This excellent deconstruction of TV news, via comedian/writer Charlie Brooker, has been circulating for the past few days, but there’s a good chance you haven’t seen it since it never mentions the word “Apple,” “tablet” or “iPad.” If that’s the case, you should watch it now.
Interesting footnote in AT&T’s earnings this morning: The carrier everyone loves to hate has quietly become the carrier of choice for e-book readers from Amazon, Sony and Barnes & Noble. They generated a million new subscriptions last quarter, and now the iPad will bring more.
If you’re reading this story shortly before the launch of Apple’s tablet, there’s a very good chance you’re on Twitter as well. Can the service, which continues to be balky under normal conditions, hold up under a deluge of chatter?
Look who has learned one of the most important lessons of the music industry’s love-hate relationship with iTunes: Apple. It shows in Steve Jobs’s approach to book publishers, which is designed to assuage their fear that e-books will cannibalize their old business.
I got a great glimpse of the future of magazines last week. It’s the March issue of Wired, transformed into a digital edition that takes full advantage of the Apple tablet we’re going to see on Wednesday. But you’re not going to be able to buy a tabletized Wired for some time: Condé Nast, like most would-be Apple media partners, simply doesn’t know that much about the device yet.
A few thousand copies of GQ magazine in iPhone form won’t turn Condé Nast around. But it’s a start, and it’s a good bet that the company’s first Apple tablet apps will look awfully similar.
The paper of record has problems, but it still has plenty of resources. Does the New York Times really need 12 months to figure out an online billing system?
Amazon is doubling the royalty rate it pays small e-book authors and publishers–if they promise to keep the prices of their digital texts below the price of physical books. The goals here are obvious: Push prices down and try to keep business away from a growing list of rivals.
Here’s someone else you won’t see onstage with Steve Jobs next week: Anyone from Time Inc. With good reason: The magazine company doesn’t have any tablet-ready stuff to show off yet. Tease that out a bit and you can tell the story of most media companies. They’re excited to start taking advantage of the tablet–as soon as they find out what it is, exactly.
Apple is set to show off a shiny new device, which means the company needs shiny new media products to show off, too. Like what? Some educated guesses: Expect stuff from Disney and the New York Times, but not from the music labels.
Has the New York Times finally started charging people to read its news online? Not yet. But people who aren’t the New York Times are using the paper’s name and charging iPhone users to read the paper’s stuff–with Apple’s blessing. What gives?
Here’s another e-reader clamoring for attention in a Consumer Electronics Show full of e-readers: The Skiff Reader, produced by a company funded by publisher Hearst Corp. and supported by Sprint. But in many ways, the Skiff Reader’s specs are beside the point, because the real point of its parent company isn’t to produce e-reader devices at all–it wants to create a publishing and distribution platform. Does this sound familiar? And does it sound like something another publisher might want to buy?
RealNetworks figures you’re going to want to move your entertainment off the Web and onto whatever device you want, whenever you want. So do a lot of competitors.
The Apple tablet is threatening to approach Yeti status, but here’s an indication it will turn out to be very real, indeed: The company has told some of its key developers to prepare versions of their iPhone apps that will work on a device with a larger screen, in time for an event next month. Sound like a tablet to you?
Since we’ve spent the past few months dreaming about what a magazine might look like on a tablet from the future, why not do a little dreaming about the tablet itself?
Sound good? Then take a gander at the XO-3, a superlight, supercheap tablet that the people from One Laptop Per Child think they’d like to have available in 2012.
Peter Kafka has been covering media and technology since 1997, when he joined the staff of Forbes magazine. Most recently, he has been the managing editor of the tech and media Web site, Silicon Alley Insider. Read more »
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