A last-minute thought on Apple’s mythical tablet
It is widely rumored that Apple will be introducing some kind of tablet gadget about half a day after I write these words. It is also widely rumored that a key aspect of this introduction will be deals with major print-media publishers, who will be offering electronic versions of their books and periodicals on the mythical tablet.
Based on some of Apple’s recent work (eg, the iTunes LP format), it is reasonable to assume that these electronic text publications will be marked up in HTML5, CSS, and Javascript. Companies like the New York Times and McGraw Hill are going to need a production tool for flowing their content out in this new format, as well as all the other formats that they’re currently distributing. In short, they’re going to need something like InDesign, but designed for HTML and with the ability to include video, dynamic content, etc.
Ben Hammersley has been writing about electronic media and the future of journalism, but more from a different angle—from the original act of creating stories. But I don’t doubt he’s been thinking about the production side too.
What tool will that be and where will it come from? I doubt it will be Adobe’s GoLive, although that might work. I suspect (assuming all these other suppositions are correct) that Apple will be announcing their own software, taking another dig at Adobe. If all this is correct, it’s going to become an important software market.
And while Apple gets dinged (often justifiably) for a walled-garden approach to their products and services, in this case a win for Apple would be a win for the public interest. A publication format based on existing standards lowers the barrier to entry for other players; if Amazon decides they want to support this new format in the Kindle, they’ll just need to ensure they’ve got a standards-compliant HTML engine on it, and publishers will just retarget the Kindle with the same output. The formats may involve some kind of quirky or proprietary wrappers, but these would get laid on at the last step in the production process. It would be trivial to re-wrap the same payload for multiple devices. For any of these devices to succeed, of course, is another matter entirely.