Earlier this week I attended the ‘Publishing Business Conference & Expo’ in New York, including the ‘TH(ink) E-Readers 2010 Summit.’ This conference addressed many publishing issues and concerns including the imminent threat of change. As conference organizer Noelle Skodzinski put it in her welcome letter: "The ‘perfect storm’ (she refers to the combination of the economic recession and the technology driven changes in the publishing landscape), as many have called it, has forced the industry to a tipping point…" As you might have guessed, an important part of the show was dedicated to the impact of e-books in general and the e-book reader (EBR) in particular.

Norbert Hildebrand
Insight Media Analyst

This short glance into the world of the content creators and publishers was very interesting from our traditional technology-driven perspective. As we have often mentioned, the key to successful CE product introduction is the availability of content for that platform. I was trying to find out what new content trends and creations will drive the consumer to either the Kindle or the i-Pad, or maybe to both. Instead of listening to presentations sounding the horn for the first wave of multimedia content on EBRs, I realized that the publishing industry is just starting to envision a future with these new devices.

Most of the discussion concerned either book or magazine publishing, and the focus and interest was quite different for the two groups. The book publishers look at the EBR as an electronic form of a book and expect the device to mimic a printed book as closely as possible. As was said during one of the sessions, "Whatever I can do with a real book I need to able to do with the EBR." That said, it became clear that this group is very happy with the current version of the EBRs as they most closely represent the form factor and display attributes of a printed book. The most praised features were the ability to read in high ambient lighting and the very long battery life.

The magazine publishers, on the other hand, are looking at the i-Pad as the almighty solution to their business worries. While the magazine revenue has been shrinking, a full color device seems to strike a chord with the battered magazine publishers. And even without any proof of viability, they are all hailing the arrival of the mighty i-Pad as the savior of their universe.

For many, it seems that Apple is providing the hope of bringing peace to the format-riddled war that the electronic publishing world is facing. While Apple did indeed bring peace to the music download world, it did it through a customer driven retail model that makes it easy for the 40-50 year old to buy on-line without an overload of computer technology. In this process i-Tunes started ruling the world, but the overall music industry suffered significant loss of revenue. I doubt that such a solution would bring peace to the publishing world or that it would be significantly different from the closed system that Amazon already uses. A more polished user interface is probably a better differentiator.

Other interesting points — there was discussion about subscription versus advertised-based business models, multimedia publication products and the development of the publishing industry from a business standpoint. You can find a more detailed summary in the March issue of our Mobile Display Report. For more information visit our website (http://www.insightmedia.info/monthlyreports.php).

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