What are ‘cloud computing’ and cloud hosting?

‘Cloud’ hosting is based on the top innovative technologies which allow a large number of machines connected to a group of storage methods to act as a system. Its main advantage lies in its improved storage capacity compared with traditional systems. As the information is found on numerous servers, if one fails the website remains unaffected because its data are reflected on other servers. In other words, its work load moves between the cloud of servers, which means that the user enjoys uninterrupted access to the websites and that flexibility is high as there is no physical limitation to growth in real time.

The current tendency of the 2.0 environment is that most of the information and most applications are no longer to be found in our device; it will now simply be the means of communication with our information. In this way, therefore, when a user connects to the website this links up to the nearest data centre or to that with the smallest load. The various applications allow access to the data stored on an Internet server, and it is this server that belongs to the network that shapes the cloud. In consequence, we store less and less information in our computers and spend more time connected to the Internet.

The cloud has several service types: for social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Hi5, Myspace), database mediums, bandwidth, hosting, data, etc. According to Cisco (2011), 88% of computer technicians consulted intend to host part of their companies’ applications and data on the Internet. In Spain 44% of companies choose to host over half of their corporate information in private cloud environments. It seems clear that all predictions suggest that cloud computing will increasingly allow the storing and accessing of data and applications on the Internet. The latest Horizon report (Johnson et al., 2011) also confirms this when it says: ‘The technologies we use are increasingly cloud-based, and our notions of IT support are decentralized. This trend, too, was noted in 2010 and continues to influence decisions about emerging technology.’

Some of the most habitual cloud-based services for the storage of information and applications are very well-known products that we use practically every day, such as YouTube (videos), Flickr (photographs), Slideshare (PowerPoint presentations), or social networks such as Twitter and Facebook.

This data hosting model is currently one of the most important technological initiatives in business computing and is changing the way businesses access services on the Internet, thus changing the speed and flexibility of business at no extra cost. Cloud computing gives us a new way of thinking of information architecture and delivery models (Hurwitz et al., 2010). With the cloud information strategy everything becomes a service for companies to develop new initiatives without a high initial investment. Cloud computing provides new business models and can be useful for changing the way in which companies collaborate and compete (Ommeren et al., 2009).

There are various cloud hosting information systems available to private users such as Dropbox,¹ Sugarsync² and ZumoDrive,³ to mention but a few. These multi-platform cloud hosting services allow users to store and synchronise files on-line and between different sets of equipment and to share files with other users. They generally offer both free and payment services; Dropbox for example offers various alternatives. The first is free and is called Basic, whereas the second and the third (Pro50 and Pro100) must be paid for. The differences between them lie in the amount of space available; Basic has 2 GB, Pro50 has 50 GB, and Pro100 has 100 GB.

With the increased popularity of cloud technology, companies are putting their faith in applications and resources in the form of services on demand. Connection to such services involves on the one hand security challenges and on the other incompatibilities of various kinds. Both aspects are exploited by manufacturers who aim to attract their clients to the environments they own. Hybrid cloud computing solves this problem by combining cloud public services with own resources.

As far as the eBook and aspects of cloud environments are concerned, three themes are analysed here:

Books and cloud services for the eBook

The eBook is causing a tremendous stir in the media, especially regarding business models, copyright, and its impact on readers and reading habits. It is also generating innovative and imaginative business proposals, of which one of the most significant is part of what we know as cloud computing. To some extent the personal library concept of cloud technology represents a new alternative and a new opportunity for the promotion of reading on a digital medium in the face of some users’ reluctance to change over to reading in an electronic format, as it adds multiple new functions to the possibilities of the printed format. Among these functions, the storage of digital content in the cloud greatly increases the capacity of providing services to end-users so that they can discover, select, and access the books they require at a given moment from any device that has the capacity to read a standardised digital file (Armbrust et al., 2009).

