First off the blocks were the New York Times , Apple Inc and Alphonso Labs Inc . Who ? You may be forgiven for not knowing that the last-named are a brand new , boys -in- their- early- twenties -working -in -a-Palo-Alto -garage set-up . We shall no doubt hear more of Akshay Kothari and Ankit Gupta , not least because their first product , the Pulse News Reader App for the iPad, was specifically mentioned last week in his WWDC speech by Steve Jobs , first in line of great Palo Alto garage graduates , as a great example of how Apps could focus usage and intensify reader experience .

So it was a great surprize when Pulse was withdrawn mid-week , apparently at the request of the New York Times . Was it because the Pulse advert featured the NYT in its frame ? Was it because the Pulse application was better than the NYT’s own reader app ( while it was up in its original state the app was downloaded in a few days 35,000 times at £2.39 each ) ? Or was it because , although as yet it has no paywall policy , the NYT objects in principle to being framed by anyone ( are we really going to get back to that tired old internet argument ) ? Or did the NYT simply want a cut of the action and didn’t know whom to ask ?

The iPad is the latest ace hookah from which we take our info-drugs . The Pulse App is simply a smarter way of collecting RSS feeds , for which individuals could register for free , and playing them on the new hookah through a software called Safari , which everyone , including NYT , have to use if they are to have access to the new habit . The boys from the garage just gave the NYT 35,000 new subscribers to a service they already offer , and featured the NYT in their advertisements . Seems to me that editors with bouquets should attend their garage doors , not lawyers with writs . And Apple , far from removing the kids ( who won a Stanford Institute of Design award for this ) should give them a job . But Apple , having moved from hardware/software supplier to access controller and owner of the user profile on the Web , must now play a different game with content suppliers . And this one is a dangerous one .Apple , like Google in a similar role , would be too powerful in this position to make life comfortable for either growers or smokers .

( PS I understand that Pulse has now gone back up – with the NYT amputated . Who does that help ? )

At the same time in California a noisy spat was taking place between the University of California and Nature Publishing Group . Nature has been renegotiating its deal with the California Digital Library . Talks surrounded the depth of discount that the library should enjoy : Nature says it currently gives California an 88% discount on its list prices , and wants this to be close to the average of 50% that it gives other users , while California stigmatizes this as a 400% price increase .  California wrote an open letter to faculty representatives on its ten campuses , thus “outing ” the argument  in an attempt to put public pressure on Nature . , who point out that they have capped list prices at 7%, and are the major publisher most compliant with the so-called ” green agenda ” of open access .

No one is going to win this one either . Nature’s output is  “must-have ” to an outfit of California’s standing , but not beyond price . As a major buyer the university authorities could imagine that by making an example of a medium-sized player they will soften up the negotiations with the larger lists of Elsevier , Wiley-Blackwell or Springer . Both parties are in a recession , and both will plead poverty and the need to guarantee survival . It is however as unthinkable that California will not supply its students and researchers with Nature magazine at an average download price , under Nature’s proposed pricing , of $0.56 per download , as it is that Nature will walk away from an institution where its authors litter every street corner . So who blinks first , and who blows smoke in the faces of addicts and users everywhere ?

At the end , these are power plays . Is the University a big enough power block to make its will felt , and can the newspaper use its ownership any more to control how the end-user views its content ? These struggles used to take place behind closed doors . Then the golden rules were – never push your power too far , for in the exercise of using it you are losing it . NYT is clearly some way down that track : if the University of California forces its students to subscribe seperately to Nature then it too begins to lose control of the argument . How much do you need it and can you kick the habit are still powerful questions in the world of commoditized information .

