No worries there from Apple's standpoint, for the moment of inflection that they are shooting for has a lot more to do with seizing momentum amongst confused and disorganized media companies that are beginning to realize that their underfunding of effective Web publishing strategies is beginning to come home to roost in a big way. The parallel that Apple is drawing on is not so much the iPhone as the iPod, the portable music player which came along at just the right time to herd panicked music industry executives into yet another attractive, convenient solution for digital music distribution that required relatively little thinking on their behalf and plenty of hopes for secure revenues. Several years later, the iTunes music store captures about 69 percent of online digital music sales, disintermediating not only music publishers but the Web in general from the lion's share of premium music revenues.

Flash forward to 2010, when this time it's print and television media producers that are struggling to come up with premium Web strategies. Remarkably, many of these publishers are willing to pretend to themselves that it's worth jumping through hoops for the iPad launch, because, as noted in a Wall Street Journal article, it really doesn't matter if you get only a trickle of data and relationship equity from the "handful" of early iPad adopters. Oh, really. It's another way of saying that publishers are afraid of Apple's power in the digital content industry and not willing to chance that they will be on the outs with trend-setting audiences. In the meantime they enable yet another disintermediating proprietary partner.

One key difference between the iPod launch and the iPad's is that the publishers in print and video have many more well-developed channel alternatives than were available to the music industry when the iPad launched. Book and magazine publishers have Amazon's Kindle, Barnes and Noble's Nook and Sony's ereaders for monochrome content, while a broad galaxy of mobile phones offer color reading experiences for both ebooks and Web content. In the short run book publishers have even been able to leverage the iPad to get Amazon to push up ebook prices to levels more comparable to iPad pricing. But looking at this broken terrain of content ecommerce and packaging, it's a discontinuous mess for the most part, with platform fragmentation that plays into the hands of major Web outlets and device marketers that can muscle in on publishers' value propositions.

All of this argues ever stronger for cross-platform packaging and ecommerce for premium content, of course, a theme that should be familiar to readers of ContentBlogger. Since people are willing to pay for premium content experiences, it makes sense to have an appealing way for publishers to manage this concept via standardized premium Web ecommerce without having to lock into a labyrinth of platform providers that will increase their costs of delivery while slowing down their ability to respond faster than the Web does to deliver interesting content. Yes, it's appealing to limit your channel partners to create some type of limitation that creates the impression of artificial scarcity, but the Web is not radio or television, where the public have access to a tiny fringe of the delivery medium. By frittering away effort on proprietary ecommerce of all kinds, publishers continue to empower acceptable substitutes from all-Web sources that can tap their markets more rapidly and more effectively. The iPad is only one of many new devices that distracts publishers from this fundamental economic reality.

Large media companies will continue to love Apple, and vice versa, as they help to kid one another about the youthfulness of their vision. The people who I saw toying with the iPad in stores were mostly middle-aged or older, or small children with their parents. It makes for an appealing "Family Computing" story line for reporters looking for a new angle, conjuring up pictures of families guffawing together over an iPad game the way that they used to play Parchesi or some other board game. Well, it's a sentimental image, to be sure, but probably not a very realistic one. Most of the kids who I saw toying with the iPad in a local store went immediately to the Web; they know where their content lives, and they're not likely to want substitutes.

So as the Touchable Web begins to unfold, let's not confuse attractive features with the fundamental economic realities that the Web has introduced to publishing. The iPad will be with us for quite some time to come, but the Web is not likely to disappear as an economic issue for publishers just because a good weekend of PR helps launch yet another almost-Web-enabled device. Once the sweet taste of iPod eye-candy wears off, we will be facing the same sour realities that there are a lot of interesting sources of content that it and other devices deliver that have nothing to do with the hopes of major media companies.

The Skiff initiative from Hearst is far more than a tablet gizmo, encompassing distribution on a number of platforms including smart/super phones, PCs and other devices on which their clients would presumably want to view content laid out in traditional print format - and pay presumably premium print prices for it. The reader itself has a display almost as large as a typical notebook PC, with wafer-thin construction, eInk-like resolution and touch-screen activation. The Que reader is a similarly "thin is in" device, but the content that it can manage is oriented towards both traditional media and enterprise document management. The idea behind both devices is that you can have the convenience of digital storage and display without the hassle of dealing with Web-oriented content formats.

