While flashy iPods hog the billboards and street posters in may urban centers, the quiet revolution is not in proprietary mobile devices but in the rise of pervasive memory sticks that are affordable and increasingly roomy. Why lock your library of premium content into one expensive mobile gizmo when you can hook up all of your favorite devices to one common storage device that travels with you as you please? Publishers that have gone the old "license the platform" route for electronic content are going to have to adjust rapidly to portable storage media that will be far better at putting publishers in a direct relationship with their audiences.

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