One of the features of the digital format is the independence of text and content compared with the underlying integrity of the text and medium characteristic of a printed book (Cordón-García et al., 2011a). This feature gives the book a multi-format and multi-device nature that allows reading at any time, anywhere, and from any device with a service accessible 24 hours, 7 days a week. This also allows the synchronisation of reading; one can start to read on one’s work computer, continue in down-time, on the Smartphone while returning home on public transport, and subsequently in a device devoted to the purpose that retains all personal elements such as notes and reading points (Telefónica, 2010). The personalisation of cloud service contents implies outstanding added value, from cloud storage to the advantage of the synchronised consistency of contents by means of multiple devices (Roncaglia, 2011).

On the other hand, cloud technologies allow users to have a large number of books in the cloud, which creates the need for a fast search and access system as a necessary step for developing cloud services. Cloud storage gives greater efficiency for the discovery of contents. Semantic search cloud services should be the right tool for simplifying search processes, including the search for notes and quotes, with the addition of search functions from various mobile devices. In this manner new information can easily be added and noted down, the content discovery processes can be accelerated, and interactivity between data and content is favoured, particularly in scientific literature.

The cloud not only gives readers a framework for the dissemination and synchronisation of reading from various mobile devices, but also provides the opportunity to recommend and discover new titles of interest to the reader. Mobile reading tools based on content filters by means of algorhythms can be used to discover new books, such as books to the taste of readers or new books from their areas of interest. The feedback of the collaborative recommendation service is supported by the gathering and analysis of a large amount of information on the tendencies, activities, and preferences of other users based on similar tastes. Recommendations play an essential part in the services of social networks such as Facebook and in the academic field in management services of social references such as Citeulike and Mendeley (Alonso et al., 2010). In the case of books, recommendations can assess the use of eBooks and their reading within a community. With the help of data that can be provided by technologies based on cloud computing, the recommendation system can be improved and user interaction systems can be compared and calculated: frequency of access, frequency of use, and finally their use for the recommendations system with a view to discovering new titles of interest to the user (She et al., 2011). It is, however, also true that an important part of cloud technologies is the guaranteeing of content security and that of sensitive data stored in the cloud by users and their secrecy.

It also allows the interactive connection of different mobile devices of different users; let us consider research activities and the use of this cloud infrastructure to facilitate cooperation and communication among readers.

On the other hand, the advent of the eBook is giving rise to changes in reference systems, as the pagination changes depending on the device used, the readaptability of the text to the screen, the letter size, etc. Pagination is therefore not consistent as was the case in analogical environments, owing to which the reference systems are modified. However, the cloud recommendation and annotation systems facilitate this task by means of the hypertextual relations to the contents.

A noteworthy aspect of cloud information is social reading, an activity that requires page annotation, highlighting, and marking systems. Social reading has made possible the exchanging of ideas, contributions, and searches that improve and enrich reading capacity (Cordón-García et al., 2011). In this sense cloud computing offers both corporate and individual users a centralised space for the storage and application of resources that can be accessed from any reading device connected to the Internet.

Apple already had its own service, which was initially known as iTools in 2000, subsequently as MobileMe in 2008, and finally as iCloud in 2011 in association with the iTunes store. The service allows users to store data such as music files on remote servers to be downloaded in multiple devices such as iPhones, iPods, iPads, and personal computers operating with Mac OS X or Microsoft Windows. The cloud-based system allows users to store music, photos, applications, documents, favourite browser links, reminders, notes, iBooks, and contacts, and also serves as a platform for Apple e-mail servers and calendars. Each account has 5 GB free storage space; the content purchased from Apple iTunes is stored free of charge.

In December 2010 Google entered the eBook market with three million titles. Together with the volume of titles offered, the most notable feature of this service is its availability for storing contents in the cloud, which makes it easy to access them by means of various devices. This generates a flexible and synchronised reading style.