In more sober moments we inevitably discussed two urgent issues amongst the many strands pursued by speakers . The conference opened on Paywall Tuesday , the day when the Times and the Sunday Times launched their joint suicide pact . This topic reverberated around us on both days , with contrary viewpoints taken by speakers who felt , much as Peter Preston did in today’s Observer ((30 May 2010) that a facsimile newspaper would find a small and loyal audience , while others , including the afore-mentioned rock-god , felt that even if you argued  for the value and distinctive nature of the Times ” journal of record ” status and its very high quality columnists ,  the thing to do was to sell these values for themselves and sell them seperately , not look back over one’s shoulder at a format which , literally , now belongs in another world .

But that world was always with us . The other major topic was the future history of the iPad . Adam Hodgkin even passed his round the audience ( there was relief on his face when it eventually came back ) and both he and OUP’s Evan Schnittman dilated interestingly on business modela and distribution in a device -laden world . The sceptics said that the iPad had found the enthusiasts , but not yet a definition of use in a mass market . We may have to wait for 3.0 for the right functionality , but who cares , since we Europeans are still awaiting 1.0 .No one went to the wonderful extremes of Sue Halpern in May’s edition of The New York Review of Books . This is worth quoting ” In fact , Web browsing on the iPad is less than ideal …..But why bother going through a browser to get to YouTube or to read the AP headlines or check the weather when there is a dedicated app for each of these ? This is what is really revolutionary and game changing about the iPad: once there is an app for everything , its Apple’s Web , not the wide world’s ” Wow , this lady is obviously a rock-goddess !

Meanwhile , in the conference room we were more likely to decide that Google was the threat to the Web that needed attention . We covered video advertising , noted the return of display courtesy of Hugo Drayton (Inskin) , and looked at classifieds through the well-educated eyes of Fish 4 . In a hugely impressive session , Louise Rogers , the CEO of TSL Education , gave an object lesson in how to create community and fill it with user-derived content  – and fascinated many of us by her consistent refusal to go for instant monetization , preferring to build community strength in depth to continue to support her recruitment advertising model . This seemed admirable , though the proper approach will be tested by UK  government spending cuts in her sector – and the eventual wish of her private equity investors to make an exit . Her case study , and excellent demonstrations of clear strategic thinking at the Economist , at Bloomsbury publishing and at Complinet meant that no one could leave the room without the conviction that the digital revolution is now over . We even began a serious discussion of the semantic web without a single groan from a full audience representing some 120 industry players .

My apologies : I cannot mention each exceptional speaker by name . But any meeting that starts ( when he reached us ) with a keynote from Simon Waldman , looking back at his Guardian years and the ” creative destruction ” of the markets in which he worked  , and ended with Shane O’Neill giving a rallying cry of hope  based on the re-use of ex-government data  was not short on inspiration . I came away exultant : this industry is going to make it , and neither Google nor Apple can do anything to stop us !

But it was the walls of ancient Merv that brought me down . Having struggled arthritically to the top , and then onto the citadel , the view from what was once the greatest city in the world barring only Babylon exhibits – a desert . After Genghis Khan , the great city , which may have had a population close to one million , was never re-occupied . The deserts of Turkmenistan are unforgiving. Progress stopped here .

Almost the first thing that I saw on my return to work was the agenda for the next ePublishing Innovation Forum 2010 (www.epublishing-forum.com) which I am chairing in London on 25-26 May – next week – in London . Like the view from the top of the walls of Merv , it is inspiring , but for utterly different reasons . It reminds me of the pace and iterative nature of change in an information marketplace that is recreating itself from ground level in cycles that used to take a decade to complete , but which can now take 10 months .

Peering from the top of the walls , I know that I can no longer envisage an agenda that covers the whole spectrum of change . The great team who organize this event now know this too , so the keynotes are particularly important , from Simon Waldman of the Guardian at the beginning ( “The internet ate my business” !) to Shane O’Neill and his political perspective on using third party ( government) content at the end . In between come some case studies I really want to hear – Chris Pilling on the Complinet experience , or the Economist strategy on networks from Aeneas McDonnell . Evan Schnittman at OUP is a wonderful commentator on distribution issues , and Jonathan Glasspool at Bloomsbury is building a new digital world of professional and academic publishing with some interesting acquisitions .

