Archive for the ‘Future Shock’ Category

The iPad is about to have its academic chops put to the test this fall in a number of programs around the country. Colleges and universities are looking to adopt the iPad as a collaborative tool, a standardized mobile device to integrate into curriculums, and, in some cases, even a cost-saving device.

Oklahoma State University plans to begin a pilot iPad program this fall, with students in certain courses offered by the School of Media and Strategic Communications and the Spears School of Business receiving iPads to use with those courses. The program will be used to determine how effective iPads can be as tools to enhance learning as well as how such mobile devices can be integrated into the workplace.

“This limited pilot will be focused on fields of study where we believe we can best determine the higher education value of the iPad,” Bill Handy, visiting assistant professor in OSU’s School of Media and Strategic Communications, told Macsimum News. “We will evaluate the academic enhancement to the courses, how the iPad and its specific apps and web-based tools can be integrated in this capacity, and perhaps most importantly, how the integration of these mobile tools can expand the tactical abilities of students as they enter the workforce.”

Though an iPad starts at $499 and can cost as much as $829 for the top-end model, there is potential for cost savings, as well. The university has already identified one class where the textbook in ePub format costs $100 less than the dead-tree version. With a typical class load of five courses, it could be possible to completely offset the cost of a device like an iPad in textbook savings alone. (At least, this is true if you’re comparing the iPad against a stack of brand new textbooks; the savings may disappear if used books are brought into the comparison.)

The Illinois Institute of Technology has even more ambitious plans to integrate iPads into academics. A technology initiative will give all incoming freshman undergraduates—about 550 students—an iPad to use as a technological enhancement to the curriculum. Because all freshman are required to take several introductory courses, such as “Introduction to the Professions,” software, e-texts, and other resources will be uniform for those courses.

“We can ensure everyone has the same hardware and software, and it makes it easier to integrate into the curriculum,” Evan Venie, associate director of media relations for IIT, told Ars. “But we also want to open it up to other faculty that want to integrate iPad support into their courses—most of the faculty are very interested in leveraging the potential the iPad offers in the academic environment.”

Does a politician on the campaign trail have any expectation of privacy? It’s almost a silly question. But some pretty smart politicos have behaved as if there is more than one answer: Michael Steele is learning this, but unsuccessful Virginia Senatorial candidate George Allen and former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown learned it the hard way.

Now California gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown seems to be shocked shocked that there’s video recording going on here.

I was a guest this morning on KSRO radio of Sonoma County, Calif. where the question is very much alive and well as Brown’s candidacy seems to be losing momentum against the well-funded juggernaut that is Team Meg Whitman. The timing couldn’t be worse, but there was a mole at a Brown appearance who recorded the candidate indicating he didn’t really intend to shake things up if elected.

The is an old lawyer’s saying that goes: “Never write anything down you wouldn’t want to defend in court.” How quaint. The modern equivalent is: “Never say anything out loud you don’t want everyone to hear.”

See Also:

• Carly Fiorina’s ‘Demon Sheep’ Haunts Senate Race in California …
• Meg Whitman to Co-Chair McCain Campaign
• Fiorina, Whitman $teamroll Opposition in California Primaries …
• Meg Whitman’s ‘Colossal Mistake’ on Green
• Carly Fiorina 2.0: The U.S. Senate Edition

Computers and televisions may some day be one. In the meantime, the folks at The Citizen Hotel in Sacramento have decided to simply do away with TVs altogether and replace them with Mac Minis. All 198 computer-equipped rooms now allow guests to seamlessly watch television, scan their Facebook account, Tweet, stream video, Skype with friends, play World of War Craft, check email, or do anything else their Internet-addicted hearts desire.

Each computer comes with a giant LCD screen, wireless keyboard and mouse. There is also the traditional remote, which allows you to switch between “Mac Mode,” video-on-demand, TV, and guest services. This is the first system of its kind to come to the United States. Other hotels, such as the upscale Fountainbleau in Miami, have iMacs, but they augment the television, rather than replace it.

