And the battle ends almost as surprisingly it started. Amazon has now buckled to MacMillan’s demands. From Mashable:

Now Amazon has made its own statement on its forums. The gist of the message: you win, Macmillan.

Specifically, Amazon is giving into Macmillan’s demands because it “has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books.” Clearly Amazon is going along with this unwillingly and believes that consumers will prove that Macmillan’s new prices are unreasonable by not opening their wallets.

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Mashable posted this great info-graphic from Viralheat for the chatter this past Wednesday. After all, did you notice the State of the Union and Apple’s iPad announcement were on the same day? Of course you did!

Mashable points out:

Here are some state about the Apple Event:

- Total mentions in social media: 496,842
- Tweets: 322,974
- Impact on Twitter: 22,001,377 (Unique people that were exposed to one of the above search term on Twitter)

In the 48 hour time period, there were 112 tweets per minute about the iPad and the rumors surrounding it.

Now, compare it to chatter about Obama’s address:

- Total mentions in social media : 68,201
- Tweets: 50,984
- Impact on Twitter: 13,571,805

Jobs looks like he won by the sheer numbers, but he did have the rumor mill burning up the inter-tubes the two weeks+ beforehand. Obama didn’t have that advantage. However, the President did get the most praise. Wonder is part of the positive loss on Jobs was the fact that really, nothing could have lived up to that fever-high bonfire anticipation.

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Hundreds of Uses, Dozens of Business Fields to Rock

Architecture, salesmen or saleswomen, retail floors, inventory, healthcare, education, design, artists, realtors, hotels, restaurants, gaming…the possibilities are endless.

Medical

Many reports have surfaced that the iPad team has met with many medical professionals in hospitals in the Cupertino, CA area. The medical filed could have all sorts of uses for such a device. Viewing CAT-scans, pulling up a patient’s history with the touch of a finger, and have that information always on and updated.

The medical field has spent billions to become paperless. Read Write Web reported that Kaiser Permanente alone spent four billion. However, just like the smart phone market the software and devices are clunky and the tablet could upend this market. Apple’s intuitive platform, and the iPhone developer SDK provided a springboard for a remedy. Already there are iPhone apps that are beginning to make this shift happen. As Read Write Web reports, there’s Airstrip (allowing a doctor to monitor a patients vital signs from afar) and Haiku, which is the likely killer app that will succeed in the hospital field.

Education

Education is another field that is not only important to Jobs and Apple, but is a field that is prime real estate for tablet adoption. Text books have always been heavy, costly and often outdated quickly. You can imagine a college students text books all on one tablet. This is a field that could explode into a new direction, making way for living documents and textbooks that are updated via WiFi when synced with the iTunes iBooks store just like apps are now.

Depending on your age (and this could be true still today) you may remember history books were outdated, mostly because the books were purchased years in advance and used for far too many years to save money. Schools have historically been strapped for money, cutting many needed programs such as Physical Education and the Arts so budgets could allow for costly textbook upgrades.

For example, a University of Florida study found this:

“Students are learning about Christopher Columbus from books that refer to the native people he encountered as heathens and savages, according to a new University of Florida study.

Most books in elementary school libraries and classrooms have outdated information and outright distortions about the explorer’s expeditions, according to UF researcher Donna Sabis-Burns. She conducted the study for her doctoral dissertation in UF’s College of Education.

Sabis-Burns sent an online survey, receiving responses from 189 teachers and 89 librarians who provided a list of 182 books. Six out of 10 books failed to identify the native Taino people whom Columbus encountered by their tribal affiliation, instead calling them such things as “gentle heathens” and “naked, red-skinned savages.”

Take this example and multiply by 49 states and you can see the problem with analog books is massive. Fortunately, there have been measures taken by some states to switch to e-books, most notably California due to their now famous bankruptcy. Governor Schwarzenegger stated,

“It’s nonsensical and expensive to look to traditional hard-bound books when information today is so readily available in electronic form,” Schwarzenegger wrote. “Especially now, when our school districts are strapped for cash and our state budget deficit is forcing further cuts to classrooms, we must do everything we can to untie educators’ hands and free up dollars so that schools can do more with fewer resources.”

