Did the iPad start a publishing revolution yesterday or not? Wait and see

For Apple and Steve Jobs, yesterday might have been a game-changing day for Apple and -by extension- the entire media world.  I’m not sure the world shook in the way that he had hoped, but its possible that in the future we may look back on yesterday as a bigger day than how we view it was today.  Such is often the nature of revolutions.

Since very few people have had an iPad in their hands yet, the talk of its pros and cons seems to me premature.  As with previous devices, it will be more and also less than the hype of its first debut.  As people begin to use it, as developers push the boundries of its capabilities, it will mature and improve.  It was wholly unrealistic to presume that Apple (or any other company launching a new product) would make the technological or political leaps necessary to create the “supreme device” that will replace all existing technology.

A lot of people have made points about the iPad missing this or that technology.  Apple will almost certainly release an iPad 2.0 sometime in early 2011, dropping its price points and adding functionality — both as the underlying (interestingly not OLED display, which has been falsely reported) display technology becomes cheaper and based on, in some small ways, customer demand for functionality.  In this regards, think of copy & paste on the iPhone. As for some software gaps, such as lack of Adobe Flash support, while some have made the point that this is because of the iPhone OS,  I think these are driven by a desire to lock people into apps and inhibit browser-based free, or possibly paid, web-based services. It is in Apple’s interest to lock people into proprietary software/apps, which are written specifically for their device.

From a standards perspective, the iPad could be both a good or bad thing.  Again it is too soon to tell, but very initial reactions are worrying.  That the iPad will support .epub as a file format is good on its face.  However, it is very likely that the iPad will contain Apple-specific DRM, since there isn’t at the moment an industry standard.  Getting content into (and out of, for those who want to move away from the iPad) that DRM will be the crucial question.  As far as I am aware, Apple has been publicly silent on that question.  I expect that some of the publishes who agreed to content deals likely discussed this in detail, but those conversatins were likely limited to a very small group of executives all bound by harsh NDAs.  (I note that McGraw Hill was allegedly dropped from the announcement because of comments made by its CEO Tuesday on MSNBC.)

Also on the standards front, there was an excellent interview last night on the NPR news show Marketplace, during which author Josh Bernoff, also of Forrester Research, made the point that the internet was splintering into a variety of device specific applications.  The move toward applications in the past two years might reasonably be cause for concern.  It definitely adds to cost for content producers to create multiple contents for multiple platforms. I can’t say that I completely agree with his assessment, however.  The fact that there are open platforms available in the market place and that competition is forcing developers to open up their systems, notably the Google Android phone OS as well as the introduction of the Amazon Kindle Development Kit last week.

What is most interesting about this new product is its potential.  No one could have predicted three years ago the breadth and depth of the applications that have been developed for the iPhone.  Unleashing that creativity on the space of ebooks will very likely prove to be a boon for our community.  Specifically, this could provide publishers with an opportunity to expand the functionality of the ebook.

Often, new technology is at first used to replicate the functionality of the old technology.  In the case of books, I’m referring to the technology of paper. We are only now beginning to see people begin to take advantage of the new digital technology’s possibilities.    Perhaps the launch of Amazon’s new development kit and the technology platform of the iPad will spur innovative thinking about how to use ebooks and enhancing the functionality of digital content’s ability to also be an interactive medium.  The one element of the presentation yesterday that really caught my eye in this regard is the new user interface for reading the New York Times. This seemed the most innovative application of the iPad.  Hopefully in the coming months and years we will see a lot more of that experimentation, user interface design and multi-media intergration.

If that takes place than yesterday might have been a big day in the development of ebooks and information distribution.  If not, the jokes about the name will be all that we’ll recall about this new reader.