Michael Stano, Vice President of Technology for Joie de Vivre, the California-based company that owns The Citizen Hotel, says that the hotel’s test program earlier this year was a hit. “We’ve received extraordinary feedback,” he said.

All rooms now have computers permanently installed, and while the hotel is still offering the VOD option, Stano believes VOD technology, which was cutting-edge in the 1990s, is becoming obsolete. “The trends are changing rapidly. With Hulu, Netflix, and Youtube, people are going to want more options,” he said.

The software that enables switching between computer mode and TV mode was developed by Paris-based Direct Streams. The company has also installed the software on Macs at hotels in Paris and the Maldives. Thierry Beau started DirectStreams in 2007 exclusively to offer in-room hotel entertainment on the Apple platform.

While one selling point for the computers is that they allow guests to “leave their laptops at home,” business travelers who carry sensitive documents on their hard drives probably won’t do that anytime soon — especially those who love their non-Mac computers. And for those on vacation who leave their laptops at home with dreams of a disconnected existence, apologies.

The hotel is keeping its business center, which is equipped with iMacs. Guests can print out their boarding passes to the community printer from the comfort of their rooms.

Assuming the change is embraced, Joie de Vivre will start rolling out Mac Minis to other hotels later this year.

See Also:

• The Second Coming of Apple TV
• In-Car Wi-Fi Puts ‘Infobahn’ on the Autobahn
• Ford Brings Wi-Fi to the Highway
• Total Media Convergence, Courtesy of Microsoft

Call it the billion dollar question of today’s digital revolution: When it comes to online media, who’s in charge?

Looking back on the first phase of the digital revolution, when big media companies chose to give away their content for free online, their system of power started breaking down. Later came the upstart phase, in which bloggers and niche news sites added more content to the online world, but also stole away eyeballs and revenue from the big guys. Now, it seems the power shift is near-complete — in today’s online media world, the consumer is in control.

People from all walks of media life gathered at the HBO Theater in Manhattan late last week to try to discuss this issue and find answers to the new Big Question: If consumers are the king of content decisions, how can you make any money?

Sure, there have been countless conferences which have yet to change the world. But the MOB (Monetizing Online Business) Conference, hosted by the Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, set out on a slightly different approach than the rest. [Ed: Wired.com is owned by a company owned by S.I. Newhouse].

Rather than bring in the usual suspects, focused on ways to preserve and port old business model, Vin Crosbie, co-moderator and adjunct professor at the Newhouse School, said this one-and-a-half day conference aimed to “start the discussion over with a clean slate.”

A clean slate seems necessary because let’s face it — at this point, everyone already knows the bad news. But now in phase three, the era of mobile internet and the tablet and, there may be new ways to get back into the business of business.

The problem is, nobody seems to know exactly how to do it yet. There is reason for hope — everything companies need to know to make consumers happy is being played out in plain sight. Unlike the old days of print, when media content was sent into the world with no precise way of tracking how it gets consumed, the new world of online analytics and tracking technologies helps companies understand the who, what, when, and where of media consumption.

To that effect, David Zaslav, President and CEO of Discovery Communications, offered this valuable nugget to the entrepreneurs, media executives, and others in the audience at MOB: “don’t follow the money, follow the behavior.”

In other words, in order to steer their ships towards financial success, large companies to stop focusing on itself and what used to work. Instead, find out what the audience wants, and figure out the best way to give it to them. Even if it doesn’t play to a current strength.

NEW YORK — It may have led to all kinds of problems in Minority Report, but former police chief and commissioner William Bratton says predictive policing has an important role to play in the art of keeping the peace and that — at least as applied in the United States — is nothing to fear.

