If you are in or related to the tablet business, then your financial outlook and attitude are on the rise. Lately, analysts have released sales and prediction figures for both Amazon’s Kindles and Apple’s iPad in batches of 12+ million units. Amazon, leading up to the Christmas holiday, was selling Kindles at a rate of 1 million a week. Apple’s rate for iPad’s has been just as brisk with an even longer time on the market as compared to the Kindle Fire.

Tablet Activities

• Information station — news, e-mail, web, aggregate readers like Flipboard
• Entertainment station — Netflix, YouTube, music, Angry Birds
• Learning station — e-Books, e-textbooks, educational apps

As more consumers purchase tablets, and we approach the tipping point toward mass adoption (as with smartphones), our consumption patterns will shift. Whether it is sheer convenience, instant gratification, portability, or the like, consumers will do more with these devices. At the same time, the operating systems driving tablets will mature to offer easier content creation, sharing, and feature sets.

Since tablets are media consumption machines, other media delivery systems will decline in appeal. Specifically, the total volume of print media should continue to shrink. The gaining popularity of e-Books reduces the need for as many printed books. Document sharing and collaboration tools like Dropbox or Evernote allow you to read, markup, and retrieve what you would have recently sent to a printer — especially appealing for business professionals. To-date these tools are somewhat restrictive and clumsy, but they will not remain this way.

Tablets versus printed material is not a zero sum game. For the foreseeable future, both will provide their own utility. If you are in the business of providing printed sheets, however, you might well want to expand your capabilities. We all still have a need to consume information, collaborate, and communicate. Content, whether delivered digitally or analog, is required. The opportunity, then, is to be the source for creating, repurposing, and distributing that content regardless of form but with respect for function.

photo: Pirate Alice

Last January, I proposed a few new business models that could take print forward for the near term. I gave these types of print shops names like the Specialist, Localist, Technologist, Leanist, and the Entreprenuerist. All, with the possible exception of the Leanist, challenge the status quo through the effective exploitation of technology.

Fast forward to this January where I found myself reading Phil Simon’s The New Small. Simon talks about a new breed of small businesses that take advantage of what he calls the “Five Enablers” — cloud computing, SaaS (software as a service), free and open source software, mobility, and social technologies. Although these topics are a mainstay on this blog, the printing industry is just now starting to here many of these terms as we lead up to Drupa.

Anyone who needs a primer or refresher on these topics, along with 11 profiles who business that embody the “new small”, should buy and read Phil Simon’s book. Over the past two years, it is one of the most apt and timely books I’ve read for those in graphic arts. Go read it and prove me wrong. I dare you.

Book Trailer for The New Small from Phil Simon on Vimeo.

iNation

Last week Apple unveiled an update to iBooks and an easy-to-use iApp for anyone to create interactive books. Up to this point Apple has had little success with iApps that were not about organizing ones digital lives. iTunes and iPhoto are raging successes. iMovie, iDVD, and Garageband, while popular, require a different level of interest and skill in content creation not needed with the other two. Let’s not forget, like most already have, about iWeb — the app that was supposed to revolutionize creating web pages.

Although iWeb is painless for creating passable website, Apple handicapped its potential by attaching it to a pricey MobileMe subscription service. But the Web, with its democratic openness, gave users an abundance of options to create their online presence. Blogger, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, WordPress, Tumblr, Flickr, and all of the other “social” platforms made it easier and less restrictive. Apple could not tame the Web.

The iBook Author app is not iWeb. The interactive books you create with this app can really only go to one place — the iBook Store. Apple owns, controls, and sells the only creation tool, the distribution point, and the consumption devices. Once again, they have created a blue ocean to swim in where the take is 30% from content they do not even create.

Apple Gets

• A publishing army to feed its iBook store
• 30% of your books sale price
• More Macs and iPads sold

With that said, the consumer does get a powerful and free tool to digitally self-publish. iBook Author is dead simple and while Apple has originally positioned it as a way to publish textbooks, the bigger market is in the consumer market. Apple can cross-pollinate features perfected in other iApps to make this an awesome tool for consumer books, whether digital or printed.

