02.08.10
Tim Bajarin writing in PCMag.com
Apple'
s new tablet may revolutionize the publishing industry, much to the benefit and detriment of big houses.Apple review, Apple commentary, Apple news... Everything AppleThe publishing industry was drooling over the Apple iPad long before the product was actually announced. What it saw in the rumored device was the potential for a powerful delivery platform for a new generation of books, magazines, and newspapers. Publishers hoped the color screen, speedy processor, and intuitive interface would help them innovate content and create new business models.
Now that the iPad is a reality, the publishing industry has begun to gear up to create publications that integrate images, video, and audio into text, dramatically enhancing the storytelling process. In this sense, the iPad is a blessing. It gives publishers a new palette to work with, and, if they're smart, new methods for charging directly for that content. They could, for example, offer new subscription models or position individual publications as standalone apps.
But here lies the curse of the publishing industry. The iPad could give rise to a new creative self-publishing crowd that could, in turn, become competition for the established publishing industry. Today's creative writers could bypass the industry altogether. The opportunity is already there to a degree, via a number of self-publishing programs, but Apple's iBookstore would give them a power partner with a unique technology and powerful distribution.
To get a perspective on how such a shift might play out, revisit the launch of Apple's iPhone SDK. I was at the event on Apple's campus when the company announced the release of the SDK. I watched as seven or eight companies took the stage to showcase programs they had created for the iPhone, after having access to the SDK for just two week. There were representatives of the medical, productivity, and gaming industries present. And while the medical and productivity examples were interesting, it was the game demos that were the real stars of the show.
The interesting thing about the game demos is that they came from established designers. A funny thing happened once the actual SDK was released to the broader development community: small houses and individual programmers delivered the first round of best selling games before the big companies got their products to market. Tap Tap Revenge is one of the best examples of this phenomenon. It's still one of the best selling games in the App Store. Small publishers really took advantage of Apple's SDK, the App Store, and distribution engine.
Read the rest of Tim Bajarin's story at PCMag.com.
2 comments:
Tim Bajarin’s PC Mag article, “Apple’s iPad: A blessing and Curse for Publishing”, is spot on: certainly for non-fiction “publishing”.
As you probably know, the iPad (in its present early form) is really a blown-up version of the iPod-touch, and with many features from the iPhone.
Well over 100,000 of those features (applications) have come from, brilliant (mostly young) IT innovators. And they’re already earning 70% of the click-through income from customer downloads.
Just as iTunes has enabled musical artists to bypass the big companies (Bono was on the stage with Jobs to launch the original iPhone, and U2 immediately kicked in with 200 previously-unpublished tracks).
Keep up the flow, lad.
And if you know of a good venture capital company to invest in “the new publishing revolution”, send him or her my way.
Or perhaps I should accept Apple’s invite to their 2010 World Educational Summit in Prague in April:-)
Gordon Dryden
The writer of the article is right is some of his later comments but makes a major mistake early on when he suggests that publishers were gagging for the iPad because of the opportunities for enhanced content. No, they were keen to see it as counterweight to the market power of Amazon. And that's exactly what happened with the big stoush between Amazon and a large publisher. It is only because Apple can negotiated a better deal for the publisher that the publisher was in a position to take Amazon on over it's e-books prices. Other than that I think publishers are probably scared of the "opportunities".
It is certainly valid to suggest that the non-fiction publishers will benefit from the opportunity for enhanced content, BUT, that takes time and money to develop so unless sales increase it may cost more for an ebook version than the paper. And what of those education publishers reliant on new editions every year ot two to extend the life of a text? Some are already selling just chapters and I expect a subscription model will be established as a significant online sales model.
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