Bratton, former Commissioner of the New York Police Department and Chief of the Los Angeles, helped New York City fully adopt CompStat, the real-time police intelligence tracking system during his tenure in the mid-1990’s. Now as chairman of Altegrity Risk International, he’s expanding these techniques and technologies to include business and government intelligence. The efforts of companies like ARI, he thinks will help local and national governments enter an era of predictive policing.

Soon, police officers will be able to enter information from a computer in their car and send it into headquarters, allowing detectives get to work before even arriving on the scene. “In the next five to ten years, we will be like a doctor, working with increasing diagnostic skills,” Bratton told the audience at Tuesday’s 2010 Wired Business Conference. “That is the next era [of policing]. In fact, it’s the era we want our international intelligence service to be very much engaged in.”

The idea is to find criminals before the commit crimes, preventing certain crimes altogether.

Could this lead to an Orwellian police state? Bratton didn’t seem to think so. Because we live in a democratic society, he says. we should be safe. “There’s certain info I cannot get without your consent. A criminal record, if you have one, I will not be able to search for that.”

Still, there’s information everywhere, so for companies like ARI, whose job it is to seek out background histories for businesses and governments, it’s about pushing the boundaries. “We try to see how much you can do in a democratic society that is allowed,” said Bratton. “A lot is allowed.”

The extent to which the CompStat is scalable remains to be seen — police work still comes down to police and the human element and the very human desire to perhaps exaggerate success. As former head of the nation’s two largest forces Bratton indicated that he knew a little something about how to prevent that sort of thing from subordinates.

“In policing,” Bratton said, poker-faced, “you tell them quite clearly: ‘You screw around with the numbers and I am going to kill you.’”

Remember when Facebook really was a private club? In the days before we called anything a “social network?” When “sharing” and “connecting” wasn’t bait for the switch of “monetizing” the stuff and nonsense of our lives? Well, four NYU students do, and they are so nostalgic for those halcyon days way back in 2004 that they have set out to re-invent that wheel — for the good of mankind.

The New York Times reports Wednesday that Ilya Zhitomirskiy, 20; Dan Grippi, 21; Max Salzberg, 22; and Raphael Sofaer, 19, decided that Facebook had become so … Facebook that the world needed a safe online haven, one that could fulfill what had once been the fact and promise of Facebook. A place secure from the Big Bad Wolves who walk right though an open door to cull, scrape, decipher and analyze our timelines, and who see a commercial opportunity every time we go for coffee, buy a movie ticket or change partners.

Even though there is some evidence that only old fogeys are annoyed by Facebook’s latest change in the definition of “private” and “friend,” the NYU Four (as they shall henceforth be known on Epicenter) were surprised to discover that their sense of being fed up was shared by so many others.

“We were shocked,” Grippi told the Times. “For some strange reason, everyone just agreed with this whole privacy thing.”

There’s a practical component to the millennial crowd for keeping some things close to the vest that meshes nicely with a re-emerging visceral need: Students entering the job market have to explain their drunken escapades and make-out sessions and perhaps even drug use (we’re looking at you, Michael Phelps) that hiring managers now will know all about.

The Times story is well worth reading, so here are only a few details: The NYU Four used Kickstarter to raise $10,000 in 39 days. They calculate they’ll need a few months to write the code — and these guys are students at NYU’s elite Courant institute for math brainiacs, so they probably have that right. They call their project “Diaspora,” so you kinda get how serious they are about this.

We’re stoked because we’ve posited that Facebook has gone rogue and have called for just this sort of project. So while it’s way too early to know if anything will come of this, stranger things have happened. At the very least this news is apt to give a cranky Ryan Singel a reason to crack at least a little smile.

Boys, live long and prosper. When the big money guys start pulling up in Maseratis they say could be yours tomorrow, stick to your guns. Remember another promise that a couple of other college guys made when you were in grade school: Don’t Be Evil.

You can start by not suing us for using the picture we downloaded from your site, joindiaposra.com.