The Next iBook App

No doubt, Apple will add more starter templates geared toward the consumer market like photo books in later updates. By integrating with iPhoto, your picture library can be shared in a digital iBook or can still be printed as a memento for the coffee table. Since iPhoto is also aware of your pictures meta data (location, time taken, etc.) and has built-in facial recognition, the cumbersome process of designing your photo book could be streamlined. Apple already does this with iMovie and iDVD, and iPhoto could have a magic picture book option too.

Not everyone who creates an iBook will want to publish it to the iBook Store, but instead would like to share with a smaller group. Now that Apple has built out a cloud platform for music matching and streaming, the same cloud could be used to distribute your digital photo book to Grandma and Grandpa’s iPad for $2.99. After all, anyone who uses an i device has a registered, trackable account with Apple.

Printers Take Heed

Did Apple, yet again, steal your pulp? Not much changes in the short-term. K-12 Schools historically have been second only the federal government in their bureaucratic quicksand. There are budget constraints, teacher unions, and parents to navigate through. Indeed it may come down to simple mathematics. If a textbook costs a public school district $100 and can be used for up to 5 years(as the Apple video suggests), then the cost is $20 per student and year. The costs of these first digital textbooks are $14.99 and cannot be reused by multiple students. Then there is the cost of the actual iPad which at volume educational pricing would still be more than the $5 per year to match the costs of the traditional textbook. The higher education textbook market where students purchase their own devices and books is where the disruption will happen first.

Printers or platforms that cater to self-publishing should keep as watchful an eye on what happens in this space, especially if Apple continues to develop the author application’s feature set toward the consumer side.

As Apple has shown with the music and film business, it is prudent to plan for a world already disrupted by their technology. So the question to start asking is “What will I do when Apple does steal all my pulp?”

photo: Apple, Inc.

Not too long from now, students might be able to toss an iPad into their backpacks instead of textbook after textbook. At least that is what Apple and a few big name book publishers indicated at yesterday’s event. With the publisher’s backing, Apple announced a starter selection of textbooks for sell but more importantly an authoring application avialable as a free download in the AppStore called iBook Author. After briefly using the application, here are my first impressions.

Apple’s iBook Author App

Your iBook on the iPad

Clay Shirky says in his book Cognitive Surplus that we have too much time on our hands. Most of us spend it watching TV. But not everyone subscribes to this one way street of media consumption. Now those with a desire to participate and create can rally around their interests with others on the social web. As Shirky points out these efforts can manifest in such disparate forms as the frivolous LOLcats to the socially beneficial Wikipedia.

Why does this matter? Shirky proposes that a small shift in our cognitive surplus can create significant results. “The connected population still watches well over a trillion hours of TV a year; 1 percent of that is more than one hundred Wikipedia’s worth of participation per year”, says Shirky. Wikipedia has logged more than 100 million labor hours of free participation!

Not everything requires the scale of Wikipedia, however. Other businesses have built platforms to capture this surplus of time and brain power. Threadless and 99designs are graphics related companies who tap the power of the crowd to generate design. iStockphoto does the same for photographers, videographers, and illustators. The companies have built platforms but in order for platforms to exist the relationship between business and participant has to be mutually beneficial. Participants for the companies above receive a financial kickback and a bit of bragging rights or recognition for their work.

Another common point among all platforms exploit people’s instrinsic motivations. We participate because we want to, not be cause we have to. Facebook works this way. We join to be socially connected to others so we can share what’s happening in our lives through text, photos, and more. Figuring out how to use people’s own motivations as the carrot to unlock this cognitive surplus is the single biggest challenge for being able to create a platform.

There are certainly other platforms that could be built on the peripheries of graphic arts that go beyond design and photography. What other’s would you see as being beneficial?

photo credit: JD Hancock

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