Warren on Book Marketing, Social Media, Twitter and More: Steve Jobs Does Amazon a Favor

Most of the predictions of what is coming next are wrong.
The world changes fast, and it's easy enough to notice some trends. That doesn't make it easy to pick the winners and losers.
There's a trend toward ebooks, the iPad is pretty. That doesn't mean Apple will be the king of booksellers anytime soon.
Reminds me of Chris Anderson showing up and AdTech and trying to explain that the magazine industry is going to be all iPad soon.. but when questioned about how the ads would be sold.. admitting that he has never had anything to do with the online version of Wired.
Huh?
Then there's this concept that we all will want to sit on a couch and read our tweet like a magazine.
I think the iPad is a fantastic computer.. part of th evolution of devices. NOT the game changer these pundits think. You may replace your laptop with a tablet, you may do less on your smart phone and more on a device big enough to read.. but with all the zillions of formats and forms in the pipeline, there likely will not be new categories.. just merging of "thing hooked up to the net" categories.
But don't trust me. I can't predict the future.. I'm just commenting on trends.
Amplify’d from www.futurebook.net
They're called anchors, and Apple is very, very good at making them.
The iPad became an anchor at launch. Immediately, everything in the digital reading market and the tablet market was judged against the Apple product. It's what they do at Apple. They come along and they make something which is so well-judged and so pretty that suddenly everyone else has to try to make a product to outdo it on its own terms and of course they can't. iPhone-killer. iPad-killer. Blah blah.
Interestingly, the question was also asked whether the iPad was a Kindle-killer. To which the answer, it would seem, is a resounding 'no'. (And actually, of course, it was never going to be - because the real battle is not between the two gadgets, which are nicely differentiated by function and price, but between the Kindle Store and the iBook/iTunes store, which are in many ways exactly the same thing with different corporate jumpers on).
Amazon are rising to the iPad challenge all the same, with a sexy new graphite skin, a better screen and battery life, a cheaper option, and so on. Eventually, the iPad and the Kindle may be destined to drift together. I'm told that E-Ink touchscreens capable of displaying colour motion images are not so far off, at which point you're talking some pretty serious technological convergence.
But all that aside, why do I say Steve has done Jeff a favour?
Well, back to anchors. The thing about them is that people don't necessarily buy the anchor product, it's just the yardstick they use. So anyone looking at the ebook reader market is going to make a mental list. They're going to put the glossy, sexy, lifestyle-ish iPad at the top, but acknowledge that it's the most expensive of the bunch. Immediately below it will go the Kindle, with all that brand recognition, wireless delivery, assorted apps for your other devices so you need never be without your books. And then comes everyone else, in a bewildering array of colours and uncertainties.
“Our best estimate is that Kindle books will outsell paperbacks sometime in the next nine to 12 months.” — Jeff Bezos
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