Interesting New York Times piece about the Apple tablet, which media companies hope will give them a chance to undo the mistakes they made adapting to the Internet. Money lines:
People who have seen the tablet say Apple will market it not just as a way to read news, books and other material, but also a way for companies to charge for all that content. By marrying its famously slick software and slender designs with the iTunes payment system, Apple could help create a way for media companies to alter the economics and consumer attitudes of the digital era.
This opportunity, however, comes with a sizable catch: Steven P. Jobs.
Jobs, it seems, is something of a tyrant: Insisting that the music labels price and do business on his terms. I suspect the newspaper companies are going to calculate that a piece of what Jobs is putting on the table is a heck of a lot tastier than 100 percent of the big slice of nothing they’ve managed to serve themselves, for the most part.