratified the inclusion of snippets in general Web search results as an example of “fair use” under copyright law.)

It quickly became clear that the plaintiffs in the lawsuits would sooner see out-of-print books remain in limbo forever than sacrifice one penny of potential profit to Google. No matter that these authors and publishers weren’t even marketing the books Google was scanning: if the rightsholders themselves couldn’t figure out how to make money on their out-of-print titles, no upstart search-gizmo company was going to, either.

It may surprise you that, as a writer, I’m on Google’s side in this dispute. But my point of view is that decent writers can always find ways to get paid for their work. They shouldn’t have to leech off the people who …Next Page »

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Last week, we reported that Amazon is acquiring Seattle-based Shelfari, a literary social networking site. We also noted that Cambridge, MA-based LibraryThing (which Amazon also owns 40 percent of) had some harsh words for its West Coast rival. John Cook of the Seattle P-I provided some useful insights and comments here (e.g., the deal is less than $10M, not a home run). But the acquisition left me wondering about more than just the future of these two startups, and whether it was a good exit for Shelfari. It made me think about Amazon’s strategy, and how the deal fits into the larger context of social sites built around books and other consumer goods.

For starters, some of the technology in the deal sounded similar to a new feature of Borders’ online bookstore that we profiled a few months ago. In June, I reported on Borders breaking away from its competitor Amazon’s services and launching its own “magic shelf” user interface—a “virtual” bookshelf, designed by Cambridge, MA-based Allurent, that lets you browse book covers as if you were in a real store. My first thought when I looked at the Shelfari site was that, superficially at least, it resembled Borders’ magic shelf. So I wondered: did Amazon’s acquisition of Shelfari have anything to do with the Borders move?

I first contacted Shelfari to get its side of the story, and was met only by world-class PR-speak, in an e-mail from an Amazon official: “Shelfari and Amazon’s common goal has been and will continue to be to deliver the best product and services to customers. Both companies are dedicated to building great communities that celebrate books and will work together to create enhanced experiences for members. As always, our joint focus is on customers not the competition.” (This is what happens when you get bought.)

Not surprisingly, the co-founder and CEO of Allurent, Joe Chung (an Xconomist), sees things a bit differently. “I think Amazon probably is responding at least somewhat to the magic shelf,” Chung says. But he explains that Amazon is “probably buying the innovation and team more than the specific property and they probably figure they are better off picking these things up to keep them out of competitors’ hands.” Fumi Matsumoto, Allurent’s co-founder and chief technology officer, adds, “It’s just really great for us to see these rich user experiences going mainstream.”

I also reached Tim Spalding, founder and CEO of LibraryThing, but he declined to be quoted. He did point me to his blog, in which he highlighted Zoomii, another online bookstore with a novel cover-browsing interface, and also an older post about Borders’ magic shelf (which got mixed reviews from the commenters). About the most recent Amazon deal, Spalding writes that he has “the greatest contempt” for Shelfari, and that “once the Amazon/Shelfari deal goes through, we are competing against Amazon.” Which is a challenge he seems to be taking on with gusto. “The good news from the Shelfari deal,” he writes, “is that when startups get acquired, they tend to stagnate.”

Given that Amazon owns a good portion of LibraryThing as well, this would seem to be a thorny situation for Spalding, to say the least. But whether his company or Shelfari ends up on top, the Amazon deal appears to bode well for the business of online communities built around books and other products. After all, a big player getting involved—and a little bad blood between competitors—never hurt innovation.

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The Apple iPhone is easily the most powerful, multitalented phone ever marketed. As I and many others have pointed out, it’s really a handheld multimedia computer, with camera and (in the iPhone 3G) GPS functions to boot. So it’s a little baffling that the only set of instructions you get when you buy an iPhone is a flimsy color pamphlet called “Finger Tips” that looks more like an extended magazine ad. This thin document is tucked into the box so cleverly that I didn’t even realize it was there until after I’d bought a 3G and was putting my first-generation iPhone back in its original container to sell it.

It’s true that Apple is famous for making hardware and software that’s so user-friendly you usually don’t have to read a manual to get started. But the iPhone doesn’t work like a Mac. For one thing, it doesn’t come with built-in help menus. And it doesn’t even behave like other mobile phones: its external buttons aren’t labeled, and simply making a phone call requires you to string together at least five non-obvious actions (pressing the Home or Sleep/Wake buttons, flicking the “unlock” slider, opening the phone application, opening the phone keypad or contact list, and entering a phone number or selecting a contact).

