Among several others, Michael Cairns pens thoughtful comments on the desirability of publishers embracing mobile platforms such as the iPhone:

To bring us back to the iPhone circumstance, as long as publishers continue to think in terms of traditional functional silos and roles and responsibilities they limit themselves in their ability to leverage their assets. In contrast witness Amazon which has never considered any aspect of the publishing value chain to be off limits and more publishers need to think in this manner if they want to redress some of the advantages Amazon and others retain (or new competitors develop) in the marketplace.

I agree with this.

I argue that moving onwards now, not with haste but with speed, is about setting the groundwork, about moving in advance of requests to go digital (which you will not ever get from the majority of current authors and readers). This is a market space where transforming what publishing is has rarely been more vital and important. As Ryan Sholin observes,

All the market research and focus groups in the world can’t tell you how readers, or customers, or users will feel about the product of innovation until they have it in their hands.

Although currently negotiated rights with authors may usually be restrictive and compel the use of distribution limitations broadly writ as DRM, I think the concept of ebooks as a downloadable blob will be belied by a class of networked applications that assume connections to content, or cached content, in a manner that will greatly empower appropriate repository architectures. Is that DRM? In a way. And I suspect (even as I wear a library / public sector hat) that is the direction I would want to take things as a publisher, or a content vendor and licensor.

This trend is already apparent in video, where NetFlix, Google, Apple, and Amazon are competing to provide real time "purchase and experience" offerings.  Amazon recently moved from downloads to a pure network based model:

Not only is Amazon utilizing streaming in order to deliver "instant" playback but it also means that content doesn’t have to be permanently stored on a user’s hard drive. As a result, Amazon is able to offer another potential benefit to customers: a virtual video library of previously purchased content, stored in the ‘cloud’ (on the company’s own servers) ready to be streamed as many times and to as many compatible devices as the user has access to.

The explosion of interest in mobile platforms is an opportunity to get authors excited for the future, and publishers revitalized - and potentially reorganized. When publishers no longer have "head of digital" directors, that will be a good sign - it will mean digital is integral to the business, critical to publishers' vision of themselves. Just as the CIO is a passing ghost on the landscape of technology accommodation, these positions should evolve into directors of content access, or somesuch. We have some years yet before this is commonplace, but a few will get there before the many.