At one point it was assumed that e-books would completely take over the textbook market and would help drive down costs. So far that hasn’t happened much. The primary e-book customers seem to be folks who want to carry all their books around in a more convenient format. The e-books themselves often are priced similarly to the printed version.

There has been some innovation in the area though. For example. Amazon today announced Kindle Textbook Rental. The rental price paid increases the longer you keep the book.

The new Amazon service would be ideal for situations where there is a long reading list for a class. The student would then only need to rent books for the semesters where those books are being used. It doesn’t look like much would be saved for traditional full-year textbooks. A quick glance at some of the pricing indicates that renting the book for the school year costs roughly the same as buying the e-book.

Believe it or not, as I was looking in to the rental pricing I noticed that in some cases the new hardback versions of textbooks are actually priced lower than e-books. Of course, used hardback copies always cheaper than e-books. And with the Kindle books, there’s no option to sell the book at the end of the year.

So despite the new possibility of lowering e-book costs by renting, it seems that in many cases the lowest cost is. as it’s always been, the used-book market.

For example, where we once built public buildings (stores, churches, schools, courthouses) in monumental ways and with fine materials, we now cut corners. We place what should be important buildings in poor locations. We put a school in a field at the edge of town. We put a courthouse in a rundown neighborhood. There is an uproar if anyone tries to do more than the basics when designing or building anything with tax money.

I was again reminded of this when I read this article in the NY Times about the precipitous decline in school libraries.

In the “old days” every school had a library and librarian. The library was a central part of the school experience. It was well used, funded and maintained.

Then over time, things began to change. First we started getting behind on updating the library collection. This is brought up twice in the Times article:

• A “library, whose books were so outdated that some still referred to the Soviet Union without reporting its demise.”
• “[T]he principal of one of the six high schools that share the building said the books there were too outdated to be usable.”

When a collection is not appropriate for use, it’s not surprising that fewer people use it.

Then we started sharing libraries between schools, eliminating the ability for many kids to simply stop by the library during their school day. It now required a special school trip — maybe even in a bus — to go to the “school’s” library. Not surprisingly this further marginalized library use.

And now finally, we’ve simply stopped hiring, and have moved on to firing, librarians. While many folks seem to feel that Google can somehow replace a librarian, this is obviously not really the case. Curators and experts are needed no matter what situation we are in.

Basically, we’ve said that these things, school libraries, which were apparently mandatory and expected in the first part of the 20th century are now way too expensive. And because they are too expensive, we first marginalize them and then eliminate them.

And the subtext here, of course, is the incredible hole we’ve dug for ourselves in education overall.

As the President mentioned in his Twitter Town Hall yesterday: “For us now to give short shrift to education when the world is more complex than ever, and it’s a knowledge-based society and companies locate based on whether they’ve got skilled workforces or not, that makes no sense.”

Again, back to my main point: How could we afford this stuff in the past? Why can’t we now? Where is all the money going instead?

To summarize:

• He pointed out that Google has not only written all their own core applications, they also have created a customized Linux build and a unique file system. They even design their own server hardware. (Although as an aside, while the hardware they are using is technically “custom”, the stuff I’ve read on this makes it pretty clear that they are using pretty stock desktop motherboards.)
• Similarly, Facebook, while formerly using off-the-shelf hardware and software, has increasingly created customized kit. They have a special cross compiler, HipHop, (technically source code transformer) that takes the PHP that Facebook’s programmers write and turns it into C code that is then compiled. They have also recently announced the Open Compute Project, which outlines all their customizations in server and datacenter design in hopes that other companies can adopt some of them and drive down the cost.
• Finally, Siracusa talked about Amazon and how, just like Facebook and Google, they have significant investments in custom applications and datacenter infrastructure and how they are trying to monetize those investments by selling services like S3 and EC2.

Based on the way that Apple tends to go its own way and on its almost pathological abhorrence of depending on anyone but itself, you might think that it would follow the models above when designing its own datacenters.

But apparently it hasn’t.

From the photos shown at the WWDC keynote, it looks like Apple is using standard HP servers and NetApp storage. No sign of XServes or other Apple-specific stuff. And from some traces of iCloud network traffic, it appears that Amazon’s Web Services and Microsoft’s Azure cloud services are somehow involved in serving up at least parts of the iCloud data.

Now why would this be? As Siracusa says, “It’s out of character.” So why would Apple put its new flagship service into the hands of others?

In the podcast, Siracusa seemed unable to come up with a solid answer to this that he could get behind. Perhaps a lack of time to build something better? Or maybe bad experiences with Mobile Me? In fact, he seems to believe that using commodity software and hardware is almost unthinkable. He goes on a long jag about how hard it is to get different vendors’ software and hardware to work together, apparently unaware that everyone (other than Google, perhaps) has to deal with this. He calls this kind of integration “unproven”. Really? And surprisingly enough, the chat room didn’t seem to correct him. Co-host Dan Benjamin did seem to be pushing on this a bit, but then ultimately let Siracusa go.

But anyway, there’s a pretty simple answer for why Apple has gone down this road, and it shows that their choices here are not as “out of character” as you might initially think.

Think about it: What does Apple Corporation do? They design and market software and devices and they sell media to run on those devices. That’s pretty much it. They don’t build anything. They don’t sell online services that aren’t somehow associated with their software or devices.

In this regard, there is a huge difference between Apple and the three companies that Siracusa opened with. Google, Amazon, and Facebook are all web services companies at heart. So just like it’s worth it for Apple to create custom software and hardware, it’s worth it for Google, Amazon, and Facebook to create custom datacenter technology.

Look at how Apple handles the manufacture of their high-profile devices. Instead of running their own factories (like they used to), all assembly and parts are handled by outside companies that are specialists. Screens and processors and RAM by Samsung.  Camera by Largan or Sony. Assembly by Foxconn. Etc.

Apple’s apparent datacenter decisions are similar to this: Why should Apple come up with their own datacenter technology? Why would they want to spend any energy on this when others (Amazon, Microsoft, Akamai, HP, NetApp etc.) have already done all the needed legwork? Why not take advantage of others’ expertise in an area that is not critical to Apple’s core business?

In fact, if Apple truly is able to run iCloud on top of all these existing cloud service providers they may have a much better cloud solution than any one of those providers has on its own. If Amazon has a catastrophic failure, that’s no problem for iCloud because it’s also running at Microsoft and Akamai. If Microsoft has better connectivity in a certain part of the world than does Amazon, then Apple can make sure that iCloud services come from Microsoft for that part of the world.

As it turns out, Apple may be again trumping the industry by going its own way. Not quite so “out of character”, eh?

But anyway, back to Dear Photograph. Another weird thing was the the two photos that mention “swag”. One says “When will I have this much swag again?”. The other, “I wish I had as much swag then, as I do now.” I’m thinking that perhaps these two people should get together and discuss.

My overall feeling about the site is that there’s a pall of sameness about the photos there. I would like to see situations where the new photo and the old don’t even seem to intersect anymore.