As a concession to those who need a bit of hand-holding while getting accustomed to the iPhone’s radically original interface, Apple has created a 14-megabyte PDF user guide, which you can download free from the Apple website. But even that document is rather terse, leaving you to discover many of the iPhone’s coolest details, tricks, and shortcuts on your own—which, I guarantee, you won’t.

Fortunately, computer publisher O’Reilly Media and New York Times gadget columnist David Pogue came to the rescue last summer with iPhone: The Missing Manual. O’Reilly’s tag line for the Missing Manual series is “The book that should have been in the box,” and in the case of the iPhone, it’s absolutely accurate. Indeed, there are even more details to master now that the iPhone 3G is out, along with the 2.0 version of the device’s firmware, which has the added capability of running third-party software applications. Last week O’Reilly published a second edition of Pogue’s book containing everything you need to know about the iPhone 3G and the new App Store, where users can choose from more than 1,500 third-party programs.

O’Reilly sent me a review copy of the book a couple of weeks ago. As time was running out this week to write my World Wide Wade column, my first impulse was to merely skim the book. But the farther into it I got, the more I wanted to slow down to enjoy Pogue’s witty writing and ensure I didn’t miss any interesting details.

I wound up reading the book cover to cover—or at least, from the beginning of the file to the end of the file (I was using the PDF version). In the end, I would gladly have paid the $24.99 cover price ($16.49 at Amazon) just for the book’s excellent collection of time-saving tips for heavy iPhone users.

Maybe I’m just dense, but even after owning an iPhone for 13 months, the following tidbits were still revelations to me:

• When using the device in iPod mode, you can skip ahead to the next song by pinching the clicker on the earbud cord.
• You can fast-forward or rewind through a song by tapping, but not releasing, the onscreen “next” and “previous” buttons.
• When using the on-screen keyboard, you can type a period by tapping the space bar twice, without having to open the secondary punctuation/numerical keyboard.
• The iPhone’s camera doesn’t take a picture until you remove your finger from the onscreen shutter button. So to avoid bumping the device and blurring your photos, you should frame your photo while holding your finger on the shutter button, lifting it only when you’re ready to snap the picture.
• In the Safari Web browser, the keyboard includes a very convenient “.com” key that makes it easy to type new URLs in the address bar. I knew that—but what I didn’t know was that if you hold down the “.com” key, a balloon will pop up allowing you to choose from “.net,” “.org,” or “.edu” as well.
• In Safari, if you hold your finger on a link for a few seconds, the full URL will pop up in a balloon, giving you more information about where the link leads—similar to mousing over a link in a PC browser.
• If you want to save a snapshot of whatever’s showing on the iPhone screen—say, a still from a video, or a Web page that you want to remember later—you can grab the image and save it to the phone’s photo album by holding down the Home button and pressing the Sleep/Wake button once.

The book contains a wealth of additional insights, tricks, and workarounds. And even though Pogue only had a few weeks to assemble the chapters on the iPhone’s newest features, like the App Store, he was able to compile some terrific recommendations about the most useful third-party applications. I’ve already had a good time using one of them: AirMe, which takes snapshots using the device’s camera and uploads them directly to my Flickr account without stripping out the geotagging data, as the iPhone inexplicably does if you simply e-mail your photos to Flickr using the phone’s built-in mail application.

If you’ve read Pogue’s Posts at the Times, then you know that his technology descriptions are thoroughly researched and crystal clear, and are enlivened by a pleasant combination of good-natured sarcasm and mildly corny jokes. The book reads the same way—even when Pogue is wading, for completeness’ sake, through such weighty matters as resolving calendar conflicts and syncing the iPhone with corporate Microsoft Exchange networks.

Amazon says it won’t have the print version of iPhone: The Missing Manual, 2nd Edition in stock until September 29. But you can buy a PDF version directly from O’Reilly right now—and if you want to get the most out of your iPhone, you really should.

Here’s one more tip: From the iPhone’s mail program, you can open attachments of all sorts, including PDFs. So if you download the electronic version of the book and e-mail it to yourself, you can read it on your iPhone.

For a full list of my columns, check out the World Wide Wade Archive. You can also subscribe to the column via RSS or e-mail.

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When I took my dog out for a walk yesterday morning, the sidewalk was strewn with old EKG readouts, as if we had just missed a macabre ticker-tape parade. I picked up one of the sheets—probably flotsam from the hospital across the street—and gazed at the thin blue trace, tremulously crossing a field of pink squares.

The stiff, glossy paper was imprinted “Marquette Pressure-Scribe Recording 1976.” It was obviously old. In fact, a doctor’s scrawl indicated that the patient—a woman whose name I won’t print here, since I probably committed a huge HIPAA violation just by picking up the readout—had come in for the test in March 1987. I’m no doctor, but I could see from the trace’s violent, roller-coaster swings that she had not been well.

