Running on what looks to be a Microsoft Surface the Reactable, Infractor is software that represents all of the New York Times as a streaming beam of light, with individual stories floating through the stream like fireflies. Placing an interactive prism on the table splits this beam, allowing you to assign filters like “Obama” to make the stream more relevant. (A jog wheel, placed next to the prism, can alter the prism’s specific sensitivity.)

Eventually, you’ll tailor the beam to only hold topics you’re interested in. Well that, or you’ll remember why the printing press doesn’t use prisms to convey information.

[Infractor via notcot]

Yesterday, we explored Apple’s discussions with newspaper, magazine and textbook publishers about creating a new type of hybridised media for an Apple tablet. Vooks—interactive books for the PC/iPhone—are a telling example of such an idea gone wrong.

Starting today, four Vooks are available for $US7 a pop. They’re essentially part-book, part-video stories and instructional texts that can link you to social networking sites should you want to fanboy out to your awesome Vook.

While the idea is sound, the product looks no better than a mid-90s encyclopaedia on CD.

And it really makes us realise, mixing medias—especially enhancing text for fiction—is tricky beyond the mere subject of taste. We’re used to watching both news and fart-related video clips on a blog, but embedded flash video is just corny when placed next to a murder mystery.

Part of the challenge is format. UI needs to be updated to something we haven’t really seen before — or maybe even imagined. Jumping across media should be a natural, passive experience. That part seems doable, though extremely difficult, with touch, camera and even voice interfaces. For instance, you could track a reader’s eyes to a certain word and activate a sound. You could make a page turn naturally to a full screen video as opposed to relegating clips to an awkward 480×360 box.

But when hybridising media, the part that could be even tougher is one of budgetary constraints. As soon as a book includes video, a publishing house becomes a production house and a writer becomes a director/editor. Stephen King’s prose might send chills up your spine, but the local cable commercial quality video blurb sitting beside it won’t have the budgetary love of a Hollywood flick, at least, not unless Stephen King or somebody else is going to take a paycut (or sell a LOT more books).

Advertising books costs money. Printing and distributing books costs money. But writing a book? That part’s basically free.

So whatever Apple and publishing houses are cooking up, we hope it’s beyond what we’ve seen in Vooks. No offence, Vook — someone had to do it (wrong) first. [Vook via NYT]

Several years ago, a modified version of OS X was presented to Steve Jobs, running on a multitouch tablet. When the question of “what would people do with this?” couldn’t be answered, they shelved it. Long having established music, movie and TV content, Apple is working hard to load up iTunes with print content from several major publishing houses across several media.

Two people related to the NYTimes have separately told me that in June, paper was approached by Apple to talk about putting the paper on a “new device”. The R&D labs have long worked on versions of the paper meant to be navigated without a keyboard or mouse, showing up on Windows tablets and on multiple formats using Adobe Air. The NYTimes, of course, also publishes via their iPhone application. Jobs has, during past keynotes, called the NYTimes the “best newspaper in the world.”

A person close to a VP in textbook publishing mentioned to me in July that McGraw Hill and Oberlin Press are working with Apple to move textbooks to iTunes. There was no mention of any more detail than that, but it does link back to a private Apple intern idea competition held on campus, in their Town Hall meeting area in 2008, where the winning presentation selected by executives was one focused on textbook distribution through iTunes. The logic here is that textbooks are sold new at a few hundred dollars, and resold by local stores without any kickbacks to publishers. A DRM’d one-time-use book would not only be attractive because publishers would earn more money, but electronic text books would be able to be sold for a fraction of the cost, cutting out book stores and creating a landslide marketshare shift by means of that huge price differential. (If that device were a tablet, the savings on books could pay for the device, and save students a lot of back pain.)

Apple also recently had several executives from one of the largest magazine groups at their Cupertino’s campus, where they were asked to present their ideas on the future of publishing. Several mockups of magazines were present in interactive form. It is presumed that more talks took place after the introduction and investigatory meeting. Some magazine company is also considering Adobe Air as a competing option for digital magazines, but without a revenue/distribution system that iTunes has, it seems unlikely.

I haven’t heard anything about traditional book publishers being approached yet, but given the scope of the rest of the publishing industry’s involvement, it’s not hard to imagine they’re on board as well.

