Mat Honan for Gizmodo:

I’m reading 1Q84, Haruki Murakami’s long-awaited new book. In hardback, it’s 944 pages and weighs several pounds. I am a pasty blogger with weak arms and soft hands, so the Kindle version seemed like a no-brainer.

Except the Kindle version is hobbled. Extensively hobbled, in fact. It lops off two of Amazon’s best features, public highlights and, far worse, the ability to read on all my devices.

Honan says he started reading on one device, wanted to pick up on another and got an error stating ‘License Limit Reached’. Amazon subsequently said that the device limit for 1Q84 is one. Clearly, this is down to the publisher, but I’m surprised Amazon has allowed this. Yet Amazon customer service confirmed the device limit to Honan and added that device limits vary by publisher.

I’ve not heard of this restriction on Kindle before, so I guess it must be fairly rare. That said, it is troubling. The point of a digital ecosystem is to free us of restrictions. Buy a digital book for Kindle, and you should be able to read it on any device for which you have Kindle access. Restricting it to one device is like the bad old days of digital music, where publishers demanded you rebuy per device. That’s great for publishers, in their deranged minds, but it’s not something modern consumers will have any truck with, and it’s also damaging to the systems publishers increasingly rely on.

The path forward for media is clear: re-engage with consumers by making your content affordable, accessible and easy to transfer between devices. Lock users into a system (iBooks, Kindle, Comixology) if you absolutely must, but don’t think you’ll get away with locking things down further per device, or you’ll just drive people to other publishers and, for your content, torrents.

You’ve got to love old rockers. Pete Townshend comes across a bit like today’s Mr Bonkers, blaming iTunes for not offering everything a record label does, and instead acting like an uncaring shop. That’s probably because iTunes is, in fact, an uncaring shop and not a record label.

The interview is summarised on Mac Observer (hat tip: Adam Banks, and full transcript on MusicWeek) and it’s quite illuminating:

Mr. Townshend, the leader of iconic rock ban The Who, argued that once upon a time, the music industry as a whole (including publishing and record labels) used to offer eight different forms of support to artists, including editorial guidance, financial support, creative nurture, manufacturing, publishing, marketing, distribution, and payment of royalties.

He said that if you look at artists who distribute through iTunes, they get only the last two forms of support, distribution and payment of royalties.

Because iTunes isn’t a record label.

“Now is there really any good reason why,” he asked, “just because iTunes exists in the wild west internet land of Facebook and Twitter, it can’t provide some aspect of these services to the artists whose work it bleeds like a digital vampire [UK bank] Northern Rock for its enormous commission?”

Because iTunes isn’t a record label. As for it bleeding artists’ work like a digital vampire, iTunes is one of the main reasons why anyone pays for digital music at all. It wasn’t the first of its kind, but it rapidly embedded itself in the collective consciousness of device and Mac/PC owners, and it made it natural to spend a few quid on a digital album download, rather than go hunting for a torrent, which would be much closer to Townshend’s digital vampire.

Townshend goes on to say Apple should employ A&R people to guide artists, and so perhaps he isn’t misunderstanding what the iTunes Store is, but is instead arguing that Apple should be assisting artists due to the label ecosystem crashing and burning in slow motion. I suspect he suggests Apple because of its clout, since he doesn’t make the same demands of Amazon, WalMart or Tesco.

The thing is, Apple’s never really had much truck with creating media—it just provides the platforms on which people can create and sell—and so there’s no proof it’d even be any good at being a record label. In iOS gaming, Apple’s made a single game—Texas Hold’em—and it simply lets devs get on with it, rather than interfering. To that end, I can’t see Apple going all ‘record label’ in the music space, nor really why it should. It’s providing an outlet—an easy way for people to buy. And you can bet if Apple did pump resources into helping music artists, it’d alienate people working in other fields, lacking such support, and probably also piss off remaining record labels, too, potentially making things worse for many musicians.

Townshend continues to offer suggestions:

He would also like to see Apple choose 500 worthy artists a year and provide them with free Macs and the training to use them when creating music. Those artists could be identified by the above-mentioned A&R folks, who should then follow the progress of those artists throughout the year.

So, Apple should not only provide advice, but also free hardware. What about their own radio station?

“Yes Apple, give artists some streaming bandwidth,” he said. “It will sting, but do it. You will get even more aluminum solid state LURVE for doing so.”

How about groupies and drugs?

…

OK, so there is some kind of line.

