It’s iTablet Eve

January 26th, 2010Blog1 comment

Here it is my friends: The night before Apple changes the world again. Fake Steve Jobs reports that “He’s tingling all over”. The Financial Times tells us that the tablet will be to the Kindle as color TV is to black and white. Walt Mosspuppet says that the tablet allows you to order free pizzas delivered by a unicorn.

You’ve read my own predictions on this thing. Now that we’re less than 24 hours away from its unveiling, even I’m getting kind of tingly.

Today I was thinking about the print industry and what tabletization means for it. Here’s a pretty good article on Gizmodo about the tablet’s relationship with print.

So I have a few thoughts on this: One, I’ve been reading Newsweek and Time on the Kindle DX. This is fine and good for newsmagazines, but what people really need are layouts. Photos, graphics, spreads. National Geographic, which is all about incredible photography, doesn’t work on a grayscale Kindle. Neither do fashion mags. The Kindle is great for text, but it sucks for graphics.

This is where the tablet comes in. Magazines could be a great central hub for everything — video, audio, web links. Publishers could become the center of the media universe again, as they were when print and newspapers ruled in the early half of the 20th century. It’s just a matter of finding the right business model and for all the major players to come together on the right technological standards.

Should magazine layout be based on HTML 5? That might be a good way to go because of its usability and because it’s already based on an existing standard. The business model might literally be akin to putting a paywall in front of a website, something that the New York Times is definitely going to do in 2011.

Man, I’m excited. I’m all set to buy whatever is unveiled tomorrow. Until then I’ve got Mass Effect 2 and a writers’ workshop to occupy my time. But by March or so, I will be tableting all over this MF’er.