See Also:

• Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative
• Only Old Fogies Hate the New Facebook, Research Suggests
• Today Facebook, Tomorrow the World
• Report: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Doesn’t Believe In Privacy
• No Lie! Your Facebook Profile Is the Real You
• Pandora and Facebook: So Happy Together
• Great Wall of Facebook: The Social Network’s Plan to Dominate the Internet

Photo courtesy MultiTouch

Apple appears to have been right in betting that people would embrace a big version of the iPod Touch; the increased sense of intimacy with no keyboard or mouse chaperons is palpable. But even larger touchscreens, like the one the Finnish company MultiTouch let us play around with last week, can track each fingertip of a large group of people — a key distinction that enables a more social set of behaviors, because multiple people can use them at the same time.

These screens maintain their sensitivity to touch even when mounted behind bulletproof glass up to one inch thick, which makes MultiTouch’s screens equally suited to the board room, a university lab or public displays. Though they are probably too expensive to put one in your home, unless your home has been featured on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous or Cribs.

The best uses of these massive tablets is in a group setting, and other solutions exist — most notably Microsoft’s Surface technology — but to date, according to MultiTouch general manager Timo Korpela, none have offered the high resolution and responsiveness to multiple hands necessary for the platform to take off in a big way. As the company rolls out its efforts in the United States in the coming months, on the heels of a multitude of early successes in Europe, we’re likely to encounter these massive touch-sensitive displays in more walks of life — and, possibly, the sidewalks of life, too.

Photo courtesy of MultiTouch

Rather than using an Apple-style capacitive touchscreen, MultiTouch’s display system uses a mix of optical and infrared light to recognize objects held against the screen, as well as each fingertip from as many as eight people. This lets you zing documents back and forth in a group for collaboration, edit batches of photos together, and all sorts of other zany stuff.

A university is using it to perform virtual autopsies, with a realistic, 3-D model of a corpse; Siemens ordered one for its corporate lobby this week, and they’re showing up in T-Mobile cellphone stores in Europe, where you can plop a mobile phone onto the screen to interact with an app offering information about that phone model.

Clearly, the potential exists to blanket public spaces with interactive advertising displays, but MultiTouch’s Korpela said that so far, the biggest customers have been universities, digital app kiosks, corporations (for their lobbies), medical organizations, museums (to display interactive visual art) and other places people gather for a specific purpose — potentially boardrooms, newsrooms, video editing firms and so on.

Continue Reading “Beyond the iPad: Massive MultiTouch Displays Have Big Social Potential” »

Assuming the system works, I’m getting an iPad on April 3, sometime as soon after 9 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time as is humanly possible.

For many of us Saturday morning will be the latest round in a periodic ritual. Even Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, who’s getting two, is going to show up the night before at a store, just for the fun of it.

I’ve been through two first-day iPhone spectacles and lived through the “Jesus Phone” hype that, strangely, turned out to be pretty spot-on. I am on my third iPhone and, lucky as I am to be able to play with almost any device I want, have yet to see anything that comes close to the dramatic breakthrough that was the first-generation iPhone.

Trouble now is that Apple, having raised the game with the iPhone, has to do even better with the iPad, which will not have telephone functionality to fall back on and will compete instead with netbooks, tablets, e-readers and even laptops. In other words: There’s no clear reason you need one.

As much as I think the iPad will resonate with people (a view shared by many hands-on reviewers who already have one), it’s expensive and doesn’t obviously replace anything you already have. The magic that Steve Jobs says the iPad has will have to convince you that it really does, and that what it doesn’t replace you don’t really need all that much.

This is a standard Apple pitch, but we’re not talking about the abandonment of FireWire or no SuperDrive on the Macbook Air. The stakes have never been higher.

Partly because of my experience with the iPhone, and because I have access to a range of other smartphones, my expectations are very high. The iPad will have to be my new cigarette: a perfect delivery system for media nicotine.

For me, a successful iPad will alter my habits and refine preferences I may not be able to exactly articulate. It will drive me into media consumption I have avoided, and reveal to me those things in a full-fledged computer I have had to accept but need infrequently or not at all.