Finding this medical artifact made me think of how the line of an EKG, with its check-mark rising and falling, has become a kind of cultural icon for life itself. When the line pulses regularly, the patient is okay. When it goes wild—and especially when it goes flat—we all know what it means.

Or we think we do. But behind the blue thread on the old readout, there’s a complex skein of scientific causes and effects: the way rippling photons carried the colors of the trace from the paper to my retinas; the way the trace itself was etched by the seismograph-like arm of the old EKG machine; and the way the EKG arm was guided by amplified electrical signals, signals that ultimately originated in the convulsing muscle cells of one woman’s heart on a spring day 21 years ago.

Science explains our visual world, and visual representations help to explain science. That’s the central theme of On the Surface of Things: Images of the Extraordinary in Science, a wonderful book that I discovered this week and that is the real subject of today’s column. The authors, science photographer Felice Frankel and Harvard chemist George Whitesides (who is also an Xconomist), have filled the book mainly with close-up images of the surfaces of inorganic materials such as oil drops and silicon transistors, rather than biological cells or tissues. Yet I feel certain they’d look at the discarded EKG as its own kind of surface, one telling a vivid story about our physical world and the beings who move through it.

On the Surface of Things first appeared in 1997, and Harvard University Press issued a revised, 10th-anniversary paperback edition last month. I picked it up at Barnes & Noble Wednesday night, immediately after attending a talk by Frankel and Whitesides at the new Apple Store in Boston (which is, by the way, a true marvel of glass, brushed steel, and architecture-as-advertising). I’ve only begun to examine the 58 detailed images Frankel created for the book, each of which is paired with an elegant caption by Whitesides. But I’m already under the spell of the ravishingly detailed imagery, and I intend to clear a permanent space for the volume on my coffee table.

Frankel, who is a senior research fellow at Harvard’s Initiative in Innovative Computing and a former research scientist at MIT, said Wednesday night that she doesn’t use any special tricks for her photography—just a Nikon F3 with a 55mm or 105mm macro lens, shooting on Velvia and Ektachrome film that she later scans and cleans up digitally (using her Mac—hence the appearance at Apple). The genius of Frankel’s images is really in the way she conceives and constructs her subjects. And this is, of course, the essence of science photography, a field just as demanding and content-driven as science writing.

A Swedish foundation recently recognized Frankel for her leadership in this field with the 2007 Lennart Nilsson Award for Medical, Technical, and Scientific Photography—basically, the Pulitzer of explanatory photography. As she put it Wednesday, “I’m not just making pretty pictures. I understand the science.” And she arranges the pictures to illuminate that science.

Her photo of ferrofluid, chosen as the cover image for the paperback edition, is a perfect example. (See the book cover thumbnail, above left, or click here for a larger version.) Frankel arranged seven small magnets beneath a glass plate, then placed a drop of ferrofluid—powdered magnetite suspended in oil—atop the plate. The fluid took on a disturbingly beautiful formation that calls to mind …Next Page »

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Fans of browsing uber-geeky tomes on computer graphics, operating-system design, programming, and all other deeply technical matters have something of a wake to attend tomorrow afternoon. Kendall Square’s Quantum Books, which will be shuttering its brick-and-mortar store this weekend, is hosting a 5:30 p.m. goodbye party for longtime customers, according to the Cambridge Chronicle.

Quantum owner June Kapitan—who with her husband opened the store more than 20 years ago a few blocks away from its current 4 Cambridge Center location—told the Chronicle that rising rent and electricity costs and a shrinking customer base were to blame for the store’s closing. (Another faction evidently blames tech publisher Tim O’Reilly.) Quantum’s online store and warehouse in Wilmington, MA, will remain in business.

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In 2003, Nicholas Carr, then the executive editor of Harvard Business Review, sparked an enormous debate (and enraged quite a few technology vendors) with an HBR article entitled “IT Doesn’t Matter.” Because every company now has access to the same commodity computing hardware and software, Carr asserted, big IT investments no longer confer a competitive advantage, the way they did in the early days of corporate computing.

He reiterated his case (hedging a bit) at book length in 2004’s Does IT Matter? and became a fixture on the technology lecture circuit, polarizing audiences at every stop with his argument that, in the end, it makes little difference whether a company chooses HP or Sun, Oracle or IBM, Windows or Linux: that’s not where companies should be looking for an edge.

