Wi-Fi is now one of the most essential services a hotel can provide apart from a bed, and yet poor internet connection is on the top 3 list of complaints from hotel guests around the world.

Nah! It is really my #1 complaint.

There was time when all of us road warriors walked around with a laptop and a phone (probably a Blackberry). Now we carry around a phone, a tablet (or a Kindle) and a laptop. I am guessing connected cameras are coming next and a slew of other gadgets with a built-in need for the network. And at the same time we are all going to be using cloud services for everything; listening to music, watching videos, working, buying and ordering food. In such a world, the network (both in terms of stability and quality) takes on greater importance.

The common refrain is — well let’s just use LTE. And while we all like to believe that LTE is the panacea to our networking woes, the fact remains that we still are heavily reliant and will be reliant on Wi-Fi, especially when on the go. According to ABI Research, there were a total of 4.9 million hotspots owned by carriers (including those run by the likes of Boingo and iPass) and the total number will hit about 6.3 million in 2016.

Of course, the place where one feels the pain most acutely is in the hotels — who in my opinion are the worst offenders in providing decent and generous connectivity. It is not as if they don’t have a way to quietly tuck in the charges into our room rates! As someone who spends a sizable amount of time on the road checking into random hotels, I can safely say that bad Wi-Fi is one of my biggest complaints.

According to Hotel Chatter’s 2013 Hotel WiFi Report:

• Nearly two-thirds of hotels offer some kind of free Wi-Fi. (It is hard to say if it really is free if the price of the hotel room goes up a few dollars a night and we don’t know about it.)
• The standard amount of bandwidth in a hotel with free Wi-Fi is usually about 1Mbps per each room. (I can categorically state that is not really true.)

It doesn’t matter if the hotels (or motels) are big or small. It doesn’t matter if they are in New York or Nashville, the fact of the matter is that both the quality of network connections and the bandwidth available on the network simply sucks. Even in the best of hotels one struggles to 500 Kbps to 600 Kbps. Try watching Netflix at that bandwidth, or in my case the MLB game! I guess our shifting media habits are killing the in-room video-on-demand business, a lucrative sideline for the hotel industry. (When I am in a really bad mood, I am likely to call it a nice racket!)

Sure, I can do some basic surfing and emails on this so-called free Wi-Fi, but that’s about it. And someone who needs to blog — and thus keep up with a whole slew of news and information sources when on the go — it is virtually impossible to use the Wi-Fi for even getting the work done. I almost always take the upgrade option, paying more for more bandwidth only to find that it still sucks. Unless these guys get their act together and build high-quality robust networks, they can’t really expect people to pay up.

For now, I almost always end up using the LTE network (if it is available.) But we are already starting to see that LTE networks are getting crowded and slower and slower. So it is not difficult to imagine things are going to get a lot worse for those of us dependent on-the-go internet.

Like I said — I love the connectivity in the hotels, I just hate the poor quality networks.

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Most estimates had placed Apple’s U.S. ebook market share at around 10 percent, with Amazon’s Kindle at 50 to 60 percent and Barnes & Noble’s Nook at 25 percent. But Moerer said the iBookstore’s market share was 20 percent in the first few months after the iBookstore’s launch, Publishers Weekly reports,  and is about 20 percent now. (If this is true, the other retailers’ market shares would need to be adjusted downward, since Google and Kobo likely hold 1 to 2 percent of the U.S. ebook market.) From PW:

“The government called the iBookstore ‘a failure,’ and charged that ‘Apple pricing was unfair to consumers,’ and that ‘Apple sold fewer books because of the higher price caps.’ Moerer challenged that characterization, ‘I disagree. Ebook sales grew 100 percent last year at the iBookstore and it had over 100 million customers.’ The government countered that ‘when you drop prices you sell more books,’ and Moerer said, ‘sometimes, yes.’”

In addition, Moerer said that Apple has not enforced the most favored nation (MFN) clause for ebooks since last year. And Publishers Marketplace reports that “from the beginning Apple enforced the MFN manually rather than in a fully-automated fashion, with employees checking prices one-by-one against other retailers. Thus they ‘tended to focus on the best sellers.’”

