An iTunes moment?
An iTunes moment? THINGS are suddenly hotting up in the rather obscure field of electronic books and their associated reading devices, the best known of which is Amazon’s Kindle. A new, sleeker version of the Kindle was unveiled on February 9th. Just days earlier, Google said it was making 1.5m free e-books available in a format suitable for smart-phones, such as Apple’s iPhone and handsets powered by Google’s Android software. Read more…
No. 1 — 14 februari 2009 at 18:07
Now that the traditional business model of advertising starts failing (too), more and more signals towards paying for content seem to pop up. This is not an ‘I told you so’, since recent history has proved me wrong several times on free vs paid content. But, but , but.. devices like the iPod, the iPhone, developments like ePaper, eInk, etc. seem to accelerate towards a broader acceptance, at least if we were to take media-coverage and seminars as a means to measure, of paid content.
At a recent seminar several if not all developers of mobile applications testified that the introduction of the iPhone has increased use and downloads of their applications to three or four times as much as before the introduction. In actual numbers this might not be very significant (110,000 i-Phone users in the Netherlands and only available through t-mobile), but most of these are clearly innovators and/or early adopters, quite willing for a broader integration of their ‘phone’ in their day-to-day life.
On a personal note I remember some awkward looks some 10 years ago when reading a book on my Palmdevice while waiting for my youngest daughter finishing her swimming lessons. Perhaps the iPhone or the Kindle will finally correct this of course completely wrong image that those other parents might still remember.