apple didn't update the announced total of ipads sold for a long time, but they were still selling lots of 'em... to date, they've sold 14.8 million, half in the last quarter. this surpassed even the wildest expectations. congrats! you might recall that michael and i have a friendly bet on when the ipad numbers will surpass the kindle numbers. (can't remember if it was just the kindle, or all of the dedicated machines; nook has done surprisingly well.) anyway, amazon still isn't releasing specific figures, but there were reports they had ordered 4.5 million chips for delivery in the first quarter for use in kindle3 machines, which indicates they still believe strongly in the product. with that kind of chip order, they will get a deep discount, and amazon is very good at passing along the savings, so we can look for kindles to get even cheaper than the $139. 2012 might be the year that we finally arrive at sub-$100. i predicted april 21, 2013 as the date when ipad will "win" the numbers race. we'll see how that turns out... whatever the case, as i said in an earlier post, 2010 was the year that _writers_ started making money, sometimes _big_ money, by selling their work directly to their readers, disintermediating publishers in the process. they still have amazon as a middleman, taking 30%, but amazon performs necessary services for their cut, so it might be a fair share. the important point is this: there has now been formed a critical mass of readers who are willing to buy e-books from authors "directly" (i.e., via amazon), so that authors no longer need publishers. this is a very beautiful thing. for a long time, i pooh-poohed project gutenberg because it was just "all those old books", when i was more interested in the _new_ books that were coming out from _new_ writers. but since the publishing industry had all of those new books tied up in its system, the only place i could really work with e-books -- develop them, do r&d on them, and so forth -- was here at project gutenberg. so i really appreciate the big opportunity which presented itself here, thanks to michael... that's especially true because it was hart's insistence on the "plain-text" version of e-books that led to my discovery that plain-text is actually _the_ superior file-format for e-books. you just have to store the styling and formatting information in amongst that plain-text, which isn't hard to do, not at all. but you then have a file-format which is very easy to work on. since even marcello, the most rabid of the x.m.l./t.e.i. diehards who'd attack me regularly, has converted over to light-markup, the bulk of my work is pretty much finished here, i would think. there was no announcement here, but over at d.p., rfrank said:

Project Gutenberg and DP management have approved RST as a master format.

and with that, i issue a loud "i told you so" and a big laugh... meanwhile, new authors with new books are now calling me... because the corporate publishing industry was in charge, and they wanted to make e-book creation as difficult as possible -- so as to make it more difficult for newbies to compete -- we are now stuck with jon noring's stupid complicated .epub, as "the standard" no less! except, just as i always predicted, the absence of an open-source authoring-tool prototype app and an open-source viewer-program means that we now have a bunch of different implementations of the .epub "standard", which means we're reliving our "web-browser incompatibility" nightmares all over again, except it's with e-books this time... great. that's just what we needed. of course, this is just what the corporate publishers _wanted_. they have been dragging their feet on e-books since the start, stalling things out whenever they could, so this was the tactic. but we knew they were doomed anyway. and we were right. and now we have a critical mass of readers who want to buy, and authors who want to sell to that critical mass, so there's a new opportunity now to make the e-book world a bit smarter, by adopting a better format, just like i made p.g. a bit smarter. i'll still hang around on this list. and i'll still have things to tell you that _would_ make you smarter if you would listen... but for the most part, my attention is now on the new books. the ones that'll be born digital. good luck with the old ones. -bowerbird