Those on the leading edge witnessed a watershed breakthrough milestone this week as the first reports came in indicating that the greater new mobile access to the Internet…great…greater…greatest.
The most obvious bell they heard ringing was the sound of iPhone apps, with a first time ever report that there are now more eBooks apps than game apps for the iPhone and related hardware.
This only a half year after Steve Jobs, one of my heroes, said that it was not in Apple’s interest to support eBooks because no one reads.
“The Time’s They Are A’Changin’.”
With ~4.5 billion active cell/mobile phones in the world plus the fact that laptop computer sales surpassed desktop computer sales years ago, it should have been obvious that the majority of Internet access would be from mobile devices…right?
The pundits seem to have missed this one. Sometimes even Steve Jobs.
People are reading eBooks, and doing everything else on the Net from a majority of devices that are now mobile.
If you have a web site and haven’t yet figured out that you need to do a mobile version of that website, you are probably losing traffic.
1.2 billion cell/mobile phones were sold in the last four quarters and that was even in the middle of this huge recession.
Netbooks have taken off as the next big thing.
University library employees tell me that every other student there is on a laptop computer…50%, in a building filled with books and that so much traffic is going through that it slows the huge bandwidth of a major university location down to slower that what you get at home.
The research center where our weekly Geek Lunches take place recently, very recently, upgrade their wifi so I got 2 megabytes per second, and it took only a couple weeks before everyone else realized this and set up their wifi connections to the point where it is a quarter as fast.
Let’s face it…mobile computing has taken over the world while most of us weren’t paying enough attention to notice.
What Are The Results?
The first result is that the major sites have had to address a devices rush that makes The Gold Rush and rush hour look like a standstill.
Believe it or not there are already sites that are prepared to receive people connecting from over ONE THOUSAND DIFFERENT MOBILE DEVICES!
Why?
Because these people want the traffic.
As many of you know, I have been pushing cellphone/mobile eBooks for a number of years and I test more phones on http://www.gutenberg.org, at every opportunity.
Why?
Because it is obvious that we are going to get more eBook readers from cell/mobile phones than from computers.
If we do not present a site that looks and acts decent to their phone, such people will simply head off to the next eBook site, lost forever, or close enough to forever, in a world moving so quickly.
Therefore, I am asking YOU to test how YOUR PHONE works on our site in the near future and to write me about how it works, how it will better work in YOUR OPINION if we make certain adjustments, etc. This is BIG in terms of the fact that the site may look and act differently to the device YOU use than any other, and even acts totally differently via a different piece of browsing software on the very same hardware. Thus, I suggest/ask that you try various browsers, as well.
In the last 24 hours I tried two different browsers on the same phone, and the one that came with the phone made Project Gutenberg Home Pages look totally empty until you scrolled down countless times, while that one we downloaded and installed ourselves worked just dandy.
Go figure.
Why?
Because each device sends a line to the web site called a “User Agent” to tell the site what kind of device it is and how to talk to it, only some send such a poor set of instructions that we have to rewrite some or all of the page just for that one single device.
That’s the project I have set out for Project Gutenberg right now.
Given that there are over ONE THOUSAND such devices, we need help.
WILL YOU PLEASE HELP US GIVE YOU EBOOKS IN A BETTER WAY???
Thank You!!!
Michael S. Hart