Out there on the walls are also some seasoned observors , eyes narrowed to slits in the face of blinding sun and sandstorms . Adam Hodgkin , one of the industries most experienced venturers , will tell us how you build businesses which exploit iPhone and iPad , while Hugo Drayton , veteran of the Advertising Legion , puts fresh heart into markets which have at times looked like the Karakoram Desert itself .  

And I have only scratched the surface .Ian Eckert knows all about publishing platforms – from newspapers ( I first met him at Portsmouth and Sunderland , a group now as well forgotten as Merv itself ) to UBM , to TES and now back to making things work at Abacus . And TES’s current CEO , Louise Rogers , will be there to show how UGC really works .Other case studies include Fish4 ( who will no doubt remind me that I was once their chairman too ) and Conde Nast . And the panellists come from vital places like Nature , Penguin , Incisive Media and Pearson Education .All this gets somehow shoe-horned into two days ( pity the chairman ) and has so far gained a bigger audience than last year . I am pleased and proud that my colleagues at Outsell are once more , for a third year , its media partners .

Unlike ancient Merv , the network allows media to die in one context while regenerating in another . We have to use events like this to tap into the collective experience of that powerfull  speaking team to find out what natural laws govern that regeneration , whether experience can be replicated , how we can really understand user behaviour , what constitutes value add in the eyes of our users and whether we can understand and work with them successfully before they decide that we are part of the problem , not the solution . While I remain confident that publishing will never become a deserted city , it may be best to find out now what is in the minds of the Mongol horde on the network ,something which the citizens of old Merv never deigned to do .

I look forward to seeing you there .

In my darkness a kindly amanuensis has intervened to warn me that tomorrow They will call to ask me about “The Future of the Textbook “. They have sent 10 questions , apparently . They say I could answer them with my eyes shut , which may be fortunate this week . They also say that I am to concentrate on the 10 years out scenario. I love research when I am asking the questions , but , somehow , I feel a bit worried about providing the answers .  Do you mind if , like Old Tiresias beneath the wall of crumbling Troy , I count my beads in public for a space and soundlessly mouth some types of answers ?

Crumbling Troy ? Surely the age of the textbook is over . In ten years there will not be a textbook market , but a market in networked mass customization of learning objects , held in commercial stores but also freely created by teachers online and traded between teachers . Lesson planning softeware , deriving objects from stores , from teacher networks , and from VLE/LMS environments where these survive in open network usage , will enable teachers to create and trade learning journies/pathways designed for particular ability levels or learning problems . As education becomes more self-applied in older age ranges , higher education and vocational training , so these pathways will be increasingly designed by their users .Learning plans will have assessment and diagnostic tools on board , with the opportunity to rehearse or create new pathways of greater intensity to accomplish remedial requirements . Where these learning workflows are developed by teachers for learners , only a small proportion of teachers will be the creatives , but the work of peer schools and teachers will be widely acknowledged and imitated and customized in other contexts . 

So how will textbook publishers survive here ? The answer is that most of them won’t .Like newspaper publishers in the last five years we shall hear them intone ” Textbook content is king ” and “No one feels safe without a textbook ” until it is obvious to all that like Tom and Jerry in a madcap chase , they have run off the cliff edge and only the violent oscillation of their feet will keep them from plunging into the valley floor . Which they then inevitably do .

Some publishers have hedged this change . Pearson will sell textbooks until the end , but I suspect that long before that Pearson’s Learning Solutions , providing contracted -in school consortia systems integration to cope with these new workflows , will be the dominant revenue source . Elsewhere others have grasped enough of the point to go to interim customization, with Safari Books and Macmillan’s new Dynamic Textbooks demonstrating some of the range of possibilities .

This change to the personalized learning route is independent of gadgets . iPad will not revolutionize it , or iPhone or Android or anything else . These access modes will create accessibility , and add access features , but the learning services  requirement here is more about the network than the device . Collaboration between learners is a key element here.And it is all about mark-up , standards and accessible objects . Most of these are already in place .

