傲文世界

周三，乔布斯接受了《纽约时报》专栏作家David Pogue（音译：大卫·波格）的专访。人们从乔布斯有关ebook的言语中揣摩苹果公司似乎要想远离电子书这个市场。但实际情况并非如此。

为什么呢？因为大卫先前曾在网上发布过他和乔布斯的一次对话，现在你还应该可以在Google里搜到。大卫问的问题是：“你对电子书的看法改变了吗？”乔布斯认为目前电子书的市场还不够大，而未来更为通用的设备应该有机会胜出。”他还用了一句虚拟语气的句式：“我要是亚马逊，我会喜欢销售那些不需要仓库和UPS的产品。”

怎么解读乔布斯的话呢？我们正在做平板机，而电子书只是其中的一部分。

乔布斯并未说他对电子书不感兴趣，他只是说苹果对只有单一电子书功能的产品不感兴趣。可以想象一下，如果你只需要拿着一个机器，就拥有了多种功能，那你何必要拿那么多单一功能的产品呢？看来很多人都误读了乔布斯有关电子书的想法。电子书在苹果商店中占有很大一部分比例，为什么苹果会放弃对它的支持呢？很明显的，苹果公司还是会支持电子书，但不会出单一的电子书阅读器之类的产品，而是将电子书的功能融合进其平板机或者其他什么类似的机器上。来源

What Steve Jobs Actually Said About eBooks

by MG Siegler on September 11, 2009

There’s been a big brouhaha over comments Steve Jobs made to NYT’s David Pogue in an interview following Apple’s event on Wednesday. Basically, most people are interpreting what Jobs said about eBook readers to mean that Apple plans to completely stay away from the market. But that’s not actually what Jobs said at all.

How do we know? Because before Pogue re-wrote his interview, he posted the transcription of the Q&A, which still resides in Google’s cache. Here’s the relevant part:

Q: Has your opinion of e-readers changed?

A: I’m sure there will always be dedicated devices, and they may have a few advantages in doing just one thing. 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. You notice Amazon never says how much they sell; usually if they sell a lot of something, you want to tell everybody.

We don’t see that it’s a really big market at this point. And in the future, the more general-purpose devices will tend to win the day.

I’m not sure that Amazon, as an example, really cares that much about being in the hardware business. If I were Amazon, I’d love selling stuff where I didn’t have to have a warehouse, didn’t need UPS.

Translation: We’re making a tablet, and eBooks will be a part of those.

Jobs isn’t saying Apple isn’t interested in eBooks, he’s saying that Apple isn’t interested in making a stand-alone eBook reader. And they shouldn’t be. While the devices will exist for a while, eventually the thought that this won’t be a functionality wrapped into other devices is silly. Why carry around multiple devices when you can carry around one? That’s kind of Apple’s thing, isn’t it?

Basically, a lot of people are wrongly translating Jobs’ thoughts about eBook readers as eBooks themselves. eBooks are a huge portion of the App Store, why wouldn’t Apple want to expand their support of them? They do, and they are. It’s just going to be on their tablet device or their other devices, not some stand-alone reader.