Some people read Carr’s original article as saying that information technology itself is unimportant. That’s a misinterpretation that, as Carr admitted in Does IT Matter?, may have been “traceable in some cases to a lack of clarity in defining the terms and scope of my argument,” and he spent much of the book trying to correct it. Indeed, he insisted that the replacement over the last two decades of expensive, customized, proprietary computing systems by a standardized infrastructure was a “natural, necessary, and healthy process” that continues to lift the entire global economy.

If there is any doubt left that Carr believes information technology to be critical to modern society, his latest book—published yesterday—should erase it. The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google (W.W. Norton) takes a far broader view of the IT landscape. The book draws out the compelling parallels between an earlier technological transformation—electrification and the rise of electric utilities—and the emergence of “utility computing,” the transfer of many of the software and storage tasks once handled by our personal computers and local servers to far-away data centers handling millions of tasks simultaneously. Google’s online spreadsheet, word processing, and calendar software, which competes directly with Microsoft’s desktop productivity programs, is a low-intensity, consumer-oriented example of utility computing, while Salesforce.com’s Web-based account management software for small-to-medium-sized companies is one of the prime “software-as-a-service” offerings giving older business-software companies like Siebel and Oracle fits.

Aimed at general rather than managerial audiences, The Big Switch thoroughly explores both the positive and negative effects of the “computing cloud” that’s settling quickly over consumers and small businesses (and only slightly less rapidly over large corporations). Among the potentially negative effects is what Carr calls “the great unbundling”—the fact that Web technology has removed most of the constraints on the distribution of creative work and made it possible for consumers to obtain content without paying a subscription or even viewing an advertisement. Some of the best creative work, Carr worries, may be “crowded out of the marketplace by the proliferation of free, easily accessible” alternatives.

Carr, who lives outside Boston, visited Xconomy’s office last week to talk with me about his book and its themes. You can read the entire 6,000 word transcript of our conversation here (including fascinating digressions on Lewis Mumford, technological determinism, the future of newspapers and magazines in an era of information commodification, and the value of blogging versus book-writing). For readers with slightly less time to commit, here’s a handy streamlined version.

Xconomy: This book has a slightly different perspective from Does IT Matter?, which looked at whether IT matters on a more fine-grained scale to companies and organizations. And if I can summarize that book, the answer was no, because IT is ubiquitous and therefore there’s no particular competitive advantage to any one company. But now you’re saying that in a much broader sense, IT as a utility, just like electricity, does matter. In fact it makes a huge difference to the way our society is evolving.

Nicholas Carr: I’m taking a completely different perspective, really. The new book could even be called IT Matters, because it’s looking at all the ways that information technology does change things, in what I think are very important ways. The original book was written mainly for a managerial audience, who were thinking “Can I get a competitive advantage from these enterprise systems?,” and my answer there was largely no. This book is written for a much broader audience. And as I said, it really looks at what happens when IT—partially as a result of shifting to the utility model—becomes much cheaper, much more available, much more ubiquitous.

X: So there is a shift in perspective from your last book to this one. But there is also a shift in tone or perspective within the book itself. The first half is largely about the philosophy and logic behind utilities and how they arise, and how that laid the foundation for the amazing industrial growth seen in the U.S. in the 20th century, and for the growth of the middle class and all of the things that spread from that. That’s a hopeful story. Then in the second half of the book you turn the tables and say, “Okay, well, now that we have this stuff, let’s not pretend that it’s totally rosy.” I wonder where you come down …Next Page »

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On January 8 Xconomy published an edited version of my January 4 interview with Nicholas Carr, author of the new book The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google. What follows is the unedited transcript of that interview.

Xconomy: You said you sent the finished version of the book off to your publisher in March. That’s a long time ago, in technology terms. Things move so fast these days that it must be kind of frightening to try to write a book about IT at all.

Nicholas Carr: It is. You have to be very careful what examples you choose, because if you choose the wrong ones, then the companies disappear or go in a different direction or whatever. Which is why I like to tie it to historical trends, because you know that history isn’t going to change that much.

X: When it came time for you, after Does IT Matter?, to figure out what your next book was going to be, why was this the book that formed?

NC: I’m interested in technology and I’m interested particularly in how technology and economics intersect. The way I look at Does IT Matter?, that book looked at computer systems from the standpoint of the business user. And that’s interesting, but it’s a fairly narrow way to look at the subject. I knew that one thing I wanted to do was look at IT, from the supply side instead of from the demand or user side. Briefly in Does IT Matter? I talk about a lot of this stuff turning into a utility service. That was really the basic seed of the [new] book, and as I got more into it it became clear that what was really interesting about what was going on was not just the shift to the utility model but the fact that consumers and small businesses are the ones who are really leading the way there. Big business, which is what I talk about mainly in Does IT Matter?, are the laggards and will move more slowly. So this book looks more closely at consumers, individuals, and small businesses than at big businesses and how they buy computer hardware and software.