Another source corroborates that the January announce date others have reported is correct within the month, with this information heard from a high level.

Some I’ve talked to believe the initial content will be mere translations of text to tablet form. But while the idea of print on the Tablet is enticing, it’s nothing the Kindle or any E-Ink device couldn’t do. The eventual goal is to have publishers create hybridised content that draws from audio, video, interactive graphics in books, magazines and newspapers, where paper layouts would be static. And with release dates for Microsoft’s Courier set to be quite far away and Kindle stuck with relatively static e-ink, it appears that Apple is moving towards a pole position in distribution of this next-generation print content. First, it’ll get its feet wet with more basic repurposing of the stuff found on dead trees today.

Also announced at the opening was the fact that Google are introducing Sydney’s light rail and monorail to its Maps service, plus Canberra’s bus service towards the end of the month. On top of that, Google are now archiving Fairfax newspapers back to the late 1800s, making them readily available to everyone through their search engine.

Maybe the idea is slightly anachronistic, but the experience was solid. Version 2.0 is built on Adobe AIR, which makes it truly multi-platform—although that brings it own set of issues, like resource intensity and non-native app behaviour. And I would really like it to use multitouch trackpad gestures, like for moving between articles. But, the navigation and UI are a lot cleaner than before—a sidebar on the left replaces the older top-centric navigation, and it has some neat (if laggy) UI tricks, like splitting articles into windows a la mobile Safari.

While $US3.45 a week ($US15/month) is cheaper than an actual paper, the Reader is still a pricier wrapper for Times content than Firefox ($US0). But maybe that’s a small price to pay for something that’s much closer to the future of newspapers than the Kindle—and certainly paper. Unless you think the newspaper’s future is simply bankrupt. [TimesReader 2.0]

The Kindle’s voice feature works like any other, so pronunciation foibles are expected, and even predictable. Says the developer Nuance, the technology licensed by Amazon:

It’s not even considered a bug. If it encounters a word it has never seen, it approaches it almost like a kid, phonetically.

But for the speech feature to be useful in a newspaper context, as Amazon wishes it to be, its library will have to be constantly updated—over the air, presumably—with pronunciation overrides for whatever weird names or places are in the news at a given time.

Of course, this would be extremely unwieldy and only marginally effective, so Amazon probably won’t do it. Good luck with today’s leading NYT story, Kindle owners. You might even have to read it. [NYT]

According to James Moroney, President and CEO of the Dallas Morning News, Amazon demands a ludicrous cut of newspaper sales for distribution on the Kindle. From his talk with the Senate:

The Kindle, which I think is a marvelous device, the best deal Amazon will give the Dallas Morning News-and we’ve negotiated this up to the last two weeks-they want 70 percent of the subscriptions revenue. I get 30 percent, they get 70 percent. On top of that they have said we get the right to republish your intellectual property to any portable device. Now is that a business model that is going to work for newspapers?

You’d think that Amazon would be smarter, taking a cue from Apple’s iTunes and just skimming enough off the top of subscriptions to sell more Kindle hardware. But then again, Amazon is in a tricky situation. They’re a retailer at heart, not a hardware manufacturer. And they’re attempting to make money on both sides of the print business.

Surely, the NYT didn’t agree to such a one-sided Kindle distribution model. But Amazon seems ready to milk smaller papers like the Dallas Morning News for all they’re worth…which I’m doubting is very much to begin with. [paidContent via CrunchGear and Image]

UPDATE: Maybe the NYT doesn’t have a better deal than the Dallas Morning News. According to a reliable source in the know, The New Yorker’s Kindle split is divided 33% New Yorker, 33% Amazon, and 33% wireless carrier. Without ad subsidies, it’s hard to view this model as sustainable.

The reduced “newspaper” pricing for the Kindle DX is going to be part of a package with a “long-term” subscription to one of the newspapers—I’d guess two years—for “readers who live in areas where home-delivery is not available” according to the press release. So no one who lives in a real city, in other words.

That’ll keep ‘em afloat. [Kindle DX on Giz]

The Wall Street Journal has traditionally been an expensive paper, costing over $US100 a year for both online and print subscriptions. Now it’s free on the iPhone (just like it’s been on BlackBerries).

