Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Jordan
@neko: Funny, you don't look that wild.
My take*: Apple won't take that step until (and unless) they create an "iNewton" device, significantly larger than the iPhone and iPod. Then they will go after magazines, not books, to take advantage of their color screens, and to go for lucrative subscription-based content. Their touch system would prove very attractive for clip-and-save, archiving and "scrap-booking" magazine content, and those glossy magazine photos would look great.
Books will come after the iNewton proves to be so incredibly popular among the younger generation that it begins to rope the elders in, too.
*You gotta have a dream. If you don't have a dream... how you gonna have a dream come true?
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Beware of sleeping cats!
My take on it all... Apple is working on an other computing revolution in relation to interface and is waiting for technology to pick up. The touch interface si one step probing for popular approval. Better stuff is to come. Patience.
An other observation that may weigh in the scale is that as far as I know, Apple prefers to stand clear of format wars. That's the experience of having been marginalised for so long because of their proprietary operating systems. When the MP3 format was unmistakably crowned, they jumped to nearly total control with the iTunes/iPod success. It would be my inkling that they would try the same process with any types of mediae, the same way that their survival was maintained so long by the fantastic evolution that the laser printer put on the publishing market. Without desktop publishing we wouldn't have Ebooks. Movies have had mitigated success so far because other players have sensed the same marketing thought process and agressively participated to the game.
The ebabel crisis we tread through has to be resolved before we see any positive step from Apple to commit themselves. Remember that Apple is still second, on a popularity scale, to Windows; any decision has to be deftly measured.