I subscribe to Macleans magazine, which is a good way to stay up-to-date on things that are happening offline. In a recent issue (okay, I don’t get around to them in a timely fashion), I found an interesting article about the advent of healthy items on the menus of fast food restaurants. It turns out that for MacDonalds, the addition of these items — such as apple slices as a side instead of fries — has dramatically altered the public image of the company. To such an extent that the company’s stock, after suffering years of decline, is now surging. (Sorry for not linking to the article; they appear to have removed it from their web site)

The funny thing is, the company actually doesn’t sell many apple slices or salads. In fact, sales of those items are so low that, if they were any other item on the menu, they’d be taken off. It just goes to show you that people like to have the option, but would prefer their food fried, thank you very much.

Or would they? See, it just so happens that I have some personal experience with the apple slices in question. Although my family makes a point of not eating at MacDonalds, we have, owing to their ubiquity, been forced to eat there lest we go hungry. On a recent road trip, my wife ordered a side of apple slices for our daughter. It was only after we’d returned to the car and were on the road that we discovered the truth: instead of apple slices, we had fries! Wife had specifically ordered those slices, but the cashier had either not heard, or had been so accustomed to keying in fries that muscle memory took over.

Sure, one isolated incident. But a couple weeks later, it happened again, this time at a much better hamburger establishment. I ordered onion rings, and got fries. Why? No doubt, because everyone gets fries, and muscle memory kicks in where attention wanders.

It makes me wonder just how many people don’t get the things they ask for. In this business, as in fast food, it happens all the time. About half of my current customers (and you know who you are!) are with me because their last agency did a poor job of listening to their needs. Too many agencies like to tell their clients what they want, and to hell with what the client actually needs.

But far more common — and I’m as guilty of this as anyone — is the old misinterpretation trick. Web site development is particularly troubling here because there are so many ways of doing things. A web page can be editable by giving the client a window where they can edit raw HTML code, or it can be editable to providing a “WYSIWYG” interface, where you edit it like a word processing document. The good news is, I consider the former unacceptable, while several clients have expected only that.

But the opposite side of that equation, where I provide something beneath a client’s expectation, is dangerous ground, and it happens from time to time. One thing is clear though: it’s how a business handles being called out on a problem that determines whether they’re worth working with. MacDonalds would instantly take back those mis-ordered fries, as would Starr Burger. Would your web agency (or insurance agent, or lawyer) refactor their work to meet your higher expectations? The successful businesses strive to do just that.

Of course, most problems of this nature are almost entirely mitigated by simply paying attention from the outset.

Next time: The other great danger of this business: protecting yourself from dangerous clients!

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I like to think of mass entertainment as coming in three major forms: music, movies (and other video), and books. The first two categories are readily digitized; in fact, they already are.

Music CDs and video DVDs are digitized versions of those media. Books, newspapers and magazines, on the other hand, remain firmly entrenched in the analogue world. They are inherently the stuff of atoms, rather than bits.

If you know anything about the publication of text-based material, then you know that it’s a thoroughly electronic process: writers compose on computers, they approve it on computers, they lay it out on computers, and they send it for printing over the Internet. It’s only at the very last stage that the electronic copy is utterly abandoned, and you get a hunk of old-growth forest.

Lots of people prefer it this way. We are uncommonly attached to the classic book form factor: it’s battery-free, works in most lighting conditions, has very high resolution, and is very portable. Of course, we don’t often consider the down-sides of the book: they are very expensive, they take up a great deal of space, and they tend to go missing when you lend them out.

These facts are especially true when you talk about technical books: the sort of material that remains relevant for perhaps a couple years before becoming irrelevant or obsolete. Ironically, because these books are so technical, they appeal to far fewer people than the average mass-market paperback, and are consequently more expensive. It doesn’t help that many of these books are very big! It’s not uncommon to see an $80 book at the local Chapters. Reminds me of my university days.

It was the technical book challenge that motivated me to purchase an eBook Reader from Sony. I’m currently learning to program the Mac with Objective-C and the Cocoa frameworks, and this monumental task requires the reading of dozens of texts on the subject. The good news is, Apple provides all this documentation for free on their Web site (along with the actual development tools, which is great). The bad news is, it’s very difficult to read all this documentation on a computer screen!

Well, okay. I also think the eBook Reader is a pretty cool gadget. This was my one solid excuse for evaluating something that I feel is going to change the rules for how the written word is distributed and consumed in the future.

The Sony Reader is about the size of a paperback book, but is less than half an inch thick. Its major innovation is its display: it uses a technology called E-Ink, which is dramatically different from traditional computer displays. You can read more at the link there, but quickly: the display contains microscopic beads with ink on only one side. When a charge is applied, the beads rotate, showing black or no colour. The result is a display that actually looks like printed text on paper, and that only uses power when a page is turned! My Sony Reader has a battery charge measured not in hours of use, but in number of pages turned. In this case, I can turn 7000 pages between charges.

The Reader is otherwise a fairly normal, low-powered electronic device. It has a simple interface for navigating through books, contains enough memory to store about 70 books, and it’s readily portable, and light enough to read anywhere.

It’s not a perfect device, however. The display is only six inches in diagonal width, which is fine for text but insufficient for detailed artwork or larger pages. It’s also capable of displaying only 4 levels of grey, so many images that appear in the books are dithered.

There’s also another downside: getting content into the Reader. Right now you can only buy books at the Sony Connect store. And while they offer pretty much every book that’s on the bestseller lists, you’ll be hard-pressed to find EVERY book that you might want to read. And prices are surprising: you’ll save 10-20% off the cost of a hardcover book. To me, that’s crazy, and suggests that publishers are more interested in profit-taking than in propagating this trend.

On the other hand, there are other uses for the Reader, and devices like it that will come in the future. The most exciting possibilities are in the ways an electronic reader could replace the ephemeral texts that surround us: newspapers and magazines. While the current Sony Reader doesn’t have the display quality or size to emulate my weekly issue of Macleans, there’s no doubt in my mind that we’ll see it in the next few years. I’m looking forward to the day where, instead of receiving a 96-page magazine in the mail, I’ll simply download it to my Reader. No trees were harmed in the making of this magazine! The benefits accrue even greater for newspapers, which are a voracious waste of paper.

One can hope that, while the technology for eBooks is coming along nicely, the biggest change — in peoples’ heads — will develop similarly. My wife is the perfect example; while she admires the benefits of my Reader, her love of the book-as-object is too great to let it go.

However, as books become more expensive to produce and purchase, it will likely become inevitable that we’ll all be using electronic Readers. We’ll always have paper books, but I see the day where we’re using eBooks much more often. I’m looking forward to it.

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