In accordance with all the hype, earlier today I sat at my desk, anxiously clutching my empty wallet in anticipation of the revealing of the great and powerful Apple tablet.
Feverishly updating a Twitter keyword search (which received no less than 200 new tweets every 5 seconds) and cursing whenever I lost audio from the livestream, I developed a somewhat comical system of refreshing no less than three simultaneous liveblogs of the event while retweeting ridiculous quotes like:
Geek.
Changing the publishing game?
Nevertheless, I was really interested to see how the e-reader capabilities of the iPad stood up to the Kindle and Skiff. What were the implications for the dwindling print publishing industry and how could this type of device help monetize digital content?
Off the top of my head:
- Publication-specific apps similar to the one created for the New York Times. The idea is to combine the best of print and the web by allowing readers to save stories and view integrated video.
- The basic online pay-to-read model being pushed by News Corp’s Rupert Murdoch.
- iBooks. If they follow the iTunes model, you should be able to subscribe to a single publication and/or purchase available articles/stories from multiple publications as you see fit. For instance, I’d like to be able to purchase (really cheaply) the fashion spread from the latest issue of Numero as well as the feature article from last month’s issue of Dynamic Graphics to create my own custom magazine.
I’m not sure it’s going to “save” so-called old media, but portable-izing digital content is certainly a step in the right direction.
Did you watch the presentation? What did you think?
