Tablet
PC: The Ebook Savior?
FROM PUBLISHING
TRENDS (DECEMBER 2002)
It
was not so long ago — well, 2000, actually — that the
age of ebooks ascended upon us, an era that would, as
the AAP and Andersen Consulting then dreamily
proclaimed, be “a significant opportunity” for the book
biz, devouring almost 10% of the total consumer publishing
market by 2005 and bloating into “total projected retail
sales of $2.3 billion for the trade publishing industry.”
Remember RocketeBook battling Softbook,
and Palm menacing Microsoft to dominate
the world of onscreen reading? By 2001, of course, expectations
had been brutally downsized, and last week might have
seemed like the nail in the coffin, as Reuters announced
that Gemstar would try to dump its ebook business,
including RocketeBook and Softbook, under the feeble
proviso that a sale would occur “if a buyer emerged.”
Ding-dong, ebooks are dead. So why are 350 hype-weary
publishing types scrambling to attend a
sold-out conference on December 5 hosted by The
Open eBook Forum?
Behold the Tablet
PC. Unveiled by Microsoft on November 7, the
new gizmo weighs about 3 pounds and allows the user
to write on it with a stylus, or read from it, thanks
to an onboard copy of Microsoft Reader. Chairman Bill
Gates has already boasted that within five years
(the timespan of choice for futurists) “it will be the
most popular form of PC sold in America.” But will early
adopters shell out $2,499.99 to read on it? For his
part, Chris North, VP and General Manager of
Electronic Publishing at HarperCollins (and a
speaker at Open eBook’s “Tablet PC Digital Publishing
Conference”), volunteers that the tablet is “pretty
cool.” “Reading trade books is not one of the primary
purposes” in buying a tablet, he adds, but he thinks
that, just as Palm Pilot users began downloading ebooks
onto their devices, so will tablet owners. But this
time, cautions North, publishers who survived the “extremes
of over-enthusiasm and despair” will greet the new opportunity
with “more realistic” expectations.
Still, they have expectations, and that’s attracted
paying customers (with some seats advertised at $129
a pop) to one of the first industry conferences in a
year or more. In addition, the lineup of sponsors, including
AOL Time Warner, NYU Center for Publishing,
and McGraw-Hill (along with the Adobes,
Fujitsus, and Microsofts of the planet), suggests
that all of those files weren’t digitized for naught.
Most impressively, perhaps, the conference embraces
not just book publishing, but newspaper and magazine
publishing, making it one of the first conferences in
which every medium of consumer publisher will participate.
Indeed, for those on the magazine side, the Tablet PC
is a ray of hope. “The tablet introduces a whole new
ballgame,” says Dan Schwartz, President and CEO
of digital newsstand Qmags (also known as Qiosk).
“That’s the excitement for us and the ebook space.”
Qmags.com, now offering
electronic delivery of eight magazine titles, including
Popular Mechanics and The American Lawyer,
has been plying a space also inhabited by Zinio.com
(peddling e-versions of 20 magazines, such as Business
Week and National Geographic Traveler), and
NewsStand.com
(with about 30 periodicals). Schwartz thinks the big
draw is digital delivery, not onscreen reading. “There
are people who read onscreen, but we think they’re a
minority,” he says. Still, with the Tablet PC’s light
weight and improved display, reading on your PC is easier
than it’s ever been. The real trick is tapping into
a revenue stream, and by Schwartz’s lights, online books
may well become more like online magazines — delivered
as serialized books, or even sponsored books — because
the advertiser-based model simply offers more avenues
for cash. “We’re really still very much at the frontier,”
he adds. “It’s the frontier of the frontier.”
©2002
Publishing Trends