To Be Continued…

Coming Up in Part Three…the other fields and a big kahuna; Gaming.

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Amazon and MacMillan (one of the largest publishers in the US) have been in disagreement for over a year, the dispute being on the rice of its e-books. Amazon today pulled all MacMillan books off the Amazon store until further notice.

The New York Times explains:

The publisher’s books can be purchased only from third parties on Amazon.com.

Macmillan’s imprints include Farrar, Straus & Giroux, St. Martins Press and Henry Holt. Popular books, including “A Long Way Gone” by Ishmael Beah, “Wolf Hall” by Hilary Mantel, “Middlesex” by Jeffrey Eugenides and “Finger Lickin’ Fifteen” by Janet Evanovich, could be purchased only from third-party sellers on Friday night.

MacMillan is one of the publishers onboard with Apple Inc’s iPad iBooks store. Unlike Amazon, Apple’s store gives publishers more leeway in pricing their content. The Times reports and others have speculated that the pricing will be closely tied to hard cover books, in the $12.99-$14.99 range, as opposed to $9.99 for the Amazon Kindle.

One of the ways those higher prices could be justified are the unlimited ways to add value to e-books on the iPad – such as adding video interviews with the author, animation at certain plot intervals, or with education – a chart the is alive, and changes with a constant link to the store/web.

Steve Jobs told Walt Mossberg in a rapidly deployed video shot just after the iPad presentation that “publishers are actually withholding books from Amazon because they’re unhappy.”

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Steve Jobs and gang pulled the cover off the Apple tablet named…iPad! Ta-Dah! We’ll get used to the name, even with the MAD TV skit being replayed over and over again.

What really dazzles is what we got – the price alone was worth the wait: starting at $499! for the 16GB version. Here’s more specs: 32GB is $599 and 64GB is $699; All Wi-Fi versions. With 3G, add $130 to each model. $629 $729 and $829. AT&T 3G can be purchased with no contract and can be canceled any time, $14.99 for min. use, $29.99 for unlimited. Battery life is 10 hours, not sure if that is Apple hours or not. The other surprise: A Keyboard Dock ($69) with a normal keyboard grafted on to the front of a plastic dock. Vertical or horizontal settings.

Most people immediately point out that there’s no camera – ah-ha…there’s a accessory for that! For $27 there’s a camera attachment. As with the iPhone and iPod, accessories will be streaming in by March for certain.

For the software: You have a brand new version of iWork, all touch compatible, each one for $4.99 each. The biggest thing people have been waiting for is the book, newspaper, magazine publishing arm of the iTunes store. That’s called iBook – where you can buy anything you can buy for your Kindle and more. The Maps application is amazing, though we’ll have to see the video of the keynote to really speak on that.

Overall – We have turned a corner – we’ve now approached the Star Trek era – the mouse will be eventually phased out. Th iPad literally is a new product category, and changes the way we use computers. More to come soon…Oh and our last thing? We keep hearing people that seeing it online, or in the keynote doesn’t do it justice, it must be touched…must hold it in your hands to get the magical aspects of it.

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Well – I’m obviously too busy sometimes to get all the dirt when it happens – but looks like Seth Godin probablt saw the blooper on CNBC – the CEO of Magraw-Hill talked all about Apple’s Tablet – here’s what he said:

Yeah, Very exciting. Yes, they’ll make their announcement tomorrow on this one. We have worked with Apple for quite a while. And the Tablet is going to be based on the iPhone operating system and so it will be transferable. So what you are going to be able to do now is we have a consortium of e-books. And we have 95% of all our materials that are in e-book format. So now with the tablet you’re going to open up the higher education market, the professional market. The tablet is going to be just really terrific.

