The New Sleekness

Andy Inhatko has been covering Apple developments since before the company got cool again (and a big thank you to Mista Jobs for pulling us old-school Apple fanboys out of the dark reign of Gil Amelio and John ‘Sugar Water Boy‘ Scully). So it’s inevitable that he chime in with some of his observations regarding the mythical Apple Unicorn (which he refers to as the RAT—there’s a Chinese year joke in there somewhere, I just know it). Andy, as opposed out the majority of the people out there bloviating about the Unicorn, knows his stuff, and I’m inclined to give him a good listen:

I’m convinced that even the smartest predictions can only peg about half of the RAT. Apple has never been afraid to be bold and go big. We all “knew” that Apple was working on a phone. But like all groundbreaking products, it surprised everybody whose predictions were based on devices, concepts, and technologies that they’d already seen.

Of particular note is his very commonsensical take on publishers’ role in the App store ecosystem:

Apple will not sell periodicals and books through the iTunes Store.

At least not in the way that they sell music and movies, as discrete products. Instead, they’ll stick to the mechanism that the iPhone uses: publishers and distributors can release their own apps and build their own storefronts for their own content.

It saves Apple from innumerable headaches and opens the RAT up to be “the reader of Everything.” It also emphatically continues Apple’s momentum as the publishing platform of choice.

Are you Time-Warner? Great. Release a free “newsstand” app for your group’s publications. Apple’s SDK supports in-app purchases. The user can buy or subscribe to magazines easily; the publisher gets ongoing sales through the biggest store for digital mobile content, and as usual, Apple gets a big cut of every dollar spent on that planet.

Are you an independent publisher? Or maybe even just an author with a collection of short-stories? Great. Hook up with an iPhone developer and hand over a copy of your book in PDF or HTML format. He or she can quickly stick it in an app wrapper and you can release it as an saleable ebook without going through any publishers or distributors. There’s no vetting process; Apple is happy to just take 30 percent of the purchase price.

Once you step back from the “publishing is a special little snowflake” attitude that implies that legacy publishers are somehow immune to how the rest of the media world has been affected by technology, this makes a helluva lot of sense. Go check out the whole article—well worth a read—here (via @gruber, who is also worth listening to as an old-school Apple-watcher).

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