Who will win here ? Two or three integrated software/content houses with global markets will dominate . Pearson plus who ? Small software players offering enhanced user experiences will rip across the market like comets , but mostly end up as acquisitions for the big players , or widely emulated feature sets . About a third of content in the market will be created as proprietory objects , another third available to teachers by local school board/authority licensing deals – and the rest will be free and Web-located. The major role for “publishers ” , if we use such an archaic term , will be in locating , indexing and relating suitable objects , and sometimes encouraging teachers to invent new ones if required . Come to think of it , to behave like educational publishers used to do when they sought to s eflect the best practice of the best schools back to the rest .

I could go on , but having had more light today than I am used to , I need to stop . What do you say ? One last question ? Will blended learning prevail ? Since I am on record as saying that blended learning is as much an oxymoron as military intelligence , I am surprized that you ask . The only thing that blends properly is coffee . If you are suggesting that blended learning is as interesting as instant coffee then I might agree . But other markets show us likely patterns : when people grasp the digital point they very soon go for it unadulterated .

These thoughts came to mind this week when reading of Richard Dawkins’ problems with comments on his blog : one fundamentalist creationist called him a ” suppurating rat’s rectum ” and this is as  polite as it gets.  But James Harkin, reflecting on this for The Observer, also notes the way in which opinion follows the crowd on the Web, and the way in which other’s approval sparks our own.  Here we are community sheep, not sapient pigs, and the urge to shout down opposing voices in shorter and terser text (I am always worried by capitalized blog comments) becomes over-whelming.  And social media align us quicker than ever before with received wisdom from our community: watch out then for fascism online.

This week I gave the lecture already referred to here (and which will be appearing in Downloads soon).  One of my questioners asked about the future of reading and writing, and I found myself unable to answer except in terms that he ust have found very depressing.  We do have a new form of reading within the networked community already: “power-browse” is a way of catching at the essence of things, and noting (and sometimes following) the things that link with them.  We also have a new way of writing: into the interstices of our readings we interpose messaging which is intended to convey meaning through association.  This can be highly misleading, and much blogging and messaging seems to me to be about sorting out the inconsistencies. But we are in our infancy: we will learn.

So it is no use complaining that David Shields’ new book, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, is a hymn in praise of plagiarism.  The entire social network discourse is founded upon plagiarism, as users repeat and re-interpret through epetition.  Similarly, Shield’s reviewers have attacked his assault on the narrative form of the novel. They all assert, without evidence, that we need stories.

I do not see this in the network space at present. Nor indeed is experimentation, like Penguin’s attempt to write a community novel, very encouraging.  Cory Doctorow has made a presence from what is in effect blog-supported serialization; Charles Dickens would recognize this form as being unchanged from the serializations of Blackwoods and others of 150 years ago.

So one thing I shall be doing in coming weeks is looking at the development of multiple media art forms in the web , looking at Liza Holton and Kate Pullinger amongst others as artists and publishers who demonstrate a future for stories in multiple media (or “transmedia”, as some are already calling it) publishing.  Any thoughts on other places to look would be welcome .

Meanwhile , there is a lot more to say on the ” future of reading ” question. And the discussion is a very old one , as illustrated by Tim Martin in reviewing Robert Darnton’s The Case for Books http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/56908e02-2262-11df-a93d-00144feab49a.html on FT.com. ”

Part of the delight of Darnton’s book is his adept grasp of how history repeats itself. He has the scholarly nous to show that worries about books and reading habits extend back far further than the information age. His introduction quotes the Italian scholar Niccolò Perotti, writing with asperity to his friend in 1471 about “this new kind of writing which was recently brought to us from Germany”: Gutenberg’s black-letter type. “Even when they write something worthwhile,” Perotti complained, “they twist and corrupt it to the point where it would be much better to do without such books, rather than having a thousand copies spreading falsehoods over the whole world.” Perotti was writing barely two decades after the invention of movable type but the complaint would not sound out of place in the mouths of today’s critics, as they complain of the ephemerality of the blogosphere, decrying “churnalism” and “factoids” and lamenting the Chinese whisper effects of the contemporary internet.”

