Steve Jobs says e-books aren't worth the trouble - but should we believe him? The Apple boss has a track record that suggests it's worth being sceptical
At the close of Wednesday's iPod announcement, the resurgent Steve Jobs shook hands with various people in the crowd and even found time to chat with some hand-picked journalists. Notable among them was David Pogue, the gadget reviewer for the New York Times, and one of the few writers regularly allowed to step inside Jobs's magic circle.
In a brief Q&A published on the NYT site, Pogue asked Jobs about whether electronic book readers were interesting to him, and got a zingy little response.
"I'm sure there will always be dedicated devices, and they may have a few advantages in doing just one thing," he said. "But I think the general-purpose devices will win the day. Because I think people just probably aren't willing to pay for a dedicated device."
He said that Apple doesn't see e-books as a big market at this point, and pointed out that Amazon.com, for example, doesn't ever say how many Kindles it sells. "Usually, if they sell a lot of something, you want to tell everybody."
No surprise, really - after all, Jobs has panned e-book readers in the past as folly, famously even suggesting it's a terrible idea because "people don't read anymore".
But notice the subtle change in his approach. No longer does he say "the idea is terrible", but instead suggests that if and when people do want to read books on an electronic device, it will be sold to them through the back door - not on a dedicated gizmo. Hardly a stretch to imagine that he thinks the iPhone, or something like it, would be that sort of device.
So, the question of book readers is deeper than it first seems. But there's another question here, too: should we believe what he says in any case?
Over the years, Jobs and his lieutenants have routinely suggested that certain features or products are a no-go area. The reasoning, often, is that consumers simply do not want a particular item or the market for them is not big enough.
Yet Jobs has a reputation for persuading people to splash out to products they didn't even know they wanted - it's part of what makes him one of the ultimate salesmen. So the subtext of "consumers don't want something" is actually that Jobs does not believe in the concept and doesn't want to sell it. But the language means that when Apple finally does sell the item in question, it's easy to paint the change as the result of a shift in consumer trends, even if it's just Apple's opinion that has changed, not the public's.
A great example from yesterday was the nano's built-in FM radio - for so long, a feature that lots of iPod users asked for but Jobs rejected (and always with a certain sense that FM just wasn't advanced enough to be worthy of iPod status). After all that time spent keeping FM out of the iPod, Apple sticks a receiver in just when nobody really cares any more.
That's hardly his first change of heart. Let's take a look at a few examples from recent years, starting back in 2004, when Jobs said that Apple wasn't working on a video iPod because consumers didn't want to watch long movies on tiny screens:
"One of the things we say around Apple, and I paraphrase Bill Clinton from the 1992 presidential race, is 'It's about the music, stupid.' ... You can't watch a video and drive a car. We're focused on music."
A year later, Apple released the video-capable 5th generation iPod.
Here's another one: in 2005, when Apple announced its ill-fated partnership to create iTunes-compatible phones with Motorola, senior Apple executive Eddy Cue said that not only did the company not want to move into the phone market, but it also wanted to avoid the high-end market.
"What we've talked about is a something that is valuable for the mass market," Cue said. "It has to be a phone in the middle-tier of the market, not a $500-tier phone. It has to be very seamless to use."
Two years later - and partially because of frustrations of working with Motorola - the company announced a little product called the iPhone, initially priced at $599.
And then there is the almost mythical tablet Mac: something that Jobs has denied for years, but that numerous, well-sourced reports have said is all but certain in the coming months. Even if it never emerges, it's clear that the staff in Cupertino are working feverishly on a product that fits the bill.
There are examples of the company sticking by its guns - music subscriptions are something Apple has been bugged about for years, and has yet to implement - but there are enough times that a denial has been followed by the product in question to make it worth being sceptical.
This is not to say precisely that Steve Jobs lies about such features - but that he has a history of making categorical statements which are eventually overturned. Whether he actually believes that Apple aren't going to make a certain product and then changes his mind, or whether he's simply bringing down the veil of secrecy to keep the competition on their toes, I have no real idea.
But one thing's certain: when Steve Jobs says people don't want e-book readers, that doesn't mean Apple won't make one.
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