15/11/09 3:16

Publishing Apple changed the music and the cellphone industry. Can they do the same with publishing?

by Josep M. Ganyet

Posted in Apple, Interface, Internet, Usability | 6 Comments » Tweet This Post

The digitizing of the information changes the rules to everything. Production, storage and distribution costs tend to zero, consumers become also producers and as a result new industries appear that render well established ones obsolete in no time.

One example is the traditional publishing industry with a business model partly based on advertising and partly on subscription, a model that’s sustainable when trucks distribute tons of paper but obsolete when the net distributes terabytes of data.

On such an environment, advertisers flee to a much more interactive and responsive medium, namely the web, and subscriptions are no match for the free high quality content available online.

Who would still post an ad to a local newspaper when you have Craigslist.org or eBay.com? Or, who would pay for gadget reviews on the NYT when you have Engadget.com?

The result: many magazines and newspapers have closed their physical editions and have gone online if not closed at all.

Although Rupert Murdoch is trying to reverse this trend by charging for online access, I think the point is made.

With all this in mind the efforts to bring ebook readers to the market by companies such as Amazon (Kindle), Barnes&Noble (Nook) an Sony (Reader), just to mention a few, make perfect sense in a time of publishing crisis (crisis meaning change, not doom).

Even the endless rumors about Apple developing the mother-of-all-tablet-or-ebook-readers make more sense than ever (this is a bold statement talking about a company that has embedded rumors in their marketing DNA).

Can Apple do the same as they did in the music and the cellphone industries? Via cultofmac.com I stumble on a presentation by Freek Bijl, a Dutch internet strategist, that has put together a simple and yet enlightening presentation about the subject.

Bijl’s states that if Apple is to reinvent the publishing business they need to cover three basic needs:

• Distribution of content
• Business model where publishers can charge for content
• Usability so people can use the reading device as a newspaper or a book

So far, Apple has turned iTunes into an excellent platform for music and application distribution, it has a solid rock business model for both and the iPod and the iPhone have the best interfaces of their kind.

I can’t think of any reason why they wouldn’t want to extend this model to the publishing industry with content distribution via iTunes, micro-payments as in the iPhone App Store and a reading device that matches the iPod and iPhone usability standards.

I’m sure that the whole publishing industry (and that includes Murdoch) are eager to hear Steve Jobs’ next “one more thing”. Even more than the rest of us.

Here’s Freek Bilj’s presentation:

Please leave your comment if you are not a spambot. Trackback URL: Apple changed the music and the cellphone industry. Can they do the same with publishing?.