I am now going out to find a a sympathetic ear ( lop or prick’d will do , but there is something very comforting about the philosophical nature of the Gloucester Old Spot ) and discuss this further . I will let you know what I learn .

There will be other devices and things will get better.  Yet we have a long way to go before we reach the certainties espoused by Sir Stanley Unwin in ” The Truth about Publishing “, which I have returned to browse while writing my talk.

Sir Stanley began his publishing career, he tells us, in January 1906, and published his great work in 1926.  The book is a wonderful testament to certainty and conviction.  He is able to describe in clause by clause detail what publishing agreements and distribution arrangements should contain.  He is absolute in his conviction that there is no acceptable manuscript which cannot be exploited a bit further through good sales arrangements in the English language world of the British Empire, or through effective translation deals at the Frankfurt Book Fair.  And “publishing” is books, as securely as for my father “hunting” was foxes.  Newspapers and magazines were clearly lesser breeds without the law.  And you will only survive if you follow Sir Stanley’s maxims: “It is easy to become a publisher but difficult to remain one; the mortality in infancy is higher than in any other trade or profession.”

I bought my copy in 1967 (the seventh edition), partly because I wanted a job at George Allen and Unwin, was rejected but advised to read the book.  When some years  later I went for a job at Cambridge University Press I was interviewed by the same individual, who had morphed from Mr into Sir Geoffrey Cass.  This time I pointed out that I had read and mastered the book.  This was of no avail in my case, but I was left with a strong idea that “scientific” publishers like these two British knights “knew” how to publish:  they had mastered the ratios and processes to the extent that they had rationalized out the dangerous tendencies (”flair” was the word which earnt special contempt) of wilful book selection and were therefore bound to make money.

When, I wondered, would this sense of certainty and exactitude reach electronic publishing?  Are there yet certain rules which, if we follow them, will keep us out of trouble, or is it inevitable that alongside the businesses dedicated to the transition of the printed book to e-devices and platforms will arise new businesses dedicated to exploiting that technology in original ways for literary, informational or aesthetic satisfaction, without the prior creation of a book?

By the end of my book publishing career in 1985, the business that Sir Stanley saw in such certain terms was beginning its long decline.  Alongside Sir Stanley on my shelves sits “In Cold Type : Overcoming the Book Crisis” by Leonard Shatzkin (celebrated father of the very excellent Mike). My copy is inscribed by the author “For David, to mark the good fortune of meeting in Santander, July12, 1985″.  The good fortune was all mine, as I quickly learnt why it was that the economic model of book publishing was falling from the trees.  And they never followed his sage advice: it is still falling, and the consolidation that removed even Sir Stanley’s old firm is still taking place. Publishers still over-publish and over-print and over-price.  Except that in this Gibbonian epic we may be past Decline and moving towards Fall – an essential step if real re-invention is to occur.

Sometimes these books are scarcely worth reading.  Especially in America, where more banalities on business are pressed within hard covers more quickly than in any other place on Earth.  If you think this when you see “Newsonomics” by Ken Doctor in your bookstore, pick it up and read it.  This is something quite different: descriptive prose and fresh insight about the news business by someone who knows how to interview, can argue a case in lucid English, and writes with the sympathy of an insider and the distance of a practised analyst.  This is no accident.  Ken did more than 20 years, man and boy, before the mast in newspapers, and latterly in the now defunct Knight Ridder, where he had the helm in digital enterprises  in San Jose.  Here at least they took the approaching digital tsunami seriously, even if elsewhere they were unable to ride out the storm.  Ken then became a celebrated news media analyst, both on his own Content Bridges blog and for Outsell.