Two months later Amazon Kindle, which already provided an incipient cloud book service, created the Kindle Cloud Reader. When the account is created Kindle allows the registering of up to five devices associated with it, which may be a computer, a mobile phone, or various reading devices. This system has two objectives; firstly for a book to be read by various family members on different devices, and secondly the synchronising of reading on various devices while retaining personal elements.

Another Amazon Kindle service allocates e-mail accounts to users so they can send content to the device without the need to connect the apparatus to the computer or to have the device at that moment. If we are at work therefore and we see a document that interests us, we can send it to our personal account and when we get home the article is automatically downloaded by Wi-fi or 3G on switching on the device. Even if we have sent it in another format such as PDF it is directly converted to mobi (azw), which is the owner format in which the Kindle device is read.

Amazon has initiated through the Kindle Cloud Reader a service that is associated with its Kindle device, which allows sharing the notes included in the book with other readers as you read. The reader can choose whether these notes should be public or private. Public notes appear in the list of the most outstanding passages (Popular Highlights)⁴ that we can find in the Kindle Store. The system goes further still as when a passage is highlighed that has also been highlighted by other readers, the latter can be contacted by a message that tells the reader that another specific number of people have also highlighted the same text.

In this process of disintermediation between authors and writers, it is once again Amazon that has set in motion a new service called the @author function (@author: Connecting Readers and Writers⁵) from which any reader may ask an author a question while reading his/her book on the Kindle device. A number of authors such as Timothy Ferriss, J. A. Konrath, Deborah Reed, Susan Orlean, John Locke, James Rollins, Robert Kiyosaki, and Steven Johnson have already become involved in the beta stage of the project. The question is sent to the author’s Twitter account and also to the author’s page on Amazon. The procedure is simple and consists of highlighting a passage in the book about which the reader wishes to ask the writer a question (highlights), clicking on it, writing ‘@author’, and thus addressing the matter.

Other cloud services for reading on the web or on-line are the so-called streaming services, which combine cultural dissemination with respect for copyright. The streaming model is habitually used in audio or video distribution over the Internet, and refers to a direct current (without interruption). This type of technology allows the storage in a buffer of what is being viewed or listened to, which means that if the connection is lost one can continue to enjoy the contents previously stored or listen to, read, or view material when one wishes. This type of reading is normally based on a freemium model (advertising + subscription), i.e. free reading in exchange for the presence of unintrusive contextual advertising, although there is also the option of contracting a premium subscription to read without advertising. This is more or less the formula applied to music by Spotify, but in this case orientated towards reading and books. In fact, after the success of Netflix⁶ (a video platform with over 25 million users in the United States and Canada that offers a catalogue of 100 000 films and television series by means of streaming for a monthly subscription of $7.99), Amazon intends to transfer this business model to eBook lending, which will constitute tough competition for libraries and the services offered by the latter. Amazon already covers more than 11 000 public libraries in the United States. It operates a system by which personal notes made by the user in any book lent using the Overdrive platform (the most popular of the USA public library lending system) can be retained in the new copy if it is bought from Amazon.

In addition to streaming services, some of the cloud reading proposals are as follows.

Cloud business models

The arrival of the eBook involves not merely a change in format but also a multiple complex network that brings together business strategies, distribution platforms, and on-line sales, together with aspects of protection against piracy. It has triggered cut-throat competition between companies that were not traditionally part of the book sector, which have been joined by others from the world of technology, bookshops, mobile telephony, and even Internet operators such as Google. Since the invention of the printing press there has surely not been such an upheaval on this scale in the peaceful world of publishing, which up to then had been essentially monopolised by multinationals from Europe and the United States such as Macmillan, Elsevier, Ebsco, and Sweets.

