“There are electronic reading devices in existence already, such as Sony’s e-Reader and Amazon’s Kindle. But, publishers hope the unquestioned design talents of Apple will ensure that its latest product is the vehicle that enables them to transform their business models,” Burrell reports. “After all, the iPod has converted millions to the idea of paying to download songs and, to a degree, has revived the music industry, becoming the world’s largest music retailer in the process. The iPhone has created a culture of acquiring apps for ‘just about anything,’ many of them paid for.”
Burrell reports, “Newspaper content is already being widely consumed on smart mobile phones but mostly for free. With a touch screen of 10-11 inches, the Apple tablet presents publishers of all kinds with the opportunity to create an entirely new reader experience, one that consumers might be persuaded to pay for.”
“Jobs and his team are in talks with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, the New York Times Co. and magazine publishers such as Conde Nast and television networks including CBS and Disney,” Burrell reports. “The New York Times this week announced that it would be demanding payment for access to its website and industry observers say that the newspaper publisher is discussing with Apple whether it could begin charging for news through iTunes.”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
Great news but no webcam, no sale. I will not settle for watered-down 1st gen products ever again after the 1st-gen iPhone fiasco which dropped $200 in 2 months and lacked GPS and 3G to give it room to grow. If I can’t video chat with loved ones out of the box, I’ll wait for Act 2 no matter how much it kills me!
My opinion,in my opinion the tablet from apple could be a on-the-moment publishing and reading device with computer capabilities that can bring things in a new way that journalists work today or writers wrote a book and that its a good feature for such device,its only my opinion.
Can it save publishing? No, but it can help.
Only content (that is accurate) can ultimately save it.
and we were all up in arms, when the murdochs started sueing the Australian Broadcast Corp because it handed out free news. Trying to tell us that taxpayers ought to have funds given to them for more quality news and plus that we have to pay on top on what we already pay as tax payers.
Publishing doesn’t need saving! It’s not going anywhere, it’s changing, evolving into digital, the problem is that the same “older” people who run newspapers, etc, don’t know how to or are unwilling to change. If this iPad/iTablet/iSlate is true, then I expect the device to be a reader, with a bit of computer power, it doesn’t have to do everything. Thats what the laptop or desktop is for, sure the iPhone does do a lot but at the end of the day it doesn’t do everything… what Apple is doing is creating a system to have less devices, & have everything easy to use and to talk to. This new device will change publishing in one way, the content/design will stay the same, pretty much, the delivering will be digital and you will have to pay! Content should not & never be free! If ya think it does, then why don’t ya go tell ya boss ya will work for free!
nuff said.
The next generation of adults has grown up on Video games, DVR’s, and YouTube… with a need for instant gratification and the ability to sit back, watch and enjoy. I’ll be among the first in line to buy an iTablet, but I don’t think it or anything else will “save publishing”. Reading takes too much effort to today’s kids. It’s analagous to saying that Gold’s Gym is coming out with a new type of treadmill/stairclimber/bike that will get American’s back into shape… it’s just not about the device.
I think the absolute KEY thing Apple has — that no one else does — is a huge list (I believe Jobs said 100 million?) of buyers WITH credit card numbers (ie, iTunes accounts).
There’s a saying among entrepreneurs: “You can take away my entire business, but if I still have my customer list, I’ll be back in no time.”
That LIST is why the Tablet can gain traction. It’s why publishers will do the work to port their content, it’s why that content will GO somewhere… Unlike, say, with the JooJoo.
As long as Apple has this great relationship with a huge number of media buyers (through iTunes), they have a platform that can’t easily be replicated.
My only concern is that the tablet will be too expensive to encourage massive adoption, or will require a second cellular bill, UG.
The initial price will drop over time, hopefully not as quick as the original iPhone. Early adopters will buy the device anyway and the masses will come in after the price drop.
@iMaki:
Have you always had this problem?
Strictly speaking, to “save publishing” means to allow it to continue functioning as it has in the past. From this perspective, nobody and nothing can save publishing. Publishing must change, which means that publishing as we know it must die.
