Sara Lloyd writes at The Digitalist in "Work in Progress" on why publishers have been slow to embrace the iphone space, noting that they would have to be software developers to be "Day One" participants.

But apart from a few digital PR points scored against competing publishers, there doesn’t seem to me to be any huge value in first mover advantage here for publishers, unless we want to make the decision to become software developers. The perception is that the App Store has ‘opened up’ the iPhone to publishers and to e-reading. The reality is that the iPhone has always been enabled for e-reading: you could read a PDF on the iPhone when it launched; you could preview books via online widgets in a browser; you could utilise the ‘TextonPhone’ application. So, whilst we have been awaiting the launch of the App Store with interest, we didn’t see enormous advantage in, for example, creating a reading app ourselves or Being There on Day One, just for the sake of it. Will it really have been a huge mistake if we wait six months to see how things develop and then start to make our books available on the iPhone? I don’t think so, actually. "

This is exactly my point - publishers and libraries must be part of constructing a new channel, an active part of distribution instead of passive content providers.  (Sitting silently looking pretty has also been the historical place for libraries, and it is the wrong place to be.)  Thriving in an iPhone world means making markets, and that in turn means creating compelling experiences. 

Making this kind of impact means making great software. It's not rocket science; it happens all the time.  And theoretically publishers might know something about what the experience of "reading" involves.  What if Pan Macmillan had written a cool iPhone reading app and released it last week, and it beat the socks off its ereader competitors?  What if such an application pushed at the boundaries of our understanding of what online, connected reading looked like? 

Jeff Jarvis writes about the success of Pandora's iPhone app:

How could others use apps like [Pandora] grow? Simply putting content up — a la the New York Times' fine but not revolutionary app — is not enough.

I think winning apps for mobile will be, like Pandora, completely personal; my Pandora is nothing like yours. They will feel live and constantly connected — I can satisfy as much musical restlessness as I can imagine without having to download.

The Cyberinfrastructure 2.0 blog recently carried a comment that Apple's CEO Steve Jobs made at the 2007 All Things D conference, concerning the compelling, competitive strength of networked client applications:

So people are figuring out how to do more in a browser, how to get a persistent state of things when you’re disconnected from a browser, how do you actually run apps locally using, you know, apps written in those technologies so they can be pretty transparent, whether you’re connected or not. But it’s happening fairly slowly and there’s still a lot you can do with a rich client environment.  At the same time, the hardware is progressing to where you can run a rich client environment on lower and lower cost devices, on lower and lower power devices.  And so there’s some pretty cool things you can do with clients.  What I’m saying is, I think the marriage of some really great client apps with some really great cloud services is incredibly powerful and right now, can be way more powerful than just having a browser on the client.

Redefining what mobile reading is, and how it works, could put publishers in a very compelling place -- able to create new services, new opportunities, and most importantly, new communities.  Instead, by choosing to be a mere content provider, they let all of that go. 

It's great place for Google to be.  And a stronger place for Amazon.