The race began when the technological company Sony presented its Sony Reader, the first electronic ink device, together with the on-line bookshop Reader Store which offers over 200 000 titles. The new apparatus considerably improves legibility, useability, and mobility. The invention of electronic ink, which was developed by Grycom and 3 M, makes on-screen reading comfortable for the user as the screen used is non-reflective and is easily visible against the light. Eye strain is therefore no greater than that involved in reading a printed book. Moreover, this means that the device can contain a long-life lithium battery, since as it needs no light to maintain the image energy expenses are minimal. This is because the latter is only generated when a new page is drawn up, owing to which the duration of the battery is measured in page units. All this means that the apparatus is light (it weighs less than a printed book) and of a convenient size not only for reading but also for mobility; this is one of the most advantageous features for modern life, as we will see throughout the chapter.

Amazon revolutionised the world of publishing when in 1995 it set out to sell printed books on the Internet with a trendsetting market strategy. It collects data from the ISBN of the United States and adds to them the cover, the plot, information on the author, and recommendations of other books based on details provided by clients and which may be of interest to other readers. After the initial success of selling books on the Internet, the company sought diversification through other products such as music or electronics, and ended up becoming the leading on-line sales company.

In short, with its competitive prices, its experience in selling on-line, and its excellent after-sales service, it has a portfolio of loyal clients and currently sells 15% of the books sold all over the world. With the advent of digital reading Amazon joined the market with a successful reader (Kindle) and an eBook sales platform (Kindle Store). Amazon’s market is not, however, that of the Kindle reading device but rather that of the Amazon eBook sale platform, with its catalogue of as many as 700 000 titles.

In principle it proposes a closed system that only allows the reading of the eBooks sold by Amazon. Moreover, Amazon had acquired the company Mobipocket, which had developed a mobi reading format that was destined at the time to become the standardised digital reading format of the future. Ultimately this was not the case as the epub format prevailed. This format had been used for the first time in Sony readers and was subsequently adapted by Google Books. Amazon, however, continued to use the mobi format with a DRM (Digital Rights Management) of its own that it called azw; it did not subsequently allow epub reading although it did facilitate its conversion together with other formats such as from pdf to mobi by sending the file to the Amazon client account. This means that when we switch on the device we download the document in legible form by using Kindle.

With the arrival of the iPad and its own bookshop, Amazon decided to break the absolute dependency between the books it sells and the reading device to allow books purchased from Amazon to also be read on PC, Mac, iPod, iPad, iPhone, telephones, and Android Tablets. Amazon is currently the platform with the largest market share in eBook sales, selling twice as many eBooks as printed books according to the official press release published by the company. In the last three months of 2010, 143 eBooks have been sold for every 100 paperback and hardback books; sales increased 36% since 2009 with a capital increase of US$ 34 000 million.⁷ With its 80% of world eBook sales Amazon aims to be what Apple is to music with iPod and its iTunes store, i.e. it intends to capitalise on a virtually untapped market and to take control of the distribution of digital reading content (Penenberg, 2009).

The arrival of Apple’s iPad, which in nine months from April to December 2010 sold 17 million units, led to significant changes to the eBook market. In contrast to Amazon, who intended to set the publishing houses a maximum selling price for its books of $9.99, the six leading publishers in the United States signed a collaboration agreement with iBooks of Apple, as the latter gave them free rein to establish their final selling price of which Apple receives a 30% commission. This movement had a great effect on Amazon, which up to then had controlled some 90% of the market in the United States.

On the other hand, the largest and most widespread bookshop chain in the United States, Barnes & Noble, which has been in business for almost a century, has also joined the eBook business with its Nook reader and a digital bookshop Nook Books with almost two million titles on sale. The other great United States bookshop chain, Borders, the arch-rival of Barnes & Noble, did not join the digital market and went under. On a market such as that of North America with eBook sales representing 20% of the total market share, competition is tough even for large bookshops. This is a very significant example of the force of this phenomenon.

