Amazon, once the pioneer in this market and the company who brought book buying into our homes, has taken the knock as many pioneers can: by being too focussed on a single business model. Books were their stock-in-trade and, surprisingly perhaps given their successful   expansion into the wider world of online retail, books is where they chose to stay.

Now, against the backlit elegance of the iPad, Amazon’s Kindle looks as dusty and old fashioned as the books it sought to replace. The lessons it has learnt and the markets it opened are there for all to see; especially brighter, more visionary companies like Apple.

Apple have just forced Amazon to concede its persistent and historic advantage, price. By switching places, by adopting the pricing freedom which Amazon once used to undermine that of iTunes, Apple have ensured the co-operation of the major publishers whilst starting off (before they’ve really even started) on the right foot, namely a profitable and sustainable pricing model. Apple want no loss-leaders of the sort which have hamstrung the likes of Microsoft, Sony and Amazon. The future path of publishing will, it seems, be found by avoiding the potholes of other content digitisation.

The not-so-secret cheers at the first signs of Apple’s success can be heard from newspaper offices to games programmers because, much as we all love the idea of free it’s not so great when you have something you have to sell.

Had Amazon understood that getting their over-the-air delivery model right would lead to people wanting more from the technology then perhaps they wouldn’t have been so eager to adopt the digital ink format that has limited their selling power to books. Think small may be a great maxim for makers of chips but Pandora’s box of online shopping was opened a long time ago and our expectations exceed current capabilities (seriously, where is my jetpack?). We don’t so much see capability as we do potential. So reading books=great, but I’d like to watch video, look up references and buy presents for the kids too.

The iPad (and whatever personalised devices come after) aren’t so much about whether you can work on them (one editor told me she would only buy one once she could edit on it, and I’m sure there will be an App for that) but how can spend our leisure time on it.

And so we come back to the e-book as the notion of leisure time ends where it started, with a good book in front of the fire.

Digital books will pay dividends for the casual market, not because the screen is easier on the eye (it isn’t) or because they are cheaper (they aren’t), but because they are convenient. Much as I might prefer the sensual feel of paper flicking across my thumb and much as I want to scream and rebel at the idea of Apple being the gatekeeper of our leisure time, restricting and dictating the content to fit with a single person’s idea of “brand values”, I can’t help but notice that I’m changing. I’m demanding more from my books even as I read them. Engrossed as I was in Late Night On Twisted River (John Irving, 2009) I found myself pausing at moments and reaching for Wikipedia just to probe the border between reality and imagination. Irving is a master of blurring this border and whilst I was happy to be carried along with bears and prostitutes I couldn’t help but wonder more about the man behind the deaths of so many beautiful, innocent children.

In short, I wanted more, not less from the experience of reading.

David Hewson recently posted a number of photographs on his blog. He also tweeted about them. The photographs were of the places he had researched for his latest novel (The Blue Demon, available now at Amazon). On his blog he demonstrates how he took them and also why.

At the back of her books, Jodi Picoult devotes a few pages to the book club concept. She poses a list of questions people might want to consider when discussing her book.

Chicken House point would-be readers of their books to a specific passage using the bold statement “Read it! Try page…”. It’s an expansion on the old marketing trick of relating a unique selling point to salespeople by which they can enthuse about a product. The marked passage encourages readers firstly  to pick up the book and then open it. If the passage is picked properly then that provides the last link in the chain that has us hooked.

We want more, not less, from our books. With e-books (or books, as I believe we will one day call them) this won’t change.

The challenge will be in ensuring the tipping point doesn’t send us all downhill.

©2010 HEAD BLOG. All Rights Reserved.

Talk about saving for your own funeral. Maybe they will get June Whitfield to front the ads.

I’m only half joking. The iSlate is just the pinnacle of where tech has been headed these past few years; someone was bound to do it sooner or later. It’s just that Apple are perfectly poised to deliver the technology wrapped neatly into the consumer dream.

Because that, it seems to me, is what Apple trades in. Unlike Microsoft, Apple don’t deal with computers. It’s all about the consumer dream. Name another hardware manufacturer, be they HP or Sony or even the affordable semi-pioneers such as Asus and you have a collective that deals in computers, in technology.

Not so Apple. Cupertino asks what we dream of as consumers. The answers are brought to us courtesy of the technology but it’s the concept we buy into.

So how can we hold Apple in anything other than the best of regards?

Like Google, their image is one of purest ‘cool’ – if cool were a commodity worth billions and capable of keeping us in a blissful state of perpetual purchasing.

And the Google analogy isn’t accidental or merely convenient either.

