When Apple banned Adobe’s Flash from its iPhone and iPad, it knocked the wind out of Adobe’s strategy to bring its widely-used design tools to the emerging smartphone and tablet platforms. This has left most publishers in limbo without a clear strategy to get onto these platfoms.

Of course, no-one expects it to be quite as easy as this video shows, and there are some well-founded concerns that Adobe’s first-generation solution might turn out to be a fair bit of smoke and mirrors.

But put all this aside for a moment and just dream a little about how things might be soon.

Amazon dropped the price of its Kindle almost 30% to US$189 from US$259. This is less than half the original US$399 price tag when it was launched two and a half years ago. Amazon’s move trumped Barnes and