So this should be good.  And it does not disappoint.  Here you will find a good analysis of what happens in a media segment when the classical gatekeeper editorial role becomes diminished in Authority.  You can see here an industry contracting and consolidating as cyclical change becomes structural.  The growing disaffection of readers is matched by the inability of news providers to come up with any recognition of what their readers now want, and the people who read that disaffection most accurately are the advertisers, who quietly head off elsewhere.  Meanwhile new aggregators re-intermediate with new solutions, turning the old suppliers into secondary sources – and sometimes free sources at that. Meanwhile, readers are becoming newsmen, local is being reborn, and community in the network begins to recreate news forms which in print had taken two hundred years to evolve.  Reporters get to be bloggers, niche is more important than general and everyone is Editor.  A new form of marketing is born around viral distribution, which begins to suggest new roles for news media.  This is a great story, and it has not been told in a better analytic style than here.

By the time I came to the end I almost shed a tear for old Rupert M, struggling on past pension age to feed the family and make sense of all of this.  Ken’s analysis makes it clear to me that you cannot buy your way in (My Space-style). You have to build it and know it, experiment through failure to success.  And you cannot postpone it with a paywall, or hope that television will be immune.  In some ways the visual world of the web will sap the defences of television news more rapidly, aided by the filtering of Twitter and the super-distribution of YouTube.

By a glorious irony, Ken’s publisher is St Martins Press (Macmillan) the global super-publisher who forced little old Mom-and-Pop digital corner bookstore Amazon into a price deal that they did not want in the public interest despite the fact that it increased their margins.  This should mean that the eBook version should be out now too, but even if it isn’t, order this on Amazon or www.stmartins.com ( ISBN978-0-312-59893-8).  Worth every penny of whatever John Sargent tells Jeff Bezos it is worth.

And I hugely respect the innovatory skills of Amazon and the profound impact they have had on the accessibility of books.  However, Amazon cannot be allowed to use its muscle to collapse wholesaling into retailing and eat the margins accruing in a way that threatens the independence of producers.  Amazon is a good online bookseller: it is unsafe for us and them to become good publishers and agents as well.  It is the tendency of networks to collapse real world workflow models and disintermediate players who lack the ability to compete online.  That is a tendency which must be monitored closely in competition law, not because of intellectual property ownership issues, but because the public interest does not always equate with the delivery of supply chain economies.

Wonderful thing , the digital world: by the time I got this online, Amazon had capitulated to Macmillan.  This is sensible and progressive, but  it forces me therefore to  put the rest of the blog as a sort of italicized afterthought below !

In my briefcase I have a netbook – ideal for hotel internet access – and a Sony eBook Reader, plus of course the ubiquitous Blackberry.  Each of these devices was bought to save weight, since as I have got heavier I want the world that I carry around to get lighter.  The next device that I want to buy is one that combines the functions of all of these three at the weight of the heaviest.  So how does the iPad match my demand curve?  Well , it sort of …doesn’t.

Colour is not my high demand, since most of the sad things I read are in black and white.  Price is not my issue , since while I want the cheapest and most effective I can point to a long career of buying over-priced innovation in a triumph of hope over experience.  New functionality is not my issue either: I am now inured to the fact that with any device, including my highly computerized car and the digital controller on the heating system and the new hands free phone installation here, I will never live long enough to understand and implement all of the functionality that cleverer men than I have built in, so innovation and replacement cycles are designed to stop me worrying about that, and bring me to a new device, newly replete with all the things that I shall never learn to use.

Which brings me to Gartner and my ardent wish for the iPad to succeed.  Gartner’s range of projections is as impressive as ever, since long gone are the days when pure wishful thinking was the only fix we had on these markets.  Today, the talk is far more sober and grounded, but no less startling (http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1278413).  For example, the realization here that by 2014 more than 3 billion people on the planet will be able to transact electronically (”transact” , not use a phone) is critical to our understanding of the global networked society.  In that year we are on target for a 90% mobile penetration rate (56% Africa, 68% Asia), and 6.5 billion mobile connections.  By 2013, mobile device connections, at 1.82 billion units, will overtake PCs at 1.72 billion as the primary connection to the network.  If you are thinking now of preparing your web presence at a future point for mobile optimization then you are almost too late: this is the last call for legacy conversion.  The people who succeed in 2013 are running hard now, and are probably not carrying the burdens of legacy web publishing, let alone legacy print publishing.

