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Wednesday will be a big day for tech fans -- and could be a big day for the publishing industry as well. After lots of fanfare and speculation, Apple will announce a new portable device that will resemble an electronic tablet -- a perfect device, many believe, for electronic publishing. If true, it would be an important aid to the publishing world's move to start charging for content, as The New York Times has announced it will do next year.
So you might want to check the news Wednesday, and follow-up installments, to see what this gadget, and others like the Kindle and Nook, might mean to the publishing world.
A disclosure: I'm a Mac fan and optimistic that its demonstrated track record for exciting innovation could give a boost to efforts to charge for online content. This will be an evolution; change will not come easily or quickly -- but it must come for the viability of this crucial industry.
Here's an insightful piece in Macworld. Note the author's distinction between "commodity news" -- the routine stuff that every news outlet has, and nobody can really charge for -- and enterprise, investigative and in-depth pieces, such as the news feature and narrative forms we're studying in this class.
Here's another take, from The New York Times, making many of the same points, but also adding the cautionary note that Apple would be an intermediary that publishers might want to avoid. The rub: Apple will want its slice of the profits, and might extract too high a cost. Everything at this point, once again, is speculative.
Stay tuned.
Can you see yourself subscribing to a publication -- or buying piecemeal editorial content -- via a service such as iTunes? Does this seem promising to you?
After watching Apple's promotional video for the iPad, I wanted to buy one. But then we discussed the product (and the video) in one of my other classes, and I realized that with the exception of the iBookstore, it doesn't really have any new features beyond what Apple already offers with its other products. The iPad is like an iPod on steroids that doesn't fit into your pocket. It is like a laptop that doesn't fold to protect the screen and keyboard, and without the various inputs like a CD or USB drive.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, one thing that was brought up in this class was comparing it to Amazon's Kindle when it comes to reading books (or newspapers) on the screen. We all know that there is a difference between reading a piece of paper and a document on a computer -- our eyes react differently to the ink-on-paper vs. the backlit computer screen. The iPad will be backlit LCD screen, so reading a newspaper via iPad doesn't sound too appealing to me.
Sorry that the technical side of me slipped out for a second there. Bottom line: Especailly with your point about Apple wanting to take a cut of the profit from NYT, I don't think it will end up benefiting the newspaper a whole lot in the long run... at least because the first generation of product itself has a few potential problems that will not be worth it.