The other technological giant, Apple, also entered the electronic reading business with an aggressive display of marketing as is its custom with the presentation of the iPad, its electronic Tablet, and the shop associated with the same iBookstore. This was despite the fact that shortly before Steve Jobs had said ‘It doesn’t matter how good or bad Kindle is; the fact is that people no longer read’ (Penenberg, 2009). Those who were aware of the opinion of Apple’s director were sure that when he underestimated a competitor’s product this meant that he would devote all his efforts to that objective. Amazon’s greatest disadvantage compared to Apple is its inexperience in the designing of technological devices. This is the biggest weakness of Kindle, a product essentially of use for reading, and the greatest strength of Apple, which is much more capable of designing outstanding products that people want to buy. Apple can obtain a stronger competitive advantage with an integrating device such as the iPad, which has multiple applications with a Tablet that can not only be used for reading books but also offers videos, music, and surfing the Net and clearly targets a much larger public.

In addition, in 2004 Google launched its Google Books project to give rise to a spate of lawsuits with editors and authors regarding the concatenation of the publishing rights of the millions of books that have been digitalised and made available on-line. This led in 2009 to the creation of a common front with other competitors called the Open Content Alliance, which consisted of Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple; it recently announced its publishing project that is finally to be called the Google eBookstore.⁸ The latter is a virtual bookshop that will offer some 500 000 titles as from its launch during the first half of 2013 and will also serve as a portal on which associated retail outlets can sell their books. Together with the project they are also announcing a Google Reader based on Mirasol. Google’s main commitment is to ‘reading in the cloud’, which refers to being able to read any of its books on any device, whether a Smartphone, Android Tablet, iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, or computers based on Windows, Mac, and Linux. This is in addition to the largest catalogue of electronic books in the world, as it had 3 000 000 digitalised titles on the inception of its Google Books project in 2004, 300 000 of which are subject to copyright. It has recently presented a system that allows reading off-line, in other words the reading of books without the need for a data network to be connected to.

Although the eBook market is insignificant in many Western countries, the opposite is true in a global context and in particular in more advanced societies such as that of the United States, where several million eBooks have already been sold; Kindle has been the best selling article of the whole of the history of trade at Amazon. Up until 2013 clients worldwide purchased a total of 13.7 million Kindle units, which represents a record of 158 sales per minute. However, the latest survey carried out by ChangeWave⁹ in which over 2800 consumers have taken part indicates that Amazon’s Kindle is losing sales with a market share of 47%, while those of the iPad (32%) are increasing by leaps and bounds as the iPad’s stake of the global market has doubled since the last survey was held in August 2010. The remainder of the market includes the Sony Reader (5%) and the Nook of Barnes & Noble (4%). The study also reveals that three out of every four users (75%) who read on the iPad are very satisfied with the device, while in the case of Kindle users this figure drops to 54%. However, more Kindle owners read books on their device (93%) compared with those who do so on the iPad (76%). This is also logical as Kindle is a device used exclusively for this purpose, but if we consider the type of content read by iPad owners the latter read five times more newspapers, magazines, and blogs than their Kindle counterparts.

This market is, however, characterised by its instability, as is shown by the fact that those companies that only put their faith in the device such as iRex or Cool-er, two of the most powerful pioneering companies, have disappeared after operating for merely a year. It must be taken into account that the objective of these companies is not just the sale of reading devices, which in some cases have fallen to a third of their initial prices (such as Kindle or Nook which are being sold for $99), but also the achieving of the loyalty of digital content readers. This also shows that the most competitive companies are those that exploit the vertical integration between reading contents and devices.

Another important aspect to consider is the global nature of this phenomenon. While printed editions are tied to the language and the territoriality of a country or a region, the digital format achieves immediacy and by extension the disassociation of a given geographical or linguistic area. Barnes & Noble have begun to offer 75 000 eBooks in Spanish, albeit currently only for the Spanish-speaking population of the United States. It is, however, feasible that in the near future they will target the Latin American and European market.