Another cellular bill?
I predict tethering. Through ATT or Verizon. Possibly bandwidth limits though.
I have high hopes for the Apple tablet. I’ve been holding off buying an ereader because of the pdf issue. I’m not sure if I can justify $1000 for this though. I have a laptop, desktop and iphone. I just need something to replace books and paper that is portable. My hope is that they have a less expensive version that is adequate as an e reader.
If I can just get a stable iMovie that produces first quality, deinterlaced results for both the web AND for DVD (dammit Steve, we DO need DVDs) I’ll make my own media and it will be better than the state-controlled NYT!
A cool device alone is not enough. Steve Jobs learned that with the Mac. When Apple created the iPod and later, the iPhone, The company built protective competitive barrirers with iTunes, the iTunes and App Stores, relationships with music and other content suppliers, legions of app developers and as @Dmitri so correctly stated above, consumers and their credit cards by the millions.
For perhaps a couple of years, Apple has been talking with publishers of newspapers, magazines, books and textbooks. I have a hunch too that because of Steve’s illness, Apple has also talked extensively with the huge medical device industry too. The potential is mind-boggling.
Just one example: education, an area that has always mattered to Steve Jobs. How many kids, teens and adults are enrolled in a primary, secondary or collegiate system? Millions. If you’re a parent, how much do you pay for textbooks each year? Intead of an out-of-date text, the content can be streamed. Illustrations can be transformed into interactive, dynamic animations.
And that’s just one example.
Guttenberg, thanks for 600 years of service to humanity. You can rest now. Steve Jobs will take the baton the next step. Fast-forward 10, 20 years from now and imagine what will be. I envision nothing less than a new age.
We are lucky to be living in exciting times.
Were you incapable of reading the specs for the 1G iPhone? Did someone hold a gun to your head and force you to buy a phone that had NONE OF THE FEATURES YOU WANTED?
Are you some sort of Zombie consumer of Apple products?
Or just a drooling moron?
In our house, my son has a big new iMac and one active iPod touch. My wife has an old Titanium of mine. I have a MacBook Pro, three Mac desktops and an iPhone.
My son won’t care for a tablet; not with that iMac and XBox to play with.
But my wife is going to love it, an iSlate that is. She’ll love reading books, magazines and newspaper articles. She’ll love surfing fashion, home decorating and food sites. She’ll love banking, getting coupons and checking out the latest local super store sales.
She’ll love being able to email her friends while she is catching up on her daily favorites, Oprah, Ellen and Dr. Phil or her seasonal reality shows, Dancing with the Stars, Big Brother, The Bachelor, Survivor and The Amazing Race.
As for me, like my son, I won’t care either because I have my babies for business, research and programming. And besides my wife goes to bed much earlier than me.
So as long as I can pry the new iSlate from her sleeping hands, I figure I really won’t need one in any case. That is, until she starts taking it on her business trips and I am stuck watching the big screen and its dumb-downed new casts.
@brian
you can use a cheapass PC to do all of those things….and schools have been for YEARS. There is no messainistic kudos here for doing something that schools already do (you obviously have been out of school for a while or went to a very ‘old school’ school). Except most schools couldn’t afford to give their students a $1000 tablet and most parents probably wouldn’t/couldn’t pay for such a device either since the risk of breakage, theft or otherwise is quite high, particularly for teenage boys.
@Brain
As for comparing Jobs with Gutenberg, you are truly misguided. Gutenberg is in the top five most important people ever to exist. Jobs is a marketing whiz who got lucky to find an engineering genuis (Woz) to latch on to and carry him forth (much like the countless others since then who have similarly fulfilled his ‘visions’. Tell me one thing that Jobs himself invented and made? And not his team of immensly skilled engineers…). An iPhone or an iTablet will NEVER be comparable to Gutenberg’s movable type; the lack of uniqueness and ubiquity should show you that for a start. And secondly each is just the current expression of work that can be traced back to Turing, Von Neumann and others with knowledge transmitted via the medium of the printed work (gutenberg strikes again). Copying and improvement (the japanese way) is all well and good, but something truly unique from Apple…well that credit goes to Woz. Even the iPhone wasn’t truly unqiue. Gesture control is nothing new or remarkable. The ooh-ahh factor tends to be highest amongst naive and those lacking effective consideration.