Macmillan CEO John Sargent also completed his testimony on Tuesday. Hachette CEO David Young takes the stand Wednesday, and will be followed by the government’s expert witnesses.

Apple SVP Eddy Cue is testifying on Thursday. The Financial Times profiles Cue and describes his role in the case here.

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Users will be able to purchase and read books directly from the Mac app. (There are now 1.8 million titles in the iBookstore, Apple said, up from 1.5 million in October 2012.) The app could be particularly useful for students, who could have a textbook open on their computer while they take notes.

Amazon has Kindle reading apps for PC and Mac, though you can’t purchase ebooks through the apps. Nook has a Windows 8 app that allows purchasing and reading, but doesn’t have a Mac app.

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Amazon launched a Chinese Kindle store, with iOS and Android apps for reading ebooks, in December. The store contained around 25,000 ebooks at launch and is now up to about 47,000 titles. When I surfed around a Google Translated version of the store today, I noticed that the device page translates as “Optional Kindle device,” perhaps to remind users that they don’t actually have to buy a Kindle in order to read ebooks. Most of the books in the Chinese Kindle store are priced very, very low, with the top 15 bestselling books in the store all priced under 3 yuan (USD $0.49) and many at 1 yuan (USD $0.16).

Amazon also launched an Android app store in China last month.

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Kindling on the fire

First up on Thursday was VP of Kindle Content Russ Grandinetti, whose testimony continued from the previous day and who was questioned by Apple attorney Howard Heiss. Heiss sought to demonstrate that Amazon needed participation from all of the Big 6 publishers in order to launch the Kindle Store in 2007,; to make it clear that Amazon was aware of publishers’ dislike of the $9.99 price point long before Apple came on the scene; and to show that Amazon had reasons of its own to switch to agency pricing, beyond the notion that Apple’s launch of the iBookstore forced it to.

Grandinetti insisted that he didn’t know what Amazon’s market share was for ebooks in 2009. “Would you agree that Amazon was the dominant ebook retailer?” Heiss asked. Grandinetti said he was “not sure.” “Can we agree on your definition of ‘dominant’?” Heiss asked more testily, citing the definition from the New Oxford American Dictionary, “which I believe Amazon uses” (it’s built into the Kindle).

Heiss then cited a 2010 CNET interview with an Amazon Kindle VP, Ian Freed, which was headlined “Amazon: We have 70-80 percent of ebook market.” “Do you know. Where Mr. Freed got the metrics. The data. The information,” Heiss said. Grandinetti responded that Freed was “probably relying on publisher reports.” (Judge Cote later noted that the CNET interview was from 2010, while Heiss had been asking Grandinetti about 2009.)

Heiss asked if Grandinetti was aware of publishers’ dislike of the $9.99 price for New York Times bestselling Kindle books. It “wasn’t secret,” he suggested. Grandinetti agreed, “It was not.” And Heiss referenced an October 2009 email from Kindle VP David Naggar to Grandinetti, which read in part, “The debate is RAGING and the next 6-9 months is when all the battles are going to be fought.”

What did Amazon know?

Heiss sought to show that Amazon was not unfamiliar with agency pricing before Apple launched the iBookstore. For instance, he noted that Amazon already used the agency model for newspapers, periodicals and some music. In addition, he noted that in 2009, the Wall Street Journal and New York Times both reported that Big 6 publishers were considering withholding new ebooks from retailers, releasing them a few months after new hardcovers — a practice known as windowing, which was intended to protect print sales from being cannibalized by ebook sales, and which publishers were considering because Amazon’s ebook prices were so low. In other words, Heiss wanted to remind the court that Amazon needed to consider forces beyond Apple when it was deciding whether to offer publishers an alternative to wholesale pricing.