Meanwhile, market fragmentation benefits book publishers as in the absence of distribution control by a single company they can establish their own conditions as occurred in February 2010. At that time Amazon intended to establish a maximum retail price of $9.99 and impose it on publishing houses. In response several of them, including Macmillan (which is the sixth largest publishing company in the world and publishes some of the top bestsellers such as those of Dan Brown), threw themselves into the arms of Apple. This gave rise to an angry reaction from Amazon, which removed the books of these publishing houses from its catalogue, although it ultimately had to accept the conditions established by the publishing house and set a maximum price of $14.99 (Cordón-García et al., 2010). This situation was, however, reported by the European Commission in December 2011 as it considered that Apple and the five top publishing houses had established an agreement contrary to free competition. Furthermore, they are currently being investigated by the U.S. Justice Department.¹⁰

On the other hand the lucrative educational market, particularly that pertaining to universities, has yet to be exploited. Specific projects have been developed with business models based on the sale of contents to the individual user, together with sale by use experiences. These projects include those of NetLibrary, Safari, Ebrary, and Questia. However, the scientific market is still being capitalised on by the multinational distributors that were already operating with the established market of e-magazines (Ebsco, Sweets, Elsevier, Routledge, etc.), to which eBooks are being included from the same platforms as the magazines. In most cases this is being done with access by means of identification on the Intranet and without DRM; it is what Armstrong called the serialisation of eBooks (Armstrong et al., 2009).

Cloud user rights

There is no doubt that the cloud is highly beneficial to end-users insofar as the ubiquity and availability of information is concerned, but the security, privacy, and ethics of information by third parties should not be neglected. These companies ensure data security and inviolability by means of a legal concept known as ‘Reliable Computing’, with access models that are borderline regarding the fundamental rights of any citizen within a democratic system. Some United States associations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation or Internet Archive have developed a decalogue known as the Social Network Users’ Bill of Rights¹¹ that specifically addresses the rights of eBook users (Celaya and Vazquez, 2010).

Dodoce.com proposes the following twelve rights of digital book readers (Celaya and Vazquez, 2010):

Conclusion

Market turbulence generates uncertainty and shakes consumer and business confidence, lowering the value of financial assets. History tells us, however, that changes to the economic climate also offer unique opportunities for those who are capable of looking beyond short-term difficulties to seek new projects. Organisations may choose to stagnate or to prepare for success and leadership roles. If they choose the latter option, returns from hard-fought cost-cutting battles may turn into improvements in infrastructure, more rational integration processes, and essential changes in market presence or positioning to fill new niches or those freed by competitors. In this context new cloud business models are operating outside the market of digital contents. Cloud computing is nowadays one of the most important technological initiatives of business computing. It is changing the way in which businesses access services on the Internet and also the speed and flexibility of business without increasing costs.

As for the applications, these will essentially allow reading and writing on the Internet, and the creating of contents and also sharing them, labelling them, assessing them, disseminating them, mixing them, remixing them, and geolocating them. A large proportion of these applications are in the cloud and will depend more on communications than on computer capacity. These applications include characteristics or uses that give them their social features, such as the possibility of making assessments, sharing contents in applications and social networks, making comments, and receiving recommendations based on the experiences and interactions of other users, the objective of which is conversation or interaction with and between users.

Reading in the cloud is the reading of eBooks independently of the device or format, provided that they are stored on the Internet. The independence of the text as far as its content is concerned gives it a multi-format and multi-device nature that permits reading at any time, in any place, and from any device. It also makes the synchronising of reading possible; one can start to read on a computer at work, continue on a Smartphone, and subsequently do so on a device designed for the purpose, retaining all personal elements such as notes, underlinings, and reading points.

In addition to the development of mobile technologies with an increased useability capacity, reading in the cloud is providing a range of added value services that are playing a vital part in the growth and transformation of the publishing industry in a drift towards all things digital. Although these development models facilitate the availability, access, and ubiquity of information, they are in a no-man’s-land concerning fundamental rights such as data secrecy and security, to which close attention will need to be paid to ensure they are not violated.