Still, Townshend does come up with at least one nugget of solid-gold sense:

The biggest change that he advocated during his speech was that Apple stop requiring independent bands to go through third party aggregators to be in the iTunes Store. He believes Apple should pay these artists directly so that more of the money from their music downloads gets to them. He acknowledged that some of the third party aggregators offer some label-like services, but argued that most are just middlemen sitting between the artists and iTunes.

This is the one thing that’s always surprised me a little about the iTunes Store. You can make and upload your own game, and, unless I’m mistaken, you can self-publish a book. But music? Too bad. You have to pay a third-party service a buck or more per track, for each store you want a presence on. And that isn’t a particularly modern, ‘Apple’ way of thinking.

Got yourself an iPad? YOU IDIOT! As Laptop, the “pulse of mobile tech” shows, it’s merely a round-one contender in a 2011 Tablet World Series. (Hat tip: Brooks Review.) As you can see, if you nip through to the site, the tablet champion of champions is in fact the Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet, which has taken the world by storm and has sold millions since you started reading this article.

Laptop says:

With strong features like a scratch-resistant Gorilla Glass display, support for enterprise-level security software / encryption, and an optional active stylus, the ThinkPad Tablet simply dominated the game this weekend. Users were undoubtedly also attracted by the ThinkPad Tablet’s productivity-centric software, including its note-taking app and file manager. Full-size USB ports and SD card slots also helped the ThinkPad tablet’s case.

Or: readers of Laptop (responsible for the voting and final outcome) are deluded anti-Apple nutters, given that they had the ASUS Eee Pad Slider win out over the iPad 2. (It’s one thing to prefer another system over the iPad—fair enough—but the Eee Pad Slider? Really?)

Laptop again:

Could the ThinkPad Tablet’s win herald a new appreciation for productivity

Goddammit, now I have to delete all my productivity apps from the iPad again, because, apparently, it’s not a device for productivity. Only the wonderful Lenovo ThinkPad, with its unique Documents to Go (enabling you to edit, view and create Word, Excel and PowerPoint files, and not at all available on, say, iOS) gives you productivity!

and for pen-based input?

In other news, perhaps we could get rid of those nasty touchpads and mice and return to keys alone on the desktop. And those cars? Horrible. Horse and cart, please. And sanitation? DISASTER! Let’s wallow in mud, consider the sun a god, and kick each-other’s faces off for instead thinking something else is a god, such as the moon, a tree, or a particularly dashing squirrel.

Extra points to the Laptop readers for voting the Amazon Kindle Fire—a tablet that isn’t out yet—into round two. Dreams beat reality, I guess, which perhaps is another reason why the ThinkPad Tablet won out overall.

Hog Bay Software just released WriteRoom 3. It’s available now from the Mac App Store, and its price has plummeted from $24.99 to just $9.99.

WriteRoom is one of two apps I use daily for writing (the other being Scrivener), and it was the earliest of the full-screen, streamlined Mac text editors that was worth a damn. Over time, rivals eclipsed WriteRoom in terms of looks and price, but the original retained the mix of customisation and efficiency that I require, and so I stuck with it (although on iPad I’ve been seduced by iA Writer, which on the Mac I find has a few too many shortcomings). Now, the latest release is sleeker, cheaper and bounds ahead of its rivals in most ways.

I’ll be reviewing the app in an upcoming issue of MacFormat, but if you’ve been mulling over checking out WriteRoom for a while, I wholeheartedly recommend jumping on board right now.

Orn Malik for GigaOM is shocked that terrible free game Cut the Birds (which manages to simultaneously rip off Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja) ended up on the App Store. I’m not. Despite reports that Apple’s policing of the store is draconian, it’s anything but these days. It’s commonplace to see IP rips on the store, and I’ve chanced upon lifts from Pac-Man, Mario and other famous brands.

Generally, Apple’s pretty good at removing infringing properties when challenged (and that was even the case with an indie dev I know whose game and game name were stolen wholesale), and it’s tough to think what Apple should be doing instead. It could act as more of a gatekeeper, rejecting more IP that obviously infringes, but such action is likely to be inconsistently applied, and most likely to only protect big companies by default. Furthermore, it’s not like Apple’s alone in this—myriad cases of IP theft also exist on the Android Marketplace, for example.

Still, that such blatant IP theft has made it to the App Store does no-one any favours, not least SolverLabs (amusing strapline: “The world class software labs”—OHO!), who may find themselves minus one iOS dev account once Apple’s team lumbers into view.