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Zittrain acknowledges the benefits of tethered appliances in an age when the internet is becoming increasingly dangerous but he raises a few spectres of what might result from a world dominated by tethered appliances, where the openness and flexibility engendered by neutral networks and development platforms, an openness that has lead to an unprecedented flowering of productivity and creativity, gives way to greater manufacturer control.

While the threats are many and various it occurred to me that there is an implication for publishing. Imagine you are reading a book on a tethered device like an iPhone or an Amazon Kindle. Both of these devices are connected to Apple and Amazon and are capable of being remotely updated. Imagine you have bought a book which is stored on the said device. Imagine the book is labeled libelous or in some way defamatory, inflammatory or otherwise in contravention of the law and is ordered to be removed from sale.

If you own the print copy then whilst the book can be stopped from selling anymore, you can still possess your own copy. The object still exists and stands as its own testimony and historical record.

On a tethered device that is not necessarily so; as Larry Lessig has noted “Code is law” and the book could be erased as the system operators, having that capacity, are legally coerced into doing so. This has implications not just in terms of ownership of digital materials but has a wider import in terms of how tethered appliances could shift the nature of discourse and alter our understanding of history.

While this is clearly an extreme and hypothetical situation, it’s nonetheless something to think about.

What will emerge as the most popular reading app? Will a viable iPhone platform for sale of commercial ebooks be developed?

Interestingly the price of apps is already plummeting as free apps get more highly and more frequently rated and the paid-for apps drop down the ratings. Perhaps this suggests even more strongly that the App is not The Thing; it is merely a container or a channel for the content, which will still be The Thing. Many of the apps are great if you want to download a tonne of free Project Gutenberg ebooks and so on, but few seem to be offering paid-for titles and those which do often offer just one author’s titles or even just one title. Which ones have developed the best commercial model, or whether there is an obvious platform winner, is still unclear. And surely the existing situation in which tonnes of different books are available as individual apps will only make clarity of choice and availability a nightmare for the consumer?

I don’t agree with Kassia Krozer at Booksquare that DRM is the main issue (though it certainly still minimises massively the number of ebooks we could make available immediately on the iPhone as most authors / agents still insist upon it).

I think many publishers have decided, as Adam Hodgkin argues today, to ‘wait and see’. Now is definitely a time for experimentation (and watch this space, as experiment we will). But I don’t think any boats have been missed, here. What will really move things on is not tonnes of competing apps featuring individual authors or access to free stuff, but a cross-publisher platform for iPhone delivery, which enables clear consumer choice across a variety of titles.

And before you say it, I’m not sure Fictionwise is it unless they make their terms a *lot* more attractive for publishers.