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iPads

Explosive Growth of Apple iPads and the Future of Publishing

Explosive Growth of Apple iPads and the Future of Publishing

I’m bringing this up because I think it’s important and it’s dead center on what we are all doing here. I believe that this is something we should pay close attention to.

Here’s a link to an article that shows the incredible sales of Apple iPads which was posted to the Yahoo Publish-L list by author and publisher Brian Vidya

http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-ipad-ipod-mac-2010-7

This morning I sent out a news release for Apple application developer Marc Schulman that many of you may find very interesting. Here’s the link so you can read the news release.

http://www.directcontactpr.com/files/files/historyonthego.pdf

Marc believes that believes that the enhanced visual and zooming technologies built into the Apple iPad are adding whole new interactive dimensions to the world of publishing and education. Here’s an excerpt of what we wrote in the news release:

Can we interest you in experiencing The Civil War from a whole new perspective? Apple developer Marc Schulman has created a new product that utilizes the newly endowed technological capabilities of the Apple iPad and points to significant new multimedia developments in electronic publishing and education.

Civil War and Constitution are the latest releases from Multi-Educator’s History on the Go Series. Each is an application containing a diverse, comprehensive multimedia collection of the most important documents in the history of America. More than just an eBook with links, each program gives users an enhanced visual, interactive audio and visual education experience, using the unique capabilities of the Apple iPad technology. They provide instant access to hundreds of original documents, photographs, maps, video, and presentations.

Marc explains that in an eBook, you typically read text sequentially. With simple links you can open up photos and maybe even a video. However, it is still a pretty linear process..

But with the developing Apple iPad technology, the opportunities for exploring new dimensions is multiplied and expanded in many new ways. These capabilities have all been incorporated into the Apple products.

“The ability to expand photos and move sideways has been included in the smaller handheld iPhone and iPod Touch,” Schulman explains. ”It has been clearly optimized on the iPad. You have to experience what it is like to zoom photos, turn directions, watch screaming high-definition color videos with special effects and with high fidelity headphones all on your lap top.”

Schulman believes that this has significant implications to teaching and to education. “It brings education alive in ways people have not imagined. This has phenomenal implications to creative publishers and educators. The total experience is now what really matters.”

My own mini-brag on this is that within hours of transmittal of the news release this morning we received requests from several dozen top national media for the key code, which in addition to the news release and screenshot jpegs, is all we offered the media to review. This includes the Associated Press, Fox News, NBC News, and several national magazines and news services. Last time I sent out a news release for Marc Schulman and his Apple apps, we also made Business Week and Entrepreneur Magazine. I will note that we got more media responses last time that said “I don’t have an iPad” than we did this time, and this time, we received quite a few email’s where media expressed feelings that indicated that they were giving serious thought to getting one soon. One managing editor for a writing magazine we all know about wrote back that this all was sounding quite promising and that he was simply waiting for the iPad 2.0 without the kinks and bugs that exist in the present version.

There is also related news in USA Today’s article by Edward C. Baig, talking about the “enhanced ebook” published for Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett. In this article note the way the “enhancements” are actually marketing pitches for the other products available in the branded publishing line.

http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2010-07-20-follett20_ST_N.htm

There are lots of implications here worthy of discussion. This showing demonstrates a small, significant and growing trend for media to be responsive to targeted PR for ebooks, although being at the head of the class is a distinction here that others may have a hard time filling.

The implications to publishing are even more important. The days of “simple ebooks” with text and even photographs may be numbered. The future is going to be knowledge-laden multimedia publications – with highly integrated interactive software that offer users (“readers” although this term may also be dated) the ability to experience knowledge with more senses than just their eyes and imagination.

What do you think about the differences between the Apple app business model, traditional publishing, the new ebook model with print on demand, and the Google business model, based on direct sales and advertising.

Any thoughts anyone?