For all it does, the iPhone is a compromised reading platform. The small screen — though large by smartphone standards — is claustrophobic and makes it difficult to read at great length. The device itself is a limitation. A book or a magazine is not inherently off-putting (though the content may be).

The iPad will have to make me completely forget about the delivery system — disappear, as Gadget Lab editor Dylan Tweney puts it. It will have to make it possible for me to read a book as long as I want to and not make me learn anything particularly new about how to read one.

The page-turning metaphor replicated by a multitouch screen may seem tired to some, but for many new adopters it will be compelling — comforting, even, to in the way that human-inspired Wii’s controls are compared to the standard gaming controller’s buttons.

Will that be enough? There will be no book smell, but will we be immersed in the designer’s vision for fonts, kerning, spacing, sizing — all those elements we process but are not acutely aware of that spell the difference between a book and its galleys?

I’ve sort of given up on magazines, for many reasons. Disposable time is a factor. But arranging to get and have them, and dealing with awkward sizes, and being stuck with them when you are done, sometimes in mere minutes — and the arcane marketing practices of the industry — have driven me away.

On an iPhone, a magazine really isn’t a magazine anymore, but a sort of miniaturized slide show. This is why so many magazine publishers have largely avoided the device but are drooling with anticipation about the iPad. For the first time, many in the industry believe, it will be possible to deliver that gestalt experience that is the artistic selection and arrangement of editorial components that, when done correctly, become greater than the sum of its parts.

Advertisers are buying in, at least in the initial excitement, giving publishers a lot of running room. But for the businesses that have extolled the unique virtues of print for decades, a lot is riding on how readily their customers will also be willing to turn the page.

A successful iPad will get me excited about magazines again, about flipping through pages and being pleasantly surprised at not only what I read, but what I see. It will inspire a Renaissance in cover design — for books, too.

For newspapers, it’s harder to see offhand what advantage a tablet offers up, given that design and presentation isn’t exactly the newspaper industry’s forte. The New York Times is a launch partner, and among the most innovative in the business, so I will be looking for its great ideas on what is newly possible and potentially game-changing. Certainly, on the iPhone, the web experience of a well-designed newspaper site is as good as the small screen can provide.

But the Times Reader, based on Adobe Air, has opened up possibilities on computers to restore print elements and design that sometimes elude the web incarnation, and it’s possible that approach will catch fire on the iPad.

In a strange dichotomy I haven’t quite figured out, I watch lots of TV on my iPhone — of the Slingbox-fed streaming variety, and the Roxio Toast + Tivo flavor, and iTunes subscriptions for premium channels I don’t buy — but no movies. This might be only a matter of available time, since movies are longer, and you tend you want to see a film all at once.

But my hesitance might also stem from, like reading books and magazine, the nature of the experience. They do, after all, call movies “the Big Screen” and TV “the Small Screen.”

I would expect a successful iPad to entice me to buy and rent movies as I have never before, happily bookmarking them. An iPad-specific Netflix app will certainly help.

Can I do stuff this with my laptop? Sure. But the impediments — space it takes up, heat it generates, lousy battery life, supporting systems I don’t need at the moment — all conspire against me doing so. Even on airlines.

So the successful iPad will also have to be whimsically on call and not particularly fragile. Pulling it out of a jacket pocket might be impossible, but being able to throw it into a bag will be necessary.

If done right, the iPad will put experienced users like me in the same demographic as perpetual novices, tearing down cultural, ageist, technical and perhaps even have/have-not barriers as never before.

We will only be able to assess the extent to which the iPad insinuates itself into our lives by looking backwards. That will take some time, and won’t happen if the device induces shrugs or only mild interest or is a downright flop.

But if the iPad actually does level the playing field, and spikes interest in various media, Apple may not ever need to announce “one more thing.”