X: Thinking about how your two books relate, I wondered if you could talk a little bit about whether this book has a different premise or a slightly different perspective. Does IT Matter? was looking at whether IT matters on a more fine-grained scale to companies and organizations. And if I can summarize that book, the answer was no, because IT is ubiquitous and therefore there’s no particular competitive advantage to any one company. But in a much broader sense, IT as a utility, just like electricity as a utility, does matter. In fact it makes a huge difference to the way our society is evolving.

NC: I’m taking a completely different perspective, really .The new book could even be called IT Matters, because it’s looking at all the ways that information technology does change things, in what I think are very important ways. The original book was written mainly for a managerial audience, who were thinking “Can I get a competitive advantage from these enterprise systems?,” and my answer there was largely no. This book is first of all written for a much broader audience, I hope, than a managerial audience. And as I said, it really looks at what happens when IT—partially as a result of shifting to the utility model—becomes much cheaper, much more available, much more ubiquitous. And in a similar way to what happened with electricity, it matters a great deal, once you get outside the narrow management questions.

X: The book has a lot of history in it. You clearly spent a lot of time delving into a detailed history of Edison and Insull and people like that, and how GE got started. I was curious about whether part of you is a history buff, and whether these questions about large technological systems and how they evolve have been percolating with you for a long time.

NC: You know, for most of my life I haven’t been a history buff, but I began to be interested way back around the time I was doing research for “IT Doesn’t Matter,” the original HBR article, back around 2002. At that point I started to read economic histories of the U.S .and the Western world and how industrial revolution technologies played a particular role. I had been reading about IT before that, but mainly from a present day perspective. And what struck me was that once you start looking at these things form an economic standpoint—and I think economics in large part determines the course of technological change—it struck me that a lot of what we are seeing happening with computer systems has happened with other major technologies in the past that have been adopted in similar ways.

When [new technologies] first come out, companies try to use them in distinctive ways and usually try to supply them themselves. And often they get huge competitive advantages. But pretty quickly it becomes apparent that these are going to become part of the general infrastructure for commerce and society. And at that point they move out into a model where they are supplied by specialist companies, in some cases utilities, in some cases other companies. I became fascinated by how that plays out. And I also saw it could possibly give me a bit of distinction as a writer about modern day technology. I think there is this general assumption that everything we see today is new—that we’ve never seen anything like this before. And from a technological point of view that’s true. But I found that you could explain a lot of this by looking backward. And not many people were doing that.

X: There’s a point in your book where you talk about this question of technological determinism, and I think you actually quote Lewis Mumford, who was a very kind of bleak determinist in a way—although in general the tone of his books if you take them as a whole was sort of hopeful, that we might throw off the shackles of technology, that we might realize we are ceding our free will. You make the point that insofar as he was arguing that we can actually choose which technologies to pursue, he was not quite right, because there is really this economic imperative that determines a lot of the which particular technologies are going to be chosen. So that the water wheel was pretty much completely doomed; it wasn’t a choice in that sense. That argument, though, gets a little harder to apply when you move forward to the present day. I can see how the spread of computing hardware would have been subject to the same kinds of economic imperatives. But I wanted to ask you about the economics of information, and whether information and cultural exchange and everything that’s going on in the blogosphere and on the Internet is subject to the same kinds of economic laws. Do you think we’re at the mercy of technological progress in the same way, now that so much of what’s happening is going on above the level of the actual equipment?

NC: I do, actually. In some ways, I found that I’m even more in the deterministic camp than Mumford. You’re right, he saw these technological forces shaping what we do, but he kept his belief that really we’re free to make any choices we want. I’m less convinced of that. If it were just the technology, I’d say sure. But we live in a market economy and technology shapes the economics of those markets and those markets shape what we do. The way I’d put it, broadly, is that every individual has free choice and can choose to do what he or she wants and can choose to adopt technology or not adopt technology. But at a societal level I think those individual choices don’t really have much effect on the broader evolution of technology, culture, and economics.

It depends on what level you look at. Does the Internet and new technology give every individual in some ways a broader freedom to express themselves, and give them perhaps more choices in the way they structure their work life? I think it does. But when you look above that at how culture in general is being shaped, how we communicate with each other, the economics of employment—I think at that level it is quite deterministic, and it is determined by the forces of technology and economics. It can be influenced, certainly, by governments and regulations and by the heritage of different countries. Different countries and regions do different things. But ultimately we’re pushed in a certain direction. People could have opposed the electrified assembly line in 1915 and chosen not to work on it. But the assembly line was still going to take over manufacturing and change the way people thought of themselves as consumers, and it was still going to push a raft of new products including automobiles into people’s lives. So at that level we didn’t really have much choice at all. It was going to happen. And I think similar things will happen with computing.

