But whats still unclear is how this gadget will set itself apart from Apples multimedia-savvy product line, including the iPhone and iPod Touch, as well as the scores of failed tablet PCs that have come and gone. Judging from the companys past moves, were betting that Apples tablet will be a media-centric device, focused at least in part on shaking up the publishing industry.
Apple is already prepared to blow Amazon and other e-book makers out of the water with one key weapon: iTunes. Having served more than 6 billion songs to date, the iTunes Store has flipped the music industry on its head. It also turned mobile software into a lucrative industry, as proven by the booming success of the iPhones App Store, which recently surpassed 1.5 billion downloads. Apple has yet to enter the e-book market, and making books as easy to download as music and iPhone apps is the logical next step.
What can Apple do better with e-books? For textbooks or anthologies, Apple can give iTunes users the ability to download individual chapters, priced between a few cents to a few bucks each. It would be similar to how you can currently download individual song tracks from an album. It might even have the same earthshaking potential to transform an entire industry by refocusing it on the content people actually want instead of the bundles that publishers want them to buy. (Of course, Apple would likely offer the -la-carte purchase model in addition to the option to purchase the entire book as one download a more attractive option for shorter works such as novels.)
College students would love this: Teachers rarely assign an entire textbook, so they would save hundreds of dollars by downloading only a few chapters of each textbook. Apple is already popular in the education sector, so heres even more money to milk from students, with the textbook industry worth an estimated $9.8 billion.
Sci-fi fans might only want one story from an anthology, or a historical researcher might target certain subjects. All Apple has to do to secure the book publishers enthusiastic cooperation is to offer them a generous cut of the revenues, like the 70 percent it currently offers app developers.
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