Initial details (unsubstantiated rumors?) about book pricing suggest that to put a book in the Apple bookstore means not having a price higher than $14.95. I am seeking clarification of this point, but if it is true, then it is unlikely that there will be native versions of academic or professional books for the iPad.

I think this is ultimately all about Rich Media. Until now, we’ve pretty much kept our print publications separate from “supplementary material” like videos, audio, animations, etc. Those are now becoming much more _integral_ to published content, and less “supplementary.” Obviously, Apple always targets the broad consumer market; note that most of the magazine prototypes that have been proliferating recently have emphasized the link between the textual content and rich media (and also plain old linking). But this will become increasingly important to scholarly publishers too. Look at all the rich media employed by NEJM, for example. True, you can access all that on a laptop. What the iPad offers, in my view, is a very appealing combination of form factor and functionality (including the touch screen, including the ability to handle “books as apps”) that provides that kind of rich user experience. I don’t think anybody will see it as replacing either their laptop or their smartphone. But I think it — and its descendants — are going to be an attractive “media consumption” device in the long run (even for plain old novels).

One other technical point I’m interested in is interactivity, annotation, etc. Certainly in academia those would be huge plusses.

— Bill Kasdorf

Y’know everybody laughed at the WII, until you couldn’t buy one for the demand. This is the same isn’t it. The first computing device where natural gestures are what you use to control it. Files, formats, storing things, the staples of the OS have been removed, leaving a device designed for the business of doing things. Instinctively.

For me, the barrier to owning an iPhone was the contract for the voice. I don’t use a mobile phone much. The data bit interested me, but the lock-in for 18 months and then the lack of portability to another supplier? Nope no thanks. This machine is free of those restrictions. Priced aggresively enough that after 2 – 3 years you’ll just go get the latest version with whatever toys are on it. Plug it into iTunes and bang, all your older stuff is straight on there. No fiddling around with OS installations and backups and all that stuff that just gets in the way of the doing.

For publishers – what opportunities! 3D protein models, videos for the tricky bits of the lab protocols animations, cutaways. layers. Kent is right, aesthetics are back and you can charge for them too. We can learn to do this stuff, we did it before. There’s a whole bunch of reference books from my molecular biology days, that would be so awesome on this machine.

Steve Jobs understands that mobile devices are not about the contract, they’re about the mobility. No bootup wait for an iPhone OS based device is there… In fact what’s a bootup?(Ok yes it’s a second or two if you turn it off.) He also gets (about the time the iPhone was jailbroken I reckon) that the street finds uses for things, uses unintended by the manufacturer… This is the Gibson device, a machine conceived to allow the street to do things with it. Apple are the suppliers of the entire infrastructure for that process.

I have little doubt that the iPad (at price points that drew gasps from the audience) will be a pretty successful product. I’m looking forward to having something lighter and more portable than my laptop for watching movies and surfing the web in many places, like trains, planes and my bed.

But a lot of the Kindle killing commentary is off-base or factually inaccurate. Adobe has already said that Apple is using an incompatible, proprietary DRM with its ePub implementation (See http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplatform/2010/01/apples_ipad_–_a_broken_link.html). And there has been significant reporting on the business model for the iBooks store — higher prices for consumers, lower royalties for publishers and more money for Apple (See for example http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703906204575027503731077976.html)

The price comparison is a little too cute, as well. Most people buy a regular-sized Kindle, which for $259 includes lifetime free wireless and costs considerably less than the cheapest iPad and LESS THAN HALF what the cheapest iPad with a cellular connection costs (before counting the required monthly plan for mobile service, minimum $180/year).

There’s also been extensive confusion about Amazon’s recent royalty hike, which applies only to self-published ebooks priced under $10. Big publishers still get paid based on their own specific deals, generally half or more of the print hard cover list price.

While Steve Jobs unveiled an amazing piece of hardware with cool software and a great price point, he did not announce any innovations to the business of selling content online. The iBook store is just like other ebook stores only with higher prices and a little more control for publishers (in fact, it seems just like the unpopular Scrollmotion app’s exact model, really, with a smidge more concession to consumers on pricing). There was no video subscription plan, no new way to pay for digital versions of print products, no iTunes for magazines, no micropayments scheme, no game-changing price cuts on TV clips, no cloud-based sharing of media files across all a person’s devices, no iTunes.com etc.

It’s quite possible that these are to come, that negotiations will be finished before the iPad actually arrives. I don’t know. But without some creativity and innovation on the business side, I don’t think the iPad can save anyone.

The entertaining (but oft-profane) Angry Drunk has a good analysis and presents an interesting case for owning one:

In my opinion, an overall good first outing. The key thing to take away from the design and specs of the iPad is that it isn’t intended to be a netbook. It’s Apple’s answer to the use-cases that spawned netbooks. Nor should the iPad be looked at as a laptop replacement. Instead, I think that the iPad should be viewed as a laptop alternative.

I am excited in ways I haven’t been for a while about the potential for multimedia rich ebooks. I’m particularly interested in scholarly editions of classic texts, with audio, glosses, annotations, images maps, and yes, video. Waiting to see what sort of content creation tools will work, though if I have to integrate things by hand with ePub via XML/XHTML, I will.