Both companies are currently engaged in activities that have far reaching and potentially damaging consequences for freedom. They show us, in dramatic tones, just how far out of touch our notion of the Nation State really is. We may gripe about unelected officials being handed authority but really it is Google, Apple and, to a lesser extent even Amazon that we should really be examining.

In the pursuit of creating the ultimate in companion devices, Apple are aiming above the heads of Amazon and Google. A single device upon which we can buy books, films, music and games is a fine old dream as far as consumer dreams go but it comes with provisos attached.

Controlling the gateways to these entertainment hubs is more than just savvy business, it’s a political and economic wakeup call. The iPhone has stimulated enormous activity in development circles and led to Apple’s latest $3.3 billion dollar profit. I’ll just qualify that; first quarter profit. That’s a great achievement and the global economy must be, to no small extent, thankful.

But what longterm damage is it doing? What affect will it have on bricks and mortar retail? Unlike the threat of Internet shopping, Apple have created a system by which there need be no rival shops.

Their proprietary approach means that each of those 2 billion Apps we’ve all been busy downloading (and happily agreeing to call Apps) have been downloaded through Apple. There can be no competition to sell them just as there can be no competition to put them up for sale; even the type of application on sale to us is tightly controlled by Apple.

Of course that’s not to say it is only Apple doing this. There is competition, of a sort. Amazon is trying to control the way in which we access books – an aim which could now fail thanks to Apple who want the whole publishing pie. Google too, want in on that and it remains to be seen who will win out. Google are interesting because they have the veneer of open source to make us believe their motives are somehow purer. The recent spats over the book agreement reveals a different side.

But why does it matter? We have to buy our books, our music, our pleasures somewhere don’t we?

We do. We also need to work somewhere. Imagine a world devoid of high streets; where there is no HMV or Waterstones. A great world perhaps but they have, between them, mopped up the choice we used to have.

Independant stores are a dying breed, concentrating the hunt for jobs into fewer and fewer hands. The benefit to local economies dies with them and it’s not so much of a stretch to see a world, ten years hence, where the big shops are just online. At best.

We’ve been here before of course. The Industrial Revolution has lessons to learn from in this regard of the dangers of concentrating power in too few hands.

But we survived that, right?

Maybe.

Huge areas of poverty, inequality and unemployement followed the Industrial Revolution and it gave rise to the concept of the sweatshop, whether it be in a factory or across an entire continent. Once we allow our consumer desires to be our needs then little stands in the way of making that a reality. Once we allow Apple to be the one stop shop we ease the way for any measure which can streamline that process even further.

It doesn’t stop there either. We have already seen Amazon withdraw books for sale after they’ve been bought, reaching into the digital home and removing a publication (ironically it was 1984) from the Kindle (remember that?). Can that ever be a good thing? It’s an activity we surely associate with repressive Nations.

And that’s just what can happen to existing publications. It’s not a work of fiction that deciding what can and can’t be published in the first place has terrible ramifications.

Much applause has been given to the return of the bedroom coder. With the iPhone we saw game development break away from the huge coding conglomerates that had built up around the walls of the super publishers. The bedroom coder was back and that meant more power, more control and ultimately more money in the hands of the craftsman. But this is somewhat misleading. Because where is the self-publisher? The sole coder has full control of his own vision, up to the point when Apple becomes involved. Then it is judge and jury time. You’ve funded yourself, you’ve been creative, they say. Now it’s time to accept our payment terms – no negotiation, no choice. And that’s if we decide your creative vision is appropriate and in line with ours.

Again, we’ve seen this before. Apple aren’t reinventing the wheel, merely tightening the reins. Walmart has come under frequent fire for using it’s commercial position to dictate content to artists.

So are Apple switching on Skynet here?are we witnessing the end of control and the demise of the Nation State?

Yes.

There is, however, the chance that it will fail.

The open standards of the world wide web could be the only challenge to the monopolization of data. As long as Apple keep a web browser as part of their devices the opportunity for new ideas to seep through because anybody can publish on the Internet. Any ideas, any music, any games can all be delivered free to air through the old WWW.

But even the Internet is beginning to look a bit too unwieldy, a bit too big. How much longer before we’d rather use the Amazon App than the Amazon website? How much longer until our research is done within a single, cleverly cross-reference App with access to every book available through Apple? How much longer before it’s just easier and less confusing to altogether skip the Internet as we understand it today?

In the end we tend to take the path of least resistance and maybe that’s the problem. Who will step in whilst we get swept along? Will we see a repeat of the anti-trust suits that marred Microsoft’s rise to dominance in the 80s and 90s and in which case will they be fought on a national level or will we see the emergence of the World State in a bid to counterbalance the power.

Whatever happens with the iSlate, iPad or iTablet – we shouldn’t just suck it and see.

©2010 HEAD BLOG. All Rights Reserved.