And…there you go folks! Like we didn’t know, but still – and I’m guessing that Apple can’t really get mad at the guy – since they are firm partners now. Your thoughts? Gizmado has more

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Wow! Seth Godin jumps the gun and announce the tablet – the froth that was turned to butter is now becoming spun sugar…I think the next few hours are going to be interesting – if Seth does this, who else will? Here’s what he says:

There’s going to be a lot of hoopla this week, some of it on this very blog (three posts already today!).

I want to be the very first author to announce a new project for Apple’s tablet…

Steve Jobs will probably never speak to me again for announcing before his launch. That’s okay, he never speaks to me anyway.

the whole post is here

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I seriously don’t see iPad as the true name of Apple’s new tablet – but then again, college humor aside – it does match nicely with iPod-iPhone-iMac – iTablet has three syllables…Hmm…but I do think the commercial’s fake, notice the left side has a nice border of black, and the right does not…

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By Christian Messer

Too often I hear people or read online, “Who needs a tablet?” or “It won’t do anything I can’t do with my iPhone or Macbook.” Well, sure, that could be the case usually…but we’re dealing with Apple here. Remember that. Why is that so important? Because Apple rarely if ever does anything half-hazard when creating hardware.

They find enough uses that outweigh not having the device. They spend years perfecting a product and they don’t make hardware to cannibalize other hardware in their line. They make things that we don’t even know we need…until they show us why we need it.

Apple sets out to revolutionize every time they unveil a new product – more times than not, if it doesn’t have that Wow factor, it’s not worth their time. They are the best at what they do: setting the bar very high, creating the space and reeling everyone in because the product is superior to the homogenized norm.
Take a look around… all the new smart phones that are out now or will be out soon? They look and act like the iPhone. A Windows user told me the other day, “yeah, my friend was eager to show off his iPhone knockoff to me at dinner…a Droid something.” Even the Zune can’t compare unless you quibble over HD on a 3” screen. The Zune is another knockoff, one that unfortunately for Microsoft has not been a really big winner. And yet, we are now hearing of a Zune phone…Crazy.

I believe that Apple’s tablet will be very much like the iPhone in revolutionary terms. This time, it will target the publishing industry for certain, but there are and will be hundreds of other uses we haven’t even dreamed about. With the iPhone, once Apple gave the SDK to developers and anyone else that wanted it, the expected came out when the iTunes app store opened. But then something really marvelous happened. People – everyday non-developers to the pros, began to create apps for everything imaginable. Who knew you could carry your entire health history with you where ever you go, on a phone in your pocket? Just recently we heard a report about the first iPhone baby.

What is that? A baby that was conceived and delivered with the help of an iPhone app. The mother had tried for four years to conceive with no luck. She tried the iPhone app which works out when a woman is most fertile. Two months after using the app she fell pregnant. She delivered a healthy baby girl, exactly on the date the iPhone app predicted she would deliver.

So, what could a tablet do and why would you need one? And just how will Apple compete against, say,Amazon’s Kindle? Thats’ up to Apple to unveil, but we can guess and brainstorm right? Here are a few challenges and ingenuity kernels that I have considered:

E-Ink

A lot of people bring this up as a deal breaker, “I’ll keep my Kindle if I REALLY want to read,” they say. Many assume, as most usually do, that Apple will just unveil a very large iPod Touch, back lit screen and all. This of course presents a hurdle in many minds -”My eyes will get tired before I read just two pages of a book.” Do you really think that when Apple decided to directly target the Kindle that they didn’t have a way to prevent this issue?

Barb Dybwad from Mashable stated, “Other companies have color e-ink products in the works, but even they don’t see any mass production before the end of next year at the earliest. And even when we get there, e-ink technology faces unmatchable competition from the existing technologies of LCD and OLED in the visual quality afforded by the contrast ratio department. The best a color eReader can hope for currently is about 20 to 1 contrast ratio, with LCD typically measured in the thousands to 1 range and OLED in the tens of thousands to 1.”