In the most fraught section of Grandinetti’s testimony, Heiss referred to a section of Grandinetti’s deposition in which Grandinetti said that, following the introduction of agency pricing, ebook prices went up “across the board.” This was an “impression,” Grandinetti said. “You weren’t looking at any data?” Heiss asked. “This was anecdotal review by you?” Heiss then went on to cite “Amazon data” that showed that statistics showing that four publishers actually lowered prices on many NYT bestsellers after the introduction of agency pricing.

“In the aggregate, prices went up,” Grandinetti said cautiously. At this point, Heiss yelled at Grandinetti for turning to Amazon’s lawyer, who was sitting a few feet away from the witness stand: “WHY ARE YOU LOOKING AT MR. KIPLING?” “Mr. Heiss, please,” Judge Cote admonished.

Heiss wanted Grandinetti to admit that Amazon didn’t put much thought or data-driven analysis into its $9.99 pricing strategy — to suggest that the company simply chose $9.99 because it was cheap. Grandinetti countered that publishers lacked Amazon’s “specific knowledge” on pricing. “I take it that coming up with the $9.99 price didn’t offer any specific algorithm,” Heiss said, to which Grandinetti responded, “Simplicity can be sophisticated.”

Grandinetti was followed by Kindle VP David Naggar, whom Heiss questioned about contract negotiations with publishers. In particular, Heiss wondered whether it was reasonable to expect that publishers would not compare amongst themselves the contract terms that Amazon offered them. ”We would let them know that we weren’t asking anything different from them than we were asking from others,” Naggar answered.

“When you told publishers that, did you simply expect them to take it on faith that you were being truthful with them?” Heiss asked. Naggar responded, “Yes.”

The day’s last witness from Amazon was Laura Porco, who was formerly a director of Kindle books and now works for Amazon’s MyHabit.com. Most of Heiss’s questions for Porco centered around her email exchanges with Madeline McIntosh, who was at Amazon from 2008 to 2009 (she worked for Porco) and is now the COO of Random House.

In particular, Heiss referenced one email exchange in which McIntosh referred to Porco’s belief that the Big 6 would never sign agency contracts unless they were offered 90-10 terms (in which the retailer would take only a 10 percent share; ultimately, the agency contracts that the publishers signed with Apple and Amazon offered a 70-30 split). ”What we never figured was that five publishers would band together and insist on worse terms,” McIntosh wrote in one of the emails, and Porco wrote back, “Hysterical, isn’t it? Jedi mind tricks here in Seattle.”

According to Apple, the meaning of this email exchange was that McIntosh was being ironic publishers had actually agreed to 70-30 agency terms — a worse deal for them. Heiss also noted that a “Jedi mind trick” is a Star Wars reference, referring to the ability to get someone to do something they don’t want to do. Porco claimed, however, that McIntosh was being entirely straightforward and that by “worse” terms, she meant “worse than wholesale,” not worse than a 90-10 revenue split. As for the “Jedi mind tricks” reference, Porco told Heiss, “I was being very sarcastic in this email and it was quite the opposite.” McIntosh would understand this, Porco said, because she had worked at Amazon.

Google’s turn in the hot seat

Thursday ended with testimony from Tom Turvey, director of strategic partnerships at Google. Turvey was questioned by Apple attorney Orin Snyder, who concentrated his questioning on Turvey’s deposition — which Turvey was asked to provide by the government, and which Turvey prepared in partnership with government counsel.

In particular, Snyder slammed Turvey repeatedly for a sentence in the testimony in which Turvey said he was “directly advised” by publishers that their agency contracts with Apple would not allow them to enter wholesale contracts with other retailers, like Google — when, in fact, other Google emails showed that this wasn’t true. (Macmillan, for instance, had told Google that it could do either a wholesale or agency contract).

“I don’t recall whether I wrote these words directly or with counsel,” Turvey admitted. Snyder, who swigged from miniature bottles of water throughout the questioning and was clearly enjoying himself, persisted: “You cannot attach a name or a face…you can’t recall a single phone call…” Turvey responded, “My recollection is that these events happened. I can’t tell you with whom.” At five, Judge Cote cut Snyder off: “We’ll let Mr. Turvey escape so he can begin to enjoy his Thursday.”

