Anyone's Guess

17 January 2010

I love the frankly ridiculous level of authoritative punditry you get before an Apple announcement. It seems to permeate the internet in its entirety, like a snowstorm of bullshit covering practically every website you can find in a dirty sludge of rumour and conjecture.

What we know for sure is coming is… actually, nothing. Their has been no solid facts leak out; in fact, all that there has been is lots of completely contradictory musings. What we all think is coming is some form of tablet computer that will completely revolutionise the world somehow, just like all those other tablet computers did a few years back.

Of course, Apple have a distinct knack of taking something that already exists, sprinkling pixel dust on it and making us all want one and no doubt they’re about to do it again. For the record, my money is on what is essentially a beefed up iPhone with a bigger screen and processor. Same OS as the iPhone, same app-store, even the same apps (once recompiled to work on both bigger and smaller screens) – why on earth would they launch another computer platform when they already have two already?

So, taking that as the platform what the hell are we going to do with it? It’s surly not going to replace the iPhone as it’s going to be too big, so presumably Apple expect you to have an iTablet as well so hence (watch the logic here people) it’s not going to be focused on the core iPhone areas of voice, SMS and music.

The obvious areas that would work better with a bigger screen are video and browsing, and of course when we say browsing we really mean reading; websites, email and text.

Yes, it’s Kindle Time. Like Miller Time but in libraries.

Going back to the aforementioned conjecture in the first paragraph and you’ll find that it’s practically impossible to find someone writing about the iTablet/iSlate/iPad/iBuyWhatEverTheySell without mentioning the apparent success of the Kindle and the burgeoning eBook market. That the eBook market is burgeoning isn’t really in doubt – it’s a niche, but a growing niche. However, exactly how well the Kindle is doing is a bit more of an unknown – sure Amazon keep saying it’s doing great and breaking sales records blah blah blah but they haven’t as yet released any actual figures on how many they’ve shipped. You’d kind of want to tell people that if it was a good number, wouldn’t you?

That being said, I’d be surprised if Apple didn’t get into the eBook market, even if they don’t announce a damn tablet – on the iPhone, done in the right way, it could really work. I used to be a bit sceptical of the idea of reading a whole book on an LCD screen until two things happened: 1) I realised that I stare at a screen, reading text pretty much every minute of every day without any noticeable effects (we’ll ignore the fact that last time I got my eyes tested I was even more short sighted then before. Totally unrelated. Totally.) which lead me to 2) I actually had a stab at it and read a book, on my laptop.

It was this book which fortunately turned out to be pretty good and I finished it off in a couple of days whilst on holiday. I wasn’t even using any fancy reader software, just Preview.app and a lot of scrolling; it just worked and felt completely natural. While eInk* is apparently The Future it seems pretty pointless at the moment – sure, the viewing angles are great but it’s just so old school. It feels like what the future looked like when we were all using Palm Pilots.

So, the screen isn’t a problem (big or small, especially when you factor in that the iPhone will surly get a higher-res screen sometime soon) and they have the perfect distribution model in iTunes means that it’s a bit of a no brainer – my only question is what the pricing will be like.

Of course, we’ve now (in our fantasy land of obviousness) got an eBook reader with a hi-res colour screen which means we also (apparently) get… drum roll… eMagazines! eMagazines** of course (what, you mean you don’t already know what a non-existent, made up product is?) is a combination of a traditional magazine with articles and the like, spruced up by what we used to call multimedia; video, animation and the like.

This all sounds lovely of course – I read a couple of magazines myself, mostly for the design and longer features, and the idea of bringing in video and other such elements is very appealing. However, what I don’t get is how this is magically supposed to save the magazine publishing industry?

I can only see two options in how they’ll work – either a) they’re going to mirror physical magazines, and hence be locked into a similar monthly/weekly release structure that fundamentally doesn’t work when we have this internet thing or b) they’ll be on a rolling update cycle which means they’re just… a website. And a website that you have to pay to access.

Personally I’d like either one of these options to work and become popular, as the magazine as an art form is one I like and a digital equivalent could be really interesting, but I’m just not sure either of these options will. In fact, I think in a way it’s worse then that – the magazine itself may be killed off by the rise of decent tablet computers.

It used to be that magazines were read firstly for news in a specific niche, and then features and other longer content. Now, all of that news content has fled off to the free waters of the internet and is doing better then ever leaving features and articles having to keep everything afloat, and that just doesn’t work. Sure, again there are niches for this kind of content but in the main you’re not going to be able support decent, long, in-depth journalism solely on decent, long, in-depth journalism. And tablets are just going to make access to that whole free internet thing even easier:

Everywhere a magazine can go, the internet can go as well.

* As an aside, there seems to be no standardisation on the exact formatting of ‘e’ prefixed words – email is email, but eBooks seem to either be eBooks or e-books, and eInk has the same dash-or-capital dilemma. I’m not a dash fan myself – seems superfluous…

** Although what on earth are you supposed to do at the start of sentences?

David Emery Online

Anyone's Guess

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