But the paragraph that caught my eye began ” By 2015, context will be as influential to mobile consumer services and relationships as search engines are to the Web”.  And, later on “context will provide the key to delivering hyperpersonalized experiences across smartphones” and “context will center on observing patterns, particularly location, presence and social relationships…. Whereas search was based on a pull of information from the web, context-enriched services will, in many cases, prepopulate or push information to users”.

What phases me is having Gartner write digital publishing strategy, but in a vital sense they are quite right.  Push and Pull were central to the debate in the early web days, but faded out in the great Age of Search.  In the post-Google world, where search is just another tool, Push returns, wrapped in the guise of personalization.  Will My iPad, or its elaborations, do that for me?  This is the key question.

There is a sting in Gartner’s tail.  I will quote it in full:

“The most powerful position in the context business model will be a context provider.  Web, device, social platforms, telecom service providers, enterprise software vendors and communication infrastructure vendors will compete to become significant context providers during the next three years.  Any Web vendor that does not become a context provider risks handing over effective customer ownership to a context provider, which would impact the vendor’s mobile and classic Web businesses.”

Any Web vendor ? If you are a content or information service provider, This Means You.  The competitive struggle for survival in network publishing intensifies, and the only recourse is to hybrid models and full service solution provision.  There is no ” Just Content” position anymore, unless you want to be a supplier to the sub-contractors of the people who supply the services.

Instead I have had demos of everything I wanted to see.  The aisles have looked fairly crowded but no-one jostled me. I have asked my questions , and even had sensible answers to some of them.  I started by working out exactly what I wanted to see: always a good move at a huge trade show but one that I seem to rarely accomplish.  I settled on a day of looking at Readers: Copia, the Liquidvista prototype, MSI eReader, PlasticLogic QUE (one of the most impressive – and a Cambridge UK development!), the Skiff,  Spring Design’s Alex, the Booken Orizon, the Entourage Edge and the Microsoft Courier dual screen digital codex (why are we suddenly into that word “codex”? – it produces Leonardo da Vinci in my mind).

Then I thought, if I had time after all those stands, I would like to look at the Samsung display and evaluate the E6 and the E10.  And I missed Steve Ballmer of Microsoft using the HP Slate at the opening press conference (I didn’t have a ticket!) so I would rather like to catch up on that, as well as previewing the Dell Streak and Cydle M7.  Well , I did get to see the Ballmer demo, and I also visited those other stands.

And I had a ton of help.  Hats off to Matthew Bernius and his colleagues at the Open Publishing Lab at RIT for gathering all this stuff up in one place for me.  And three cheers for the great people at Engadget , Gizmodo and Teleread for doing the videos and demos and evaluations of all these things, and for answering my fool questions for all the world as if I knew what I was talking about (and to their communities, who spotted a sucker immediately).  And to Bobbie Johnson and the Guardian for getting me in to the Ballmer session and then restlessly videoing the crowded aisles and fevered sales pitches: quite beyond the call of duty.

So I am off to bed now.  A little tired but quite energized by what I have seen.  But there is just one thing I cannot work out.  If I was CES , wouldn’t I put all of these links and demos and ideas on my own site, and run it year round, and offer to continually update punters like me, and create a community which includes all who went to Vegas, and those like me who stayed at home.  The current CES site is a good news site but hardly an eCommerce, 365 days a year community experience.  In the past year I have spoken to two of the greatest business event operators in the world about this, and while they talk the talk of network connectivity they do little more.  One day the physical event will be the satellite activity, and the web will be the core: I hope they transfer their brands successfully before that happens.