See Also:

• New iTunes Rules Complicate iPad Magazine Opportunities
• Can Apple’s iPad Save the Media After All?
• The Wired Tablet App: A Video Demonstration
• The Key to Apple’s iPad? Uh-Oh, It’s Magic
• Condé Nast Adds 4 Titles to iPad Initiative
• Is Apple Actually Pushing for the $10 iPad E-Book, After All?
• Wired.com Buyer’s Guide: Choose the Right iPad
• Five Essential iPad Accessories
• Hands-On With the Apple iPad
• What the iPad Means for the Future of Computing

Starting Thursday, Verizon will pre-install a version of Skype Mobile on nine Blackberry and Android handsets. This partnership puts a nice little crack in the wall between traditional telcos and internet telephony providers, who have redefined what it means — and should cost — to make a phone call. But the full promise of mobile internet telephony is still a ways off (though perhaps only a few more weeks).

The integration of Skype mobile does give Verizon one huge advantage — you can now receive internet calls spontaneously on a standard handset — but it falls far short of an implementation that would unleash the full power of Skype on a mobile device.

And it isn’t really internet telephony at all: Skype calls are routed through Verizon’s network, you can’t receive calls placed to your online numbers, you can’t use Skype (and its cheaper calling plans) to place calls to other telephones. Skype on Verizon doesn’t even work under Wi-Fi, where Skype sort of lives.

Still, it’s a bold maneuver by Verizon that would seem to benefit the original internet telephony upstart even more. Exposing people to the idea that you can use the internet to make and receive free and dirt-cheap phone calls — that you don’t need expensive calling plans and contracts — could be madness. Or, it could be a brilliant way of managing an inevitable shift that eluded other industries to their peril. In a way, this is just a continuation of the trajectory that saw telcos tack hard to wireless when it was clear the landline business was cratering.

As a technical matter, internet telephony — VoIP, or Voice over Internet Protocol — has been around for decades. But as a full-throated option it only came into its own with the explosion in broadband five years or so ago. And in the last couple of years, VoIP has become a standard part of consumer services offered by cable and satellite dish companies piping internet, television and voice into homes.

So people are used to it. Now, with the explosion of smartphones, more people will likely start asking: Since the phone is just an app anyway, why does it have to be such a darn expensive one?

Skype is in the middle of all this. Anyone can have a free Skype account and use it to make and receive free calls with anyone else who has Skype account. With the basic service, you are not a unique number, but a unique name that others can list as a contact and also SMS and instant message. This is the basic tier of Skype that Verizon has brought to its handsets (well, minus the SMS part, too).

And since the Android and Blackberry operating systems allow apps to run in the background, the phone knows when someone is trying to call you using Skype, which mimics the experience of leaving your computer on and Skype running.

On the iPhone, it isn’t nearly as pretty. Skype can’t run in the background. That’s not a big deal when you want to make a call, but it’s ugly when you want to receive one. Ordinarily, people make arrangements using another medium to make a Skype appointment — exit the spontaneity Verizon has introduced.

But on the iPhone app (which does not require Wi-Fi, but can use it), you have full access to whatever Skype bells and whistles you have paid for. That might include (as it does for me) two online numbers that people can call from any phone — not just a computer or other device that runs Skype — and that display as your caller ID. That might also include a calling plan that lets you use Skype to call any number in the United States and Canada for $30 — a year. Using the Fring iPhone app, you can even take part in a (sort of) Skype video call; the video is one-way since the iPhone doesn’t have a front-facing camera (yet?).

So, we seem to still be a ways away from the perfect situation for customers: Skype being able to have whatever customer relationship it wants on whatever mobile device that customer has. For iPhone — and soon iPad owners — it would require a change in the OS that would allow third-party apps to run in the background. For Verizon, it would require allowing Skype to provide an app that, on the handsets it markets, isn’t crippled.

