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Apple focused on videos—rather than books—for rumored tablet?
October 31, 2009 | 7:42 am
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By David Rothman
That’s the latest scuttlebutt. If the widely reported rumors are true; at least they’d jibe with Steve Jobs’ sttement that people don’t read. Some say the rumors could also show that Apple believes the book biz is broken, which, of course, it is. Or maybe the rumors are just an Apple disinformation campaign.
No matter what, a tablet for video could still be great for book reading. What’s more, books could still be part of Apple’s long-term vision. It could let Amazon and Google and others duke it out first. Then it could swoop in with its own major efforts.
Image: It’s Piper Jaffray’s conception of the tablet.
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Comments:
Apple would be stupid to do anything else: We all know that in their market, there are more people watching videos more often than they are reading… and Apple wants to sell lots of devices. Naturally they’re going to optimize it for video first.
I agree that it can still be a great reading device, but I’m sure Apple considers that an “accessory” use of the tablet, and will be treated as such.
Agreed.
Plus, think of all the problems Amazon and B&N are having getting rights to ebook content for different markets.
Apple already has licenses for music and video so they can launch with that as their online services component.
Doesn’t they stop there; the iPod launched as an MP3-only player and added DRM’ed AAC (the core of theiPod business) a year later.
Timing mattters and if Apple is going to have a presence in the tablet space they need to launch in 2010. And as early as possible. They’re already six months behind Archos and the various asian slate vendors; if they don’t get their product out soon it will be hard to convince even the faithful that they “invented” the category.
i believe this is apple’s sleight-of-hand at work, just like steve’s “people don’t read” line. isn’t it pretty well established that apple’s been courting publishers, and what about those “truckloads of books”?
All good comments. Rumors have been swirling about this mythical beast; one report said ‘the OS used has not been determined’ and another said, ‘two models are being considered, one with iPhone OS and the other with Mac OSX.’ Of course, depending on which way Apple might go, there is a world of difference concerning what sort of files and programs we’d be able to use on the tablet.
I lean towards the Arm-based iPhone model being the one they release. That means that iPhone apps would work, including the ebook reading stuff. It would be pretty cool if Amazon supported the higher resolution, and we could get Kindle DX editions for it. (But if Amazon had Kindle DX versions of magazines, that would not allow much space for Apple to ‘take over publishing’ the way some rumors would have it.)
So: music (with the LP editions) and games (biggest, coolest, ‘funnest’ hand-held gaming console) and movies/TV shows from the iTunes Store — with books, newspapers, textbooks, magazines, as gravy. If Apple can strike deals with the publishers.
Alas, the price will prevent me from owning one of those shining and glorious beauties. I’d love to have one.
@pond
“That means that iPhone apps would work, including the ebook reading stuff.”
Umm… no. For the iPhone apps since the screen size is fixed and UI designers like pixel perfect design, the chances of an app “just working” without a fair bit of glitches on a different screen size (and perhaps even aspect ratio) are small. But it would be fair to say that redoing the UI to handle a new screen size would not be as hard of a task as say porting to Android.
I think Apple is smart by focusing on the video rather than the book side of things. The video would be the hard part anyways from a hardware standpoint. Books are a quagmire of old boy network legal and licensing nightmares that makes the video and music industry look like a bunch of corner hustlers playing 3 card monte. It comes down more to licensing and payoffs on the book side. As far as viewing them on the device……there’s an app for that…. (ducking).