Apple iPhone implications for scholarly communications

["Joseph J. Esposito" <espositoj@gmail.com>]

The launch of the Apple iPhone may be a watershed for a number of 
industries, including scholarly communications.  The dust has not 
yet settled, and won't for a while, on all the implications of 
the new product, as even a casual investigation of the 
blogosphere will demonstrate, but for those who, like myself, are 
principally concerned with intellectually serious text-based 
media, there is the very real possibility that the iPhone is the 
industry's long-awaited ebook reader.

My own non-radical view has long been that ebooks would 
eventually supplant print.  How soon?  Ebooks could become like 
audiobooks, perhaps 6-8% of the total book market in 3-5 years. 
Apple may accelerate that, but it won't slow it down.  Thus, 
publishers (and there are not a few) who believe that free online 
posting of texts can drive sales of hardcopy are exploiting a 
short-term marketing opportunity.  Nothing wrong with this, but 
no one should confuse free online text (aka Open Access) with a 
strategy.

The more intriguing issue presented by Apple is how the company 
could take a dominant, if not controlling, position in this 
evolving communications ecosystem.  Widespread use of the iPhone 
(Apple's iPhone, that is, not Cisco's) could lead to more and 
more ebooks, but Apple's content management system, unfortunately 
named iTunes, may be the integrative service that binds 
users--and profits--to Apple.  A user could use the iPhone as a 
phone and, since it is built on the GSM standard, could switch 
from one GSM carrier to carrier without changing phones (common 
in Europe).  A user could also purchase another GSM phone, which 
has been tarted up to resemble the iPhone.  But a user is likely 
to store all his or her contacts, music, professional data, 
photos, and, yes, ebooks on iTunes, locking that user into 
Apple's gravitational field.

This is how the DOS (now Windows) monopoly got started, through 
the ingenious exploitation of network effects. Of course, Jobs 
lost that battle to Gates the first time around.  Is he likely to 
lose twice?

As members of the academic community ponder the future of 
scholarly communications--the role of Elsevier, the potential of 
Open Access, the ubiquity of Google--they may like to add to the 
list of possbilities that iTunes is The New Academic Library 1.0.

Joe Esposito