Snyder also couldn’t help getting in a few digs at Google’s media business. “Would you agree Google is a powerful company in the media and entertainment space?” he asked. Turvey responded, “No, I would not.” (At another point, Snyder began talking about Apple succeeding in the ebook market where Google failed. Judge Cote interrupted: “No, no, no, Mr. Snyder. Bring it home.”)

“Do you own an iPad?” Snyder asked. Turvey said, “I do not.”

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The Digital Reader, which has been following this story for several months, reported Monday that an unnamed Delaware-based LLC was the new owner of Liquavista. Amazon confirmed the purchase in a statement:

“We are always looking for new technologies we may be able to incorporate into our products over the long term. The Liquavista team shares our passion for invention and is creating exciting new technologies with a lot of potential. It’s still early days, but we’re excited about the possibilities and we look forward to working with Liquavista to develop these displays.”

The purchase price was undisclosed, though it may be made public in Amazon SEC filings’s next quarter.

Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablets obviously already have color screens, but Liquavista’s technology offers the potential for color screens that wouldn’t deplete battery life to be added to e-ink readers. This would be particularly useful for children’s books and graphic novels.

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Merkoski ran technology departments for a number of companies and headed e-commerce initiatives at Motorola before joining Amazon as a technology manager in 2005. For the next five years, he served at the company in a number of Kindle-related roles, helping to launch the first two Kindle models and the Kindle DX. “I first joined a team that built the electronic books for Kindle, but I went on from there to do it all,” he writes. “I invented some of the technology used in ebooks and launched the first few Kindles. I’ve traveled to book fairs in New York and London and Frankfurt to evangelize ebooks. I’ve watched ebooks being made in the Philippines and supervised the assembly of Kindles in China. I’ve talked to the White House, former presidents, and astronauts about ebooks.”

I found Burning the Page the most interesting when Merkoski discusses his experience at Amazon, working directly for CEO Jeff Bezos. “I worked in a modern version of Gutenberg’s workshop,” he wrote. But he can’t share much:

• “I believe Jeff [Bezos] wanted Kindle to be his legacy to history. He wanted it to succeed.”
• “The Kindle organization was in some ways a startup within Amazon and benefited from Jeff Bezos’s venture capital infusions, long-range vision, and full support.”
• “Jeff originally wanted the Kindle code names to come from Star Trek, since he’s such a Trekkie, but more literate minds prevailed.”

While Merkoski describes himself as “the closest there was to an ebook shaman, a tribal elder who could talk to all the people who joined Amazon after me about the early days of Kindle, provide the inside scoop,” he doesn’t (and may be legally unable to) provide any inside scoops in this book. So the next best thing is when he can speak specifically about e-reading platforms — including the advantages of Amazon’s competitors. The development of the Kindle was highly secretive: “No outsiders had seen the Kindle because it was created in a perfect vacuum from the very beginning,” Merkoski writes. That resulted, in 2007, in a $399 device that sold out in five and a half hours, remained out of stock for months and got a lot of mixed reviews (facts that Merkoski doesn’t mention).

Kindle’s flaws — and what competitors did better

Future versions of the Kindle improved on some flaws: Merkoski calls the Kindle 2, introduced in 2009, “truly an incredible device.” But “in fits of wakefulness, I thought about how Kindle lacked nuance, style, fonts, and things like multimedia…Kindle’s success made new ideas paradoxically difficult, as if everyone was walking around on stiletto heels on a glass floor, careful not to run, not wanting to take the wrong risks.”

Kindle competitors, he says, have done better in lots of ways. Take Barnes & Noble: “Out of all the retailers who sell dedicated e-readers, they’re the most innovative. They’re the first to release new book-reading features and to innovate on the hardware side. They were the first to have touch-sensitive e-ink screens…They totally get the social experience of books in the way that it crosses over from the real world to the digital. They can innovate so fast because they’re not burdened with their own R&D group.” Likewise, “companies with more humanistic sensibilities than Amazon will win the e-reader war by making the experience more human, more playful…let’s face it: there’s still something emotionally bereft about a Nook or a Kindle.” The winner on that front, he says, is Apple’s iPad.