I took the app for a quick spin and noticed, as pretty much everyone else will, its content layout is nearly identical to the NYT app (the main difference being that WSJ’s headline fonts are larger). However, the WSJ app also offers audio and video clips, plus it felt far snappier than NYT’s still finicky software over my Wi-Fi connection.

Available at the iTunes Store now, let us know what you think about it in the comments. Let’s cry about the bugs early so that maybe we won’t be stuck with another 2.02 version of a newspaper that barely runs. [iTunes via Macworld]

Mike Elgan, former editor-in-chief for Windows Magazine, writes a great column on how gadgets blogs fail readers. It’s solid feedback and tough love. Here’s my list on why Tech Magazines are failing readers:

1) Too Slow: Most Computer magazines will write reviews of product you’ve already bought or read about on blogs 2 months before. With the exception of Laptop Mag and a few others. How are they catching up in speed? Surprise: blogs.

2) They sometimes ignore the things companies want you to ignore: Magazines need to cover the unofficial topics that are important, even if it involves illegal activity like IP theft. Like BitTorrent. Even if the sponsoring companies don’t agree with how the technology is used, its important to educate the public and industry to its benefits and problems. And rumours are clearly useful to warn people not to buy the stuff that’s just about to become outdated. Without news that corporations don’t sanction, magazines might as well reprint press releases.

3) They charge: So much info on the web is free and ad subsidised, including the blogs. They’ve got ads. So why are they still charging when its costing them readership? The magazine model of getting people to pay for copies is dying a slow death. See: The difference in subscription and cover prices and Chris Anderson’s Free.

4) The websites sometimes suck: In the worst cases, you can’t tell where the new content is. It’s all over the place, nested in a field of links that mean nothing to anyone but advertisers and industry wonks. In the best cases, they make you click through 10 times for every feature: Come on. Pageviews are a dead competitive metric, and you’re just annoying everyone.

5) Their columns are written by people I can’t relate to: The most prestigious print columnists today are at least a decade away from 35. The age is not the issue — but there are economic, social and generational gaps that can’t be bridged.

6) They cover a whole lot of stuff no one cares about: Just because a company puts something out or writes a press release, and it’s on a publication’s beat, doesn’t mean anyone actually cares about it. Market share is not indicative of success. Porsche sells fewer cars than Toyota. More tech journalists should learn to follow their gut instincts, because as tech lovers, you get a great sense of what people are also excited about.

7) They review products without the bigger picture: Most trade mags do a fantastic job of explaining the specs and the benchmark results, without the overall real world effect (usually a small delta of improvement) and social context (see: iPod shuffle’s tiny buttons). Most tech pubs fail at this, blog or mag. Exception: The big columnists at the papers do a great job of this, especially the four horsemen, Pogue, Moss, Levy, and Baig.

8) They presume to be error-free: Last year, right before I canceled my subscription, I read a computer trade with more errors than I’d seen in any magazine. It included type-Os, but also factual F-ups like mention of “Pioneer LCDs TVs”. (Pioneer doesn’t make them here.) Magazines have copy editors, fact checkers and 2 months to deliver this content. And you can’t retract paper.

9) The writing is often boring: OK, not every article has to be funny or Shakespeare, but it shouldn’t make you want to tear your eyes out or go to sleep, either. Tech is inherently a left brain topic; making it an easy and enjoyable thing to learn about and digest is critical and something many trade pubs fail to do! This is increasingly critical as tech and gadgets go more and more mainstream and the average joe comes looking for information.

10) They fail to realise news is collaborative: Mike criticized the gadget blogs for rehashing reviews. First off, aggregation is a service. If someone can check one site, instead of 400, that’s useful. This attitude also seems to ignore the fact that news is collaborative. Sites send each other tips and in return, send links and readers back to the source. That’s how we give credit to our peers online and grow together, as a network. You can’t do that in print.

Bonus 11) Paper: They kill trees and give you papercuts. They cost money to mail. They are heavy and take up space. And they can catch on fire and burn your entire house down! And after all these years, the subscription cards are still annoying. And you can’t search through old print as easily as you can search through old online content.

[image by Mannobhai]