I believe that Apple has found a sweet spot way to get this done. They’ve taken up the challenge and figured it out. I can’t imagine that they would just produce a very large iPod Touch and not address the eye-strain issue. My prediction is that they’ll have a E-Ink mode that can be toggled on and off in some fashion.

Publishing Power House

Everyone…really, everyone has been affected by the publishing industry. 525 magazines shut down in 2008 alone. Silicon Alley Insider reported that 2009 was the year that newspaper died. 105 Newspapers shuttered, 10,000 jobs gone with them, print ad sales dropped 30% in in Q1 of 2009, and 23 of the top 25 newspapers reported a decline in circulation of 7-20%. That’s just before that report was published in July of 2009.

Newspapers and magazines are just the tip of the iceberg. Book publishing houses have not faired well either, as Steve Jobs so famously said, “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.” You can take that with a grain of salt, but he might’ve had a point. However, because nothing else has been out there, the Kindle and Sony’s E-Reader have become popular and have caused a surge in E-book sales.

There are a couple of flaws in the E-book market right now though. One is E-Ink – it is only in black and white, no color for photos etc – and most E-books (according to publishers) sell for $9.99 – not a big profit there. Apple will change this landscape. How? By creating enhanced E-books with interactivity, author interviews, author biographies, and video-like bells and whistles that add value. Remember how the music industry felt they were trapped into the iTunes pick and choose system, cutting out album sales?

Apple helped change that by creating the iTunes LP. This will be naturally folded into its new book, magazine and newspaper publishing arm. Add extra value, and the user will buy the whole album, right? That works with E-books too, add extra value, charge for it and you get back some of that profitability lost on E-books before. Photos in splendid color, videos, e-commerce coupons, fan-club inclusion, you name it, it could be done with this type of eco-system.

More to come in Part 2

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Ah…as the day progresses and the days are in single digits until the big Apple announcement, the froth that has been whipped up in the blogoshphere and tech world probably will turn into butter. 9to5Mac is reporting that they sat down with several publishing sources, from companies not mentioned by the Washing Street Journal. Here’s the main details they provide:

Apple has been moving very aggressively over the past month and has stepped it up since the event announcement last week. Both said they’d be surprised if Apple doesn’t have a deal of some sort worked out by launch. This wouldn’t necessarily be a nuts-and-bolts type of deal, but one where they agree to work together. Apple can say at the event we’ve signed up “all of the major publishers”.

Apple has been pitching itself against Amazon’s model specifically to the publishers. Apple’s “Agency model” gives publishers more control and freedom for pricing vs. Amazon who’ve recently restructured a small part of their publisher offering to compete with this surge by Apple. We received the exact same wording from both people so we think this is the type of thing that Apple is touting to all publishers. We might hear about “the Agency Model” vs. Kindle’s at the event.

Scrollmotion, the biggest current book contributor to the App Store, isn’t part of this deal and Apple is dealing directly with the publishers who are already signed up with Scrollmotion. The deals would cut Scrollmotion out of the loop or as one exec put it: “The smaller outfits are going to get screwed”. We’ve reached out to Scrollmotion for comment and will report back anything we hear.

Apple was looking for content to bring to the event — perhaps one example — but doesn’t expect to have large libraries of material in their book store until “mid 2010 at the very earliest”

Separately, one source said that no prototypes were brought to the meetings, but the tablet was described as “a very-readable 10-inch glass screen smaller in size than the Kindle DX with a similar weight.” The Apple people also mentioned that the “software was the key to the experience and it would be the game changer”. Apple also made the analogy of the shift from B&W televisions to Color with respect to the Kindle vs. the Tablet.

One other big thing: They say it isn’t going to cost anywhere near $1000 as has been reported elsewhere.

Complete story at 9to5Mac here

P.S. Oddly enough when we went to Scrollmotion’s web site? It featured an iPhone with an Iceberg Reader…weird.

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