@Brulek
Woz wouldn’t agree with you. Neither would anybody who has studied Apple.
@ iMaki
Wow, you are THE idiot! Next time, read about the device BEFORE you buy it!
Hey, TT – congrats!
And I agree with your comment, but worry that too many people can’t see facts when they see them.
I’ve avoided jumping on any of the more political threads, but these days almost every thread goes there so here’s my say. And this isn’t directed at you, TowerTone. I just had time on my hands and needed to vent a little.
There shouldn’t be “sides.” That’s simplistic thinking. The fact is the the mind automatically will do that, though, as a mechanism for saving time for other tasks.
Imagine if every morning, your mind tried to put together every possible combination of clothes you own before choosing what to wear. Imagine how long that would take. Most people would literally have hundreds of thousands of possible combinations. My wife would have millions, but I digress. Then, before driving to work, what if you looked at a map each morning at all the possible routes you could take, every side street, alley, freeway, before choosing which route to go to work. What a waste of time. No, the mind simply takes the easiest paths so we don’t have to do that work over and over and over.
So take any issue. The brain wants to do the same thing. It’s easy to fit problems into one’s ideology and choose “A” or “B” without actually thinking.
How it should work: See an issue. Propose a number of solutions based in part on what works elsewhere – making adjustments to fix what doesn’t work there – and in part on creative solutions, things no one else has tried. Select the solution that the majority of authorities and/or voters agree would be most effective – regardless of ideology. Implement it and measure its efficacy over time. If it doesn’t work in its allotted time, try the next thing. It’s just common sense, but too many people throw common sense, and even facts, out the window in favor of fighting for their ideology.
Anyone one who sees every issue as black or white, who hears the word “tax” and automatically flinches and assumes it’s bad, or, conversely, hears the word “capitalism” and instantly wants to to hide their head in Upton Sinclair, then that person needs to work at opening the mind, doing some intentional reading AND listening, and try actively thinking for themselves.
For an excellent treatise on the workings of the human mind, read “I Am Right; You Are Wrong: From This to the New Renaissance: From Rock Logic to Water Logic” by Edward de Bono. I also recommend, about once per year here, “Crimes Against Logic: Exposing the Bogus Arguments of Politicians, Priests, Journalists, and Other Serial Offenders” by Jamie Whyte.
Thanks, everybody. Have a great weekend.
/screed
If any one can “save” the publishing industry it will be Apple. Obviously the cost to the consumer will be the most critical piece of the puzzle. Personally, I think most newspapers biggest problem is their extreme populist bias. Other than the WSJ, I can think of 0 newspapers that report the news.
@mdmac
every interview I’ve seen of Woz, when he talks about designing and building the first apple computer he always says I. Not we or Steve and me, but I. I did, I did…And so it seems, he did. Jobs doesn’t have the electrical engineering/ mathematical background. He sold the stuff and helped with assembly and maybe pushed Woz in certain directions, but Woz did the inventing and the hard work.
Jobs has always seemed to me to follow, nay champion, the technology production adage: always be the dumbest guy in the room. He may know how to read the market and predict what will work, but he doesn’t do the engineering. It’s easy to tell somebody to do something, its usually MUCH harder doing it youself.
Say what you will about Gates, but he too was a far, far, far more capable hacker than Jobs.
It’s all about advertising. The tablet will give portable consumers the ability to read content and have room for color, clickable, ads. If they collect subscription money as well, then so much the better.
NOW we will see of Photojournalism in the style of The Daily Profit will actually become popular.
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Apple must be working on a content management system for tablet publishers. It will be interesting to see how it compares to the existing CMS software.