Ultimately, Merkoski believes, “Amazon is winning the ebook revolution, but it may lose the war…Competitors like Barnes & Noble and Apple have successfully blurred the lines and proven that they can provide a great media experience, so Amazon’s brand matters less in the eyes of readers now.” He says “it’s hard to love Amazon…at best, you respect Amazon for its obsession to detail, for its cheap prices, and for how it achieves the promised arrival dates for its products.”

Oddly, Merkoski doesn’t mention the Nook division’s terrible performance these days, or the company’s inability to cut into Amazon’s market share. Nooks, he claims, are “downright futuristic.” And that’s really where he wants to go in this book: How will ebooks, reading and writing change?

What’s next: High-speed head plugs and a “Facebook for books”?

Let’s be clear: Merkoski loves books. An endless number of sentences like “Books are priceless,” “Books can inspire us toward greatness,” “Books hold the repository of human knowledge, and then some,” “Reading is an act of bathyspheric descent into the depths of an inky-black ocean,” “For me, it really is about books. They’re not commodities, but soulful voices that actually speak to you” become increasingly irritating as the book goes on and weigh down Merkoski’s ideas on what the future of reading could actually look like.

Once you cut through the platitudes, Merkoski envisions some specific innovations that are interesting and imaginative. For instance, “the future might hold some sort of high-speed plug that goes into an author’s head, some way of taking an author’s imagination and converting it directly into a digital format. The same high-speed cables will connect you to the author’s original experience.” That sounds horrible to me, but another idea — a screenless e-reader that uses a pico projector to project an ebook onto a blank surface (like a ceiling or the pages of a blank book), pulls ebooks from the cloud and is navigated by voice commands — seems like something that could actually exist in a few years.

Ultimately, Merkoski believes there will be

“just one book, a vast book that includes all the others inside it, which I call the Facebook for Books. You’ll be able to start reading from an ebook and naturally segue into a different one, just by following a link. It could be a bibliographic link, or just a link to a book that influenced the author and that’s been annotated as such by a reader like you or me. You will be able to link forward or double-back and keep reading…The more content you get, the more cumulative the connections are between books, and the more intertwined and rich the network becomes.”

The company best situated to make this dream a reality is not Amazon, Merkoski believes, but Google — thanks to its knowledge of search engines and the vast number of titles it’s scanned for Google book search, “Google has digitized more of human culture than any other retailer or library.”

For now, rights issues are in the way, and so books, “our greatest repository of knowledge and inspiration, aren’t participating in conversations with us online, with the exception of public-domain books that lag by at least ninety years.” It will take “a sea-change in opinion about ebook pricing models,” Merkoski acknowledges, before such a hyperlinked database of books can legally exist — even though we have the technology to put it in place now.

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That’s what’s happened.  As Geekwire reported on Monday — and yes it dispensed with the April Fool’s aspect – Charlie Kindel, who helped build Windows 7 Phone and then left Microsoft for a startup in 2011, is now at Amazon “working on something wonderful,” according to his LinkedIn profile

His current job description:

“I’m building a new team going after a totally new area for Amazon. I’m hiring cloud and mobile developers and testers, program managers, and product managers.”

There’s been other evidence that Amazon, which fields the Kindle reader lineup, is also getting more mobility-focused in its Amazon Web Services group. It’s building a new development group in Palo Alto, Calif. to build client side applications and folks also expect AWS to expose more of its existing technology services (as well as future offerings) in a Mobile Backend as a Service (MBaaS).

There have been rumors for months that Amazon is building its own smart phone. And, as GigaOM’s mobile maven Kevin Tofel put it: If Amazon is doing a phone and just pulled Kindel into it it’ll be hard for the company to get anything out by summer, which has been a rumored release target. If they do get something out by then, Kindel will have had very little, if any, input into what they’ve done.

One thing’s for certain, a couple months down the road we’ll start seeing lots of Amazon mobile services news posted on the AWS blog.

