Over the weekend, it became apparent to most observers that Apple had another huge success on their hands. Not the iPhone, although obviously that has turned into wildly successful mobile phone bling bling. The App Store has been the more fundamental venture. Apple noted:

Apple today announced that iPhone and iPod touch users have already downloaded more than 10 million applications from its groundbreaking new App Store since its launch late last week. Developers have created a wide array of innovative mobile applications ranging from games to location-based social networking to medical applications to enterprise productivity tools. Users can wirelessly download applications directly onto their iPhone or iPod touch and start using them immediately. More than 800 native applications are now available on the App Store, with more than 200 offered for free and more than 90 percent priced at less than $10.

It would be difficult to make more obvious the implicit comparison with Amazon's Kindle, which also supports the wireless download of applications otherwise known as "books" - and not coincidentally, ebook readers had relatively modest success during this phone holiday weekend. But in the midst of the euphoria of all things Apple, the missed opportunities were all the more glaring. Kassia Krozser observed:

Since there has been significant interest in using the iPhone as an ereader, I was, well, expecting amazing things from the publishing industry. Hopes. Dashed. On a weekend when headlines were there for the grabbing and customers were searching for both toys and content, the publishing industry, perhaps practicing summer hours, was curiously silent. Not a single major initiative, announcement, horns-blaring call to check out these great offerings on iTunes.

Call me crazy, but I’d expect an industry that salivates over moving 150,000 units to be all over the potential for reaching seven million 'mobile is the future' customers. Are you not out there, listening to readers, gauging their interest? They want, you have, and you’re still hiding the goods. I get this isn’t the largest market you have, but is that an excuse to sit on the sidelines?

Of course, the same complaint should be made against publishing's fraternal twin -- libraries. Where, for example, were the software library vendors like Ex Libris or Sirsi, or even open source alternatives like Evergreen, in espousing their new iPhone applications? OCLC should certainly have a georef WorldCat application, like NOW, that would show me WHERE my nearest library is when I do a book search on my iPhone (or GPS equipped Nokia phone).

Was there some mysterious barrier that prevented libraries, and publishers, from grokking that their content might be desirable to have on a hip phone? That reading can be portable? That the sooner they figure out how to facilitate the integration of their content into the media flow of the user, the better off they will be?

Hello in There?

Most importantly, there is no end point here. That's somewhere else, just a little bit further in the distance. Ilya Vedrashko writes in AdLab:

The obvious future of in-store experience: you find something you like, reach into your pocket for a small device, scan the barcode, and the device tells you whether and where the same product is available for a lower price. Brick-and-mortar stores become little more than showrooms for merchandise bought elsewhere.

This future just got one step closer today with the release of an iPhone app Checkout SmartShop, "a shopping assistant meant to help you fine online and local prices when you’re out and about shopping." For now, you still need to type in the UPS code; they are working on converting the iPhone camera into a barcode scanner.

How much time do you give for this app to hit the market: you go into a Blockbuster, scan a box, and the movie is cued up for download on your BitTorrent client?

In a post last January on online experiences and offline expectations, I wrote, "Retailers gotta act quick if they want to have some control over the converging experiences. In a few years, people will be carrying web browsers in their pockets and won't be needing all this retail innovation. Then they would go to Barnes & Noble to browse books and order the ones they like on Amazon right from the store ... "

Not that far, actually, because KDDI of Japan has partnered with Bandai, which in turn has partnered with an American firm, Evolution Robotics, to embed product image search and information retrieval into their au line of phones. And several months ago, Michael Cairns wrote about using Amazon's TextBuyIt SMS application to compare prices in bookstores with Amazon's.

It doesn't take a lot to imagine this world not merely impacting book and video stores, but other mausoleums of physical artifacts, like, ur, libraries. Indeed, one could imagine libraries becoming essentially product showrooms for the generations of material past and future that are represented as books. There's no reason why Google could not develop an application for iPhones, or their Android mobile stack, which would link an ISBN or imaged book title page with Google Book Search, where one could download books for PPV or via licensed access to one's iPhone under whatever terms and conditions were appropriate for the publishers or content partners.

That seems like a reasonable path forward for at least some part of what the library is in the future. Of course, whether libraries transform themselves into that future, or other entrants -- like Google and Amazon -- occupy that space instead, is not yet established. It should not take long.