X: Exactly how that will play out on the Internet—what we talk about, what kinds of content are available, who’s creating that content, who’s consuming it and how much of it, how the content is sold and who makes money—those questions all seem somewhat up for grabs. But …Next Page »

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If you were creating a satellite office for Google 3,100 miles away from the Googleplex in Mountain View, CA, yet you wanted to make it authentically Google, what would you do? The short, superficial answer would be to buy a few lava lamps, paint the walls in bright primary colors, build a great cafeteria with lots of free jelly beans and energy bars, and offer piles of options on Google’s $600-something-and-rising stock to your recruits.

Stephen Vinter, site manager at Google’s fast-growing Cambridge, MA, operation, has done all of those things. Oh, I forgot to mention the big rooms crowded with workstations, the giant posters of Google’s clever holiday logos, the Rubik’s Cubes, and the smiley-face mylar balloons flying over the desks of the new employees. Google’s offices on the 7th and 13th floors at One Broadway in Kendall Square, where Vinter showed me around on Tuesday, have those too.

But that’s just the Google that visitors, magazine photographers, and new job candidates perceive. The real essence of Google’s Cambridge operation is something you can’t see—or rather, something that you can only understand by listening to Vinter explain his personal strategy for replicating Google’s amazing global success on a local scale.

“Google has made a commitment to having distributed offices, meaning we have engineers across the globe,” says Vinter, whose official title is engineering director. “The key to making sure the satellite offices are as succesful as they can be is to figure out how you can get the best-motivated people in the local area.”

He’s found quite a few already. Google’s cramped Cambridge office has more than 100 employees, up from just a handful less than a year ago, and is still growing fast. It’s not clear exactly how fast—”We don’t talk about rates,” Vinter says. But the company’s real-estate deals may say something about its expansion plans. Google has hired a construction firm to renovate a reported 59,000 square feet on three floors at Five Cambridge Center, just down the street. That’s three times as much space as the company is currently leasing at One Broadway.

Google communications senior associate Erin Gleason confirms the renovation project, but says a move-in date hasn’t been announced. Google isn’t, of course, the only West Coast tech giant that’s in rapid-expansion mode in Kendall Square. Microsoft’s Reed Sturtevant, as Bob reported this morning, is preparing to staff up a special innovation group at One Memorial Drive, where Microsoft has taken a lease on about half of the 17-story tower, and networking leader Akamai just signed leases at Four and Eight Cambridge Center that will nearly double its Kendall Square footprint to 250,000 square feet.

For Google, filling up its new space will mean exploring every corner where talent is hiding. Vinter, true engineer that he is, goes to the whiteboard in the tiny conference room where we’re meeting and draws a box surrounded by bubbles and arrows. Boston is a fantastic setting for filling up the Google box, he explains, because there are so many bubbles around it: MIT, Harvard, BU, Brandeis, Northeastern, U Mass, and the other great schools churning out new graduates; a large ecosystem of high-tech firms employing ambitious programmers and scientists (and Vinter considers both information technology companies and biotechnology companies to be fair hunting grounds); graduates from other regions who want to move to the Northeast; and people already inside Google who want to do the same.

“There are not many places in the world with that collection of people, and with the attractiveness of Boston and its culture, and with great upward mobility for people in high-tech,” Vinter says.

But what do you put inside the Google box, to make sure people are happy and productive once they get there? You start with what Vinter calls “a complete compensation package,” including, of course, those coveted Google stock options. Then there’s the …Next Page »

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An “electronic paper” screen created by Cambridge’s E Ink is the heart of the new Amazon Kindle e-book reading device, introduced yesterday amidst grand pronouncements about the beginning of a new era of electronic book publishing and reading. “This is the future of reading. It will be everywhere,” said business writer Michael Lewis, who ought to know; he’s famous for writing The New New Thing, about the creation of the first commercial Web browser. No less a personage than Toni Morrison, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist, calls the Kindle “ideal” for the traveling reader. Which is hard to argue with; the device can hold 200 books in its memory, yet thanks to the light and power-efficient E Ink screen, it weighs less than a paperback and can be used for at least 30 hours before needing to be recharged.