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Great UX, thwarted by walled gardens

Readmill is a great reading environment. That their designers obsess on visceral user experience makes it a true pleasure to use. It may very well be the best “feeling” ereader application out there. This is a critical attribute for an environment in which you can spend hours a day.

But it suffers from the thing that any book-related company or product or startup that is not a Kindle suffers from: It’s a slog to get content into it.

This is a discussion less about DRM (although, it is that, too) and more about seamless user experience. Sure, you can hunt down a copy of “Gone Girl” on a website you’ve never bought a book from before. Enter your credit-card information. Download it. Then upload it to your Readmill account. Or, you can click “Buy now with 1-Click” on Amazon.com and have it on all your devices in 10 seconds, ready to be read in the Kindle reading application. You have to be really persuasive to beat that kind of convenience.

Since Amazon would never allow its library to be accessed by reading applications other than Kindle, this is a non-trivial problem for a startup like Readmill to surmount.

A community to challenge Amazon

Goodreads has always been a bit of an enigma. Truth be told, I’ve never been an avid user. There’s a number of reasons why, but the biggest is simply that the distance between my books — and the activity that happens within them — and Goodreads has always seemed ginormous. That is, updating reading statuses for books on a website always felt odd and forced. It felt odd in 2007 when I was mainly reading physical books, and it feels odder still in 2013, where I’m mainly reading Kindle books. That said, 16 million people clearly don’t agree with me.

So why did Amazon buy Goodreads? Well, the promise of a collaboration between Goodreads and a great reading platform (like Readmill) loomed large. A combination like that had the chance of being the Last Great Stand against Amazon. Goodreads is many things but most defensibly it is a community. A strong community. An engaged community. (And now, a slightly enraged community.) Sixteen million users is nothing to dismiss. It’s not Facebook or Instagram levels, but 16 million excited people is a firehose to be reckoned with. What Goodreads didn’t have was a reading application.

It also should be noted that publishers love Goodreads. No surprise there; it’s just as one would imagine. Goodreads is an amazing platform for promoting books to an avid, core readership. So if Goodreads were to develop a reading application, it doesn’t take much imagination to see them signing up the catalogs of the big five and launching a Goodreads store for the Goodreads reader. And were that reading application to plug seamlessly into the Goodreads ecosystem — the community — then getting those 16 million users to switch from Kindle to Goodreads Reader would have been one of the easier platform sells in publishing.

Goodreads users already want to hang out at Goodreads. If they could read there too — in an app — I suspect many would.

Kindle flaws present opportunity

Despite the maturity of the market, the tablet reading space is still weirdly under-polished. Kindle reading environments have hardly changed in the last three years. The Kindle app has seen some improvement — mainly in support for complex KF8 formatted titles — but the polish around the reading experience, that visceral component, for novels and other mass-market books has remained largely unchanged. Books in the Kindle applications still don’t hyphenate. And page slides still stutter ever so slightly. These are small details that add up.

Certain polish aside, Kindle’s strengths are manifold. It has a vast catalog and transactional trust. It has all our credit-card information, making purchasing seamless. It is also supremely good at cloud data — consistent and reliable storage and retrieval of our books across devices. What it doesn’t have — and no inkling or iota of — is community.

What might have been

So you can see, there was a combo here. A curious matchup. Take one of the most polished, most satisfying digital book reading applications and merge it with one of the most engaged reading-specific communities. A marketplace could have developed that might have been the first real competition against Kindle. Not one built around competing with Kindle toe-to-toe as Barnes & Noble and Kobo have attempted (and failed at), but competing on ground on which Amazon has no footing: community.

It’s a certainty that Amazon, too, saw this. Which is why the sale this week comes as little surprise. I’ve always imagined that secretly, deep down in the murky stacks of Amazon headquarters, they had a crackerjack team making kindle.amazon.com the best social reading network in the world. Maybe they did. Or maybe they just realized it would be easier to buy the one that already existed.

Craig Mod is an independent writer, designer and publisher focused on publishing and storytelling. You can follow him on Twitter @craigmod.

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Photo courtesy Vitchanan Photography/Shutterstock.com.

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