The real rationale behind these initiatives, of course, is more of a regressive approach to content than a progressive approach. The Skiff screams at its audience, "Print formats are still relevant, darn it!" while the Que burbles out, "Web sites for collaboration? Nevah hoid of it." And in common to these devices both traditional publisher and enterprise document management business models hope to thrive by locking in support for bright and shiny new high-tech toys that amuse people enough to let them forget that they are paying not just for a pricey device but for outmoded ways of looking at content aggregation, integration and contextualization. The Web site for Skiff tells people first that it's a "publisher-friendly" device, meaning that publishers can obtain revenues from lock-in via proprietary formats while changing as little of its outlook on its revenue streams as possible.

I am hard-pressed to think of an army of executives who have to already juggle laptop PCs, smartphones and other gizmos who will find their world to be truly simplified by this emerging world of proprietary devices. There's little doubt that the tablet format for devices will begin to pick up steam this year, especially those that are touch-enabled devices that help to eliminate the need for physical keyboards. But much of the tablet buzz is smoke and mirrors for journalists, hiding the broader reality that most major publishers are faced with a world in which their revenue streams are drying up and unlikely to be propped up for very long by proprietary tablet plays. None of these devices seem to address the primary issue facing their operations: namely that the Web as a whole is far more interesting and engaging to its readers than any given publication.

Publishers do need to focus on quality editorial operations, to be sure, to ensure that they have a product that's worth the premium prices that they hope to extract on their tablet devices. But their real competition is not bloggers or online aggregators, but other Web formats. The ease with which video can be displayed both on PC and mobile devices and the rapidly accelerating integration of voice services into Web services is creating an environment in which an enormous amount of information is being created and shared with people around the world well before it ever gets into words. The prevalence of status posting services such as Facebook and Twitter make people aware of the first and best news coverage of an event to the point that follow-up reports are as redundant to the general public as they are to stock traders equipped with real-time news feeds.

Yes, the experience of print is engaging, and, often, seductive. But in an online world built around relationships, context and collaboration, investing heavily on keeping up the appearance of the seductiveness and power of print seems to make about as much sense as an 80 year-old investing in a fifteenth round of cosmetic surgery. Premium publishing models are important, but investing in outdated business models to drive premium revenues again and again is a non-starter. It will help to stem the tide of the Web no more than 3-D television or other diverting forms of repackaging. The movie "Avatar" succeeded not because of 3-D images but because it appealed to generations young and old who are moving into new forms of relationships with information and experiences via the Web, enveloped in them constantly to the point that publishing is becoming part of who they are, as I infer in Chapter 10 of Content Nation.

With this in mind, I think that the most important "tablets" are already in many people's pockets - Web-enabled smart/super phones that provide touch-activated access to content and applications that free people from heavy and expensive PCs. Most of these devices cost a fraction of the price of the premium tablet units being promoted for sale. When touch-sensitive tablet devices based on Google's open-source Chrome OS debut later this year, the need for price-sensitive access to full-display content will be underscored yet again. The publishing industry will never grow, much less survive, if it insists on locking its hopes into the most expensive delivery mechanisms available when cost-effective alternatives abound.

What publishers should be focusing on is enabling their content for cross-platform distribution as effectively as possible, demanding premium price points where warranted based on the contextual value of their communities, features and services, not on the fleeting value of a handful of specific devices. If we are headed towards a world in which people will be able to wave an RFID-enabled phone at an item to purchase it, or similarly to execute a business agreement, then publishers need to jump off yesteryear's bandwagon and tool content to be valuable where organizations generating products and services will be thrusting their marketing investments. Gimmicky tablets will prevent this no more than Cinerama-produced films stemmed the rise of television in the 1950s and 1960s. So congratulations to the tablet producers for sucking money out of publishers who should be investing elsewhere. Hopefully next year's CES will see some more sensible solutions to content display and distribution that will be true boosts to publishers.