There was a new article in the Wall Street Journal last night that “leaked” a little more information on what might be in store for next week’s Apple event.
From the WSJ article:
Apple has recently been in discussions with book, magazine and newspaper publishers about how they can work together. The company has talked with The New York Times Co., Conde Nast Publications Inc. and HarperCollins Publishers and its owner News Corp., which also owns The Wall Street Journal, over content for the tablet, say people familiar with the talks.
New York Times Chairman Arthur Sulzberger declined to comment in an interview Wednesday on its involvement in the new device except to say, “stay tuned.”
And from a seemingly unrelated article at CNET News:
Apple executives have spoken to the top four recording companies about plans to offer a streaming music service free of charge to consumers, multiple music industry sources told CNET.
Apple’s managers haven’t revealed many details about their plans but did discuss offering iTunes users a means to store copies of their music libraries on Apple’s servers. The benefits to an iTunes user would include the ability to back up music and access songs off the Web from any Internet-connected device and conceivably from anywhere in the world.
It’s hard for me not to think that the two of these are somehow linked. Yes, cloud storage for streaming your digital audio and video media, but what if that’s really just a secondary benefit of cloud-based storage and subscription services for all your “dead tree” media?
I’ve said before that this is really the kind of device that would work best for me. Not the ridiculous download-an-app-for-every-new-issue scheme that’s currently being pursued by Condé Nast on the iPhone, but all current and back issues available in the cloud, not stored forever on the device.
This makes perfect sense to me. If this is the real deal, I see it as a truly groundbreaking device/app/service, and the kind of “book reading” tool that I could easily latch on to.