This may happen sooner than later. If the reports of Apple’s iPhone HD are accurate, then third-party multitasking will be part of OS 4. That could make the iPhone the more compelling Skype delivery system — but wait: The other part of those reports is that Apple is now making a phone for Verizon, too.

Would Apple and AT&T allow Skype to run roughshod on the latest version of the iPhone? Would Verizon allow Skype to be a feast on one of its smartphones, and a merely a snack on the others?

We may know as early June 22, if these reports pan out.

Hachette has become the third major publisher to publicly denounce Amazon.com’s $10 e-book model. It joins Macmillan and HarperCollins in what seems now like the death blow to a price point that had less to do with the inherent value of the content than it did with finding a magic number readers could not resist in droves.

In a memo reprinted by mediabistro’s GalleyCat blog, Hachette Book Group Chairman and CEO David Young said his company will impose variable pricing on retailers, and that while some e-titles may be less than $10 it would seem the vast majority will be more. “It allows Hachette to make pricing decisions that are rational and reflect the value of our authors’ works,” he said.

“In the long run this will enable Hachette to continue to invest in and nurture authors’ careers — from major blockbusters to new voices. Without this investment in our authors, the diversity of books available to consumers will contract, as will the diversity of retailers, and our literary culture will suffer.”

The question of whether e-book prices should be significantly lower than their print analogs has become a fundamental divide in a simmering dispute between book publishers and the 800-pound-gorilla that is Amazon.com. In part the issue is about consumer choices but like the other digitization wars which preceded it — and continue — in music, television, film and even news, it’s also about ensuring that a creative industry survives.

And it comes at a moment in time when the e-book is poised to become a truly mainstream format or remain something relegated mostly to road warriors, geeks and maybe college students.

A tipping point in the e-book saga may have come last Christmas Day, when Amazon reported that its sales of digital books exceeded print on that holiday for the first time. Of course, that would include a lot of new Kindle owners taking their new toys out for a test drive — and if you are buying a print book on Christmas day from an online retailer then, well, it better not be a Christmas present.

But then, that also means there were a lot of new Kindle owners — some within the publishing community complain that lower e-book prices are a ploy to sell more Kindles, rather than a reflection of lower production costs, and are less interested in selling Amazon’s razors then their own blades. Approximately 5 million e-book readers were sold last year, they were a darling at last month’s Consumer Electronics Show, and a range of next-generation models are due in 2010, not the least of them Apple’s much-anticipated iPad.

The fundamental question is: Who gets to decide? Consumers will vote with their clicks and pocketbooks and if the e-book format becomes moribund — at a time when e-book prices are higher than many think are defensible, given that there are virtually no production or delivery costs in the traditional sense — we’ll never know what went wrong.

On the other hand, pricing e-books closer to the actual production cost could damage the book publishing ecosystem, and that would be tragic beyond words, unless theorists like Henry Blodget are right that nature will find a way.

E-books are really still in their infancy, and this year the devices will be subjects in an important real-life experiment to decide whether e-readers will provide more than significant incremental revenue for book publishers. And it was the announcement of iPad, which nobody will have for months, that emboldened publishers to push back against mighty Amazon, demanding that it match Apple’s iBook future pricing. Before that, the world’s largest online retailer had great sway to negotiate contracts, allowing it to set the one-size-fits-all-books price point of $10.

Prices always plummet in a price war, often to below the point which can sustain a business. While the jury may be out until later this year on the extent to which e-books supplement rather than cannibalize sales it would seem inevitable that over time books — like hardware and software — will continue to go down in price, even as content improves.

And, just like the newspaper and magazine industries, book publishers, as the custodians of the their medium, will have to be given — or will simply take — some power to manage their way through the (r)evolution.

See Also:

• Amazon Don’t Need Your Stinkin’ Books (Updated; Actually, We Do)
  
• Macmillan’s Amazon Beatdown Proves Content Is King
• Amazon: Kindle Books Outsold Real Books This Christmas
• Tablet Wars: Amazon Adds Apps to Kindle