It’s interesting that the tech world is buzzing with talk that Apple is about to launch a new tablet computer – probably called the iPad – at the same time as the newspaper world is still buzzing with Rupert Murdoch’s declaration that he will soon start charging for online access to newspapers.
At this stage they’re all just rumours about the Mac tablet, or iPad, or whatever it’s called. The latest was sparked by a customer survey by Borders bookstore, in which one of the options to tick was: “I plan to buy an Apple iPad (large screen reading device) later this year.”
OMG (Oh My God), went the blogosphere, Borders’ has the inside scope. Actually they’re probably just guessing like everybody else, but the story was originally broken by none other than the Financial Times, which reported in late July that Apple is racing to offer a portable tablet computer in time for Christmas. The latest rumour has it being released on September 7.
There was probably similar excitement around Mainz in Germany during the 1440s when Johannes Gutenberg and his mates Johann Furst and Peter Schoffer were inventing moveable type.
And then again in the early 1800s when Friedrich Koenig turned up in London with his idea for a steam-driven press to replace the man-powered ones. The first edition of The Times on the new automatic press was published on November 29, 1814.
Now, 200 years later, I have this image of Rupert Murdoch standing at the bridge of the SS Newspaper as it sinks stern first and The Sycophant Orchestra plays the Delusion Waltz. Meanwhile, a flotilla of speedboats whizzes past, spraying his face.
It is now one year and one month since the iPhone Application store opened, offering third party applications developed using Apple’s software development kit (SDK), which had been announced by Apple chief Steve Jobs on October 17, 2007.
There are now more than 65,000 iPhone apps, as they are called. More than 300 new ones are being added every day. The one-billionth application was downloaded on April 26th, just 289 days after the app store was opened. That’s an average of 3.5 million downloads per day, every day. It’s now approaching 2 billion downloads.
What’s this got to do with Johannes Gutenberg and Rupert Murdoch? Well, I now have most of the newspapers that I want to read as applications on my iPhone, including Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal (which is free on the iPhone by the way) and the Financial Times.
I’ve also got shares information, weather, sports results, restaurants, Sudoku, crosswords – all the stuff I used to buy the newspaper for. And I’m not really a big application downloader – I met a bloke the other day who has hundreds of them on his phone. The iPhone also carries my music (1,942 items, or 5.8 days of continuous listening), it acts as a tape recorder, sends and receives emails and is also my camera. As well as a phone, of course.
The iPhone has meant I no longer need to buy a newspaper for anything at all.
The only problem is that the iPhone is a bit small to read with, so I mostly still use my beautiful Macbook Air, a very thin, lightweight computer that opens up like a normal laptop, starts instantly and connects to the internet wherever I am. It sits besides me whenever I used to open a newspaper – at the breakfast table, in a café, on the plane.
No more rubbish to get rid of when I’ve finished, no more dead trees, and no limit to the amount or variety of stuff I can read.
So thanks Mr Gutenberg, and John Walter (who started The Times of London in 1785), and thanks Herr Koenig and Giambattista Bodoni, the Italian typographer who took printing to a new level.
Your work is done now. It’s over. Steve Jobs is here.
As I have written before, Amazon’s Kindle also looks pretty good and is proving very popular.
But I’m looking forward to the Mac tablet. As someone wrote over the weekend, it’ll be the colour flat-screen TV to the black-and-white tube TV of the Kindle.
As for the future of newspapers… there are dozens of news applications on the iPhone (soon iPad). I got to about 200 before I stopped looking (there was Belly Dancing News, PGA News, Gay News and iPhone News).
Some of the brands in this swarming marketplace of news are old-fashioned newspapers, plus TV and radio news stations. Most are free, including the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times; some require a one-off payment of $1.19 or $1.99.
Rupert Murdoch might be able to get his customers to pay a subscription. And, indeed Amazon is pioneering a subscription model for books, newspaper and magazines on the Kindle, which looks promising.
But it would need to be unique, and oh so good – not something Mr Murdoch is used to.
This article first appeared on Business Spectator.
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