9

By Chris Meadows

Last week, Publishing Perspectives covered the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. One of the facts that came out was that smartphone use had more than quintupled from 2.4% of the mobile market to 15.4% in 2008. Publishing Perspectives reporter Hannah Johnson noted:

If book publishers add one thing to their to-do lists this year, it should be to develop and execute a mobile content strategy to take advantage of this growth.

The article goes into detail about how the market for media content on these phones is growing by leaps and bounds, but is limited to a certain extent by app store fragmentation—each smartphone maker has its own separate app store.

To try to solve this problem, twenty-four mobile carriers are joining together to create a cross-platform app store called the Wholesale Application Community,

Carriers include Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint, and Vodafone. The goal is to “establish a simple route to market for developers” and to provide customers with access to the widest range of apps available. No specific launch date was announced. E-book app developers still have a chance to get into this community from the beginning.

The article does not mention whether Apple will be cooperating with this effort. Given that (as I mentioned earlier today) Apple has about 95% of the mobile handheld device market and is notorious for keeping its platform closed, if Apple is not on board then they may reach considerably fewer than the “three billion consumers” the article projects.

Cell Phones More Important?

Elsewhere on Publishing Perspectives, Edward Nawotka thinks that cell phones may be more important to the future of publishing than dedicated e-reading devices. Whereas in the US dedicated devices such as the Kindle, Nook, and iPad get most of the spotlight, these devices have been slow to make it to the rest of the world and so most people elsewhere read on their mobile phones.

Since mobile phones tend to be considerably less expensive than e-book devices, in the developing world they are far more likely to be owned for other purposes already. (We covered the use of cell phones for e-book reading in Africa last year.)

The arguments against cell phones for e-book reading tend to be that the screen is too small and the backlit displays may promote eyestrain. However, as the first Publishing Perspectives article notes, new display technologies are being developed that may reduce the eyestrain potential—and the small size may be an advantage in terms of having the device with you at all times. A Kindle may be a great size for reading, but you can’t put it in most pockets.

We have discussed device convergence a number of times on TeleRead, and there are usually some skeptics. But I strongly suspect that even if single-purpose e-book readers do not go away, their role will gradually decrease in favor of multi-function gadgets like the iPad—but also, and perhaps even more, the iPad’s smaller siblings.

 
9