I knew that the hype surrounding the Apple tablet had reached extraordinary proportions when I got an e-mail from
Giner told me he had been hired by a news site in
to do nothing but blog about the tablet for the 20 days leading up to
its launch — even before Apple confirmed the event itself. A news site
in
Giner also has something interesting to say about that hype because of his day job as president and co-founder of the
He says the newsrooms around the world that Giner
advises have high hopes that the tablet will be their salvation,
allowing them to charge for digital content. And in these hopes,
newsrooms are not alone.
A wide spectrum of industries has placed
extraordinary hope in a device that has never been seen in public. In
recent weeks, I’ve heard people pondering the potential of the Apple
tablet to boost, or even reinvent, markets such as education, video
games, television and books.
In an e-mail, Giner said he thinks Apple may have
let expectations get too high. “There is too much hype,” Giner wrote.
“They will not be able to match all this expectation.”
This anticipation stems from the growing rumblings
that Apple has been discussing a new system to sell and consume digital
content of all kinds: video, text and games. And that has led to
optimistic musings about whether Apple can do for (insert your industry
here) what it did for the music business:
Electronics Arts is said to be creating games for the tablet.
Same for
And HarperCollins for books.
Educators wonder if the tablet will make classrooms more interactive.
Coursesmart, a consortium of five textbook
publishers who create e-books for e-readers and the iPhone, went so far
as to produce a video showing how interactive textbooks would work on a
tablet.
Such faith and hope may be the ultimate testament to the uncanny ability of
Throw in indications that Apple is also going to
launch a music-streaming service after its recent acquisition of Lala,
and we begin to see that Apple’s ambitions extend well beyond the
launch of just some gadget. While much of the guessing around the
device has focused on its features and specifications, the potential
creation of a new marketplace for selling and consuming content strikes
me as potentially far more important.
First, it gets at a question I’ve asked for a while
now: What problem will the tablet solve for me? When just thinking
about the device, that’s been hard to answer. I use my MacBook at home
to watch TV shows and movies, surf the Web and shop. At first blush,
I’m not persuaded I need another device for these things. And I think
that’s really why tablets haven’t taken off so far.
But knowing how Apple approaches these things, I had
a hunch they were thinking a lot about that use question. And creating
a whole new distribution system for media would certainly represent a
big opportunity.
It’s also one that would likely extend across all devices, from MacBooks to Apple TV to iPhones.
It’s hard to judge the impact of such a shift, if
Apple succeeds. You can make good arguments about whether iTunes has
helped or hurt the music industry. (I think it’s helped. Things would
be worse without it.) But a lot of television networks and movie
studios have chafed at Apple’s terms for selling their content through
iTunes.
For the record, Giner thinks those hopes from people in his world are misplaced:
“Newsrooms believe that Apple will save them,” Giner wrote. “They are wrong.”
The big questions in any new content arrangement
include who would own the relationship with the customer: Apple or the
publisher? How much would Apple charge? And how would the revenue be
split?
Depending on the answers, we may look back on
Wednesday’s announcement and see that the tablet itself was much less
important than the creation of this new ecosystem. Will that be good
for just Apple, or for the content creators, too?
Stay tuned.
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