Kindle, three years in the making (and already sold out, according to Amazon’s product page), is a project with great personal significance to CEO Jeff Bezos, who emceed a ceremony launching the device in New York City yesterday and admits on Amazon’s front page that he is “infatuated with the idea of electronic books.” I feel the same way: I would be truly delighted if someone introduced an electronic reading system with the magic combination of usability and price needed to finally pry the reading public away from printed books, which, while highly evolved and quite wonderful in their way, are part of a criminally wasteful publishing economy in which 25 percent of books are pulped each year without ever having been opened. Alas, Kindle is not it.

The electronic paper technology created by E Ink, which I profiled at length on November 1, does go a long way toward solving the usability part of the problem. The 6-inch Kindle screen—which is identical to the screen used in a competing e-book device, the Sony PRS-505 Reader—uses E Ink’s proprietary “VizPlex” film, in which transparent sheets of electrodes create patterns by attracting or repelling magnetically charged black and white particles that float inside tiny microcapsules. Like paper itself, the display uses reflected rather than transmitted light, and is therefore much easier on the eyes than conventional LCD screens. Dave Jackson, E Ink’s director of marketing and planning, says the version of VizPlex that E Ink created for the Amazon and Sony devices reflects 40 percent of the light it receives—up from 32 percent in the company’s previous generation of e-paper, and approaching the reflectance of newsprint.

But I’m sorry to say—at the risk of repeating myself, since I also wrote a downbeat review of the Sony Reader for Technology Review in January—that E Ink’s technology isn’t enough to make Kindle the breakthrough e-reading device that I and thousands of other e-book fans have been waiting for. For one thing, and I won’t belabor the point (because others have been making it repeatedly), it’s ugly. It’s all angles and corners and buttons and wheels. If the iPhone were a sleek black-and-chrome swan, Kindle would be its geeky gosling cousin. Even the dot-com-era Rocket eBook, a much heavier, bulkier, LCD-based e-book device made by NuvoMedia (where—disclosure time—I worked for about 18 months from late 1999 to 2001), was more elegant.

But even if the Kindle were beautiful, there would still be the problem of price. Price, meaning both the $399 cost of the device itself—a very steep admission ticket to the world of electronic reading—as well as the $9.99 that Amazon is charging for New York Times bestsellers and other new releases. Yes, $9.99 is a big markdown compared to the typical $25 cover price for a new hardcover (and even compared to the $13 to $18 you’ll pay for a hardcover at Amazon). But it’s not nearly big enough. For better or worse, consumers have gotten used to paying low-single-digit dollar amounts for electronic content. A song on iTunes still goes for $0.99, a TV show for $1.99. Netflix rentals will run you $1 or $2 per DVD, depending on how many you go through in a month. It may be a travesty that undermines all the great traditions of literature and authorship, but my bet is that people simply won’t pay $10 for access to the electronic version of a novel, which is, after all, just a few hundred kilobytes of 1s and 0s (and with an e-book you don’t even get the paper this information is usually written on).

The habit of reading among the English-speaking public—I’m talking about the mass public here, not the educated elite—has gone through at least two great flowerings. One was the era of the penny dreadfuls and dime novels, which ran from about 1840 to 1885. The second followed the invention of the mass-market paperback in the mid-1930s. Both revolutions in reading hinged on revolutions in printing technology and price; it simply became much cheaper to make and buy a book, and readers responded to the new plenty with savage appetites.

Something similar has happened on the Web, where virtually all written content is free, and which, thanks to the Internet terminals in public libraries and programs like One Laptop Per Child (where Amazon could have looked for some design lessons), is spreading beyond the middle- and upper-class homes that can afford computers. But no e-book reading or publishing system, and certainly not Kindle, has taken on the price challenge. In fact, Amazon’s system makes reading more expensive than before (unless you’re the sort who buys lots of hardcover books, in which case you’d still have to buy about 100 Kindle Editions before the discounts would cover the cost of the Kindle device).

I don’t know when, if ever, the economics of publishing will tilt in favor of e-books. It’s true, of course, that electronic gadgets always decline in cost over time—and if the Kindle dropped to around $199, I would probably buy one myself. (On that point, though, it’s not clear how quickly Amazon will be able to cut the Kindle’s price, since the VizPlex film in the screen, as I noted in my story about E Ink, remains a high-priced specialty item.) But the prices of Kindle Editions are probably even more critical to the overall success of the new publishing model Amazon is trying to create. For the Kindle system to catch on as a real alternative to print books, I think prices for new releases would need to drop to the $5 level or below.

