Out From the Digital Stone Age: Tablet PCs Emerge Along with a Lesson

Perhaps one of the hardest tasks to man-up – or woman-up to in my case, whether in PR circles or just around the evening dinner table, is to admit when you’re wrong. Of course, this is mammoth amounts of scholarly work written on why that is the case, but I’ll spare you the details, provide the obligatory link to a book about “cognitive dissonance,” and get to the point of this blog post.

Recently I’ve blogged about two issues: the trouble with statistics, that approximately 47 percent of people like to make them up and the remaining 53 percent fail to interpret them correctly, (yes, that adds up to 100) and that tablet PCs and e-readers, while no doubt part of the mobile digital mix, are not likely to explode in popularity — at least until they are more completely untethered from Wifi-only Internet access.

Well, at least when it comes to the tablet computer portion of the above paragraph….(here goes) I may have been wrong. That wasn’t too hard.

An article in the technology section of CNN.com yesterday reported that adult tablet ownership roughly doubled during the holiday season jumping from 10 percent in mid December to 19 percent ownership in early January, only a few weeks later, and women were the biggest new converts. The Pew research behind the article attributed the surge to continuing price falls (some tablets are selling for as little as $99) and the aggressive marketing efforts of competitors like the Kindle Fire and Barns and Noble’s Nook as they continue nudging their way into what’s predominantly been an iPad 1 and iPad 2 domain.

What’s more, investment bank Morgan Keegan reduced its estimate of iPad shipments in December from 16 million to 13 million, a drop of 19 percent, while estimating that the Kindle Fire sold between 4 million and 5 million units, according to the article. An industry analyst cutting back on its predicted iPad sales is further evidence that the tablet market might be getting more complex –even if the Wifi umbilical cord hasn’t been fully cut.

While a doubling of anything is relatively easy when you start with low figures, (having $2 in your wallet when you started with $1 is a 100 percent increase) it’s quite possible this article and the Pew research are the first indications that tablet computers are finally coming into their own. Think about it, tablets were “born” right around and just after the momentary Netbook craze from roughly 2007, Kindle’s launch year, and 2010, the iPad 1 début. As “second borns” you’d think they’d be more refined products, flying off shelves. Well, it may have taken some warm up time, but apparently, they’re beginning to do just that.

With that coveted laptop-sized screen, who knows, 2012 could really be the “year of the tablet” never mind the smartphone. As communication professionals, it might be time to start thinking and re-thinking both for ourselves and for our clients ways in which tablet PCs can better disseminate a marketing message or push a product.

We already know they’re great for downloading books, have a knack for beating the statistical odds, and have proven this PR professional mistaken. (At least for the moment)

Now let’s see what else they can do.

Long Live Reading, Digitally and In Print

Earlier this week, Amazon announced that for the first time, electronic books for the Amazon Kindle have outsold hardcover books. The online bookseller averaged 143 Kindle book sales for every 100 hardcover copy sales over the last three months. WOW.

Cue the wailing and gnashing of teeth over the impending death of print. And with it some other things, you know, like cultural literacy, Western civilization, and all knowledge.

Although I own a Kindle (and most recently an iPad), I have hung onto the (obviously) antiquated notion that the tactile sensation of a book in your hands (or, for that matter, of a newspaper spread between them) contributes to the experience of reading. So I am sympathetic to the fear that books will become obsolete; should that happen, a sizable chunk of me will become obsolete right along with them.

But I don’t see that happening.

I was watching Ghostbusters not longer ago, and in a great scene Harold Ramis’s character announces to Annie Potts’s harried secretary that “print is dead.” (This, for fans, is just before Spengler tells her that he collects “molds, spores and fungus” as a hobby. Classic.) The point is, Ghostbusters came out in 1984- more than 25 years ago. Not to make Ramis and Dan Aykroyd (the writers) out to be bad prophets, but print still isn’t dead, despite the tremendous advances in technology that might have rendered it such. I’d bet it continues to survive at least for another generation. Or three.

The Amazon announcement doesn’t refute this belief, either. Look closer at the figures, and you realize that they don’t account for paperback sales, which make up the bulk of Amazon’s total book shipments. They also don’t mention the fact that Amazon is aggressively promoting e-books, to facilitate sales of its Kindle, offering electronic titles for as little as $0.99, versus the $9.99 price of a hardcover new release. And let’s not forget that Amazon is only one retailer. They make a good barometer, to be sure, but as the dominant online bookseller, Amazon is in a better position to facilitate the sale of e-books than a brick-and-mortar bookstore with an ancillary website. All of this indicates that the popularity of e-books is indeed growing, but not necessarily that print is doomed.

If print was doomed, if this did mark the first death throe of the beloved book, would that really spell the end of life as we know it? I’m not so sure. E-books facilitate reading, and in certain circumstances can enhance it. They aren’t printed on bundles of dead trees. They are easier to obtain, particularly through Amazon.

Regardless of the ratio of e-books to hardcover to paperback, the figure that’s forgotten is that Amazon sold more written material this quarter than last. More people are reading. More people are buying authors’ work. More people are interested in divining the wisdom deep within a book.

These are positive developments, and we should recognize them as such.

So let’s not sound the death knell for books quite yet, and let’s not fret quite so much about what happens when we must.

In the meantime, I’m going down to the local Waterstone's bookstore (in Richmond, London) to grab the Stieg Larsson trilogy for both of my kids.