For reasons which shall remained unnamed, I have three weeks or so to morph into a reasonable facsimile of an iPhone programmer. Which is not a lot of time to learn how to:
- Unlearn enough Windows reflexes to use a Mac
- Learn my way around whatever IDE Apple supplies for iPhone/iPod/iPad development
- Dredge up enough decade-old memories of C/C++ to start stretching my brain around Objective-C.
The B&N reader application is still installed on my Windows desktops, so I bopped on over to the website for a bit of instant gratification. The search for "iPhone application" netted ten pages of results (the last page containing some splinters from the proverbial barrel-bottom). But of 100 results, how many were in digital format?
Two. One for a developer magazine (Independent Guide to the iPhone 3GS) and the other a book that might just be more appropriate in the dead-tree format (The iPhone Pocket Guide). Maybe I'm a statistical outlier, but it seems to me that the early adopters of digital books will be technical folks--people who don't want to buy one copy for the work office and another for the home office...and certainly don't want to lug single copies back and forth between the two.
True, a dead-tree book can sit off to the side of the work area, saving precious monitor real estate. But dead trees aren't quickly searchable. When you're scrambling up the learning curve, jumping between index and main text is horribly inefficient compared to CTRL-F. Plus, on-screen readers can always be minimized when they need to be out from underfoot. Granted, they don't allow you to copy and paste sample source code. But neither do dead-tree programming books, so that's more or less a wash.
The glaring misunderstanding of the demographic surprises me, but at the same time doesn't. In the short term, it's always more "efficient" to streamline your target audience/user. But at some point it's more work to round off the peg-corners than to drill square holes. Which is what I strongly suspect is happening here.