And that’s just not going to happen—not as long as the New York publishers have anything to do with it. So for now, the Kindle and its remarkable e-paper screen will remain a curiosity—a toy for early adopters—and lots of real paper books will continue to be pulped every year as the same publishers struggle (and fail) to predict exactly how many copies of Lemony Snicket parents will buy for their children this Christmas. The future of reading is still safely in the future.

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If there’s one thing New England has in great supply, it’s books. And that makes the area one of the battlegrounds in the digital library wars—the competition between commercial entities such as Google and Microsoft and non-profit groups such as the Internet Archive to secure agreements to scan, digitize, and distribute the world’s print literature. This week a large subset of the region’s libraries threw their weight behind the non-profit camp, signaling the growing resistance to Google’s professed goal of organizing “all the world’s information.”

The Boston Library Consortium, a group of 19 state, college, institutional, and university libraries around New England, announced Monday that it has chosen the Open Content Alliance (OCA) as the main technology partner in a massive effort to digitize public-domain books and other materials (that is, those not subject to copyright or no longer covered by copyright). The project—which will result in “a freely accessible library of digital materials from all 19 member institutions,” according to a statement from the consortium—will be based at a new facility at the Boston Public Library, built around automated book-scanning machines developed by the San Francisco-based Internet Archive.

Local library leaders greeted the announcement as a victory for taxpayers. “The Boston Library Consortium includes some pretty significant publicly funded institutions—the Boston Public Library, for instance, as well as the State Library of Massachusetts and the flagship state libraries of Connecticut and New Hampshire,” notes Ann Wolpert, director of libraries at MIT, which is part of the consortium. “These libraries, which are funded by taxpayers, really have a public purpose, and I think that for them, the argument of joining the OCA rather than going with one of the more commercial partners was simply a matter of being true to their funding base. Rather than put their work in a proprietary environment, searchable only by one search engine, [the consortium] felt strongly that it would be important to make sure that whatever they digitize should be available to taxpayers without constraint.” Libraries at the private colleges and universities belonging to the consortium, including MIT, Brandeis, Tufts, Brown, and Williams, “were happy to honor that point of view,” says Wolpert.

At stake for every library considering how to digitize its collections is the question of how to help readers find the material once it’s online. Google is credited by many members of the library community with kick-starting the entire digitization movement in 2004 with its massive Google Print project (now known as Google Book Search). But the same librarians have shied away from working with the search giant, largely due to the company’s requirement, mentioned by Wolpert, that books digitized via its factory-scale scanning effort be searchable exclusively through the Google search engine. Microsoft, which has its own book digization project, Live Search Books, imposes similar terms.

Yahoo and the Internet Archive, a non-profit created by software entrepreneur and Alexa founder Brewster Kahle, launched the OCA in 2005 as a non-commercial alternative to the Google project. The alliance’s goal is to build a permanent archive of digitized text and multimedia content from collections around the world, using open standards for the “metadata” such as author and title information that makes these materials more discoverable and searchable. With funding from the Alfred P. Sloan foundation, the OCA has already digitized more than 100,000 volumes from private, national, and university collections—including the personal library of John Adams, held by the Boston Public Library. The materials are indexed by the OCA members’ own search engines and by the Internet Archive.

“Going with OCA was a very concerted effort by the Consortium, and the primary reason is for the material to remain free and open,” says Barbara Preece, the consortium’s executive director. “People weren’t happy with the restrictions that Google and Microsoft put on—that you can only search from the single search engine. These groups are not interested in content. They are interested in search and advertising. And the fear is that this content would be restricted only to people who can afford to get it.”

One local institution conspicuously absent from the Boston Library Consortium and from the agreement with the OCA is the Harvard University Library, which, with its 15.8 million volumes, is the largest academic library in the world. Harvard was among the five institutions partnering with Google when it launched Google Print, and still has an agreement with Google to digitize the public-domain books in its collection.

But the same local library leaders who advocate the OCA’s non-commercial, non-exclusive approach to book digitization stop short of criticizing Harvard for sticking with Google. In fact, some welcome the presence of competing philosophies as libraries go through the digital transition. “It’s a very important time to have lots of experiments running, to test different notions of how to do industrial-scale digitizing,” says MIT’s Wolpert. “And so my point of view on this is the more the merrier, because we’ll learn from every one of these undertakings. Frankly, I think that Google gets enormous credit for having gotten the ball rolling.”

Library professionals in other regions are applauding the Boston consortium’s move. “Given the dispersal of print materials across the North American landscape, it’s good news anytime you get a cluster of institutions coming together” on open digitization efforts, says Nancy Elkington, director of partner relations at RLG Programs, the R&D wing of the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), a 40-year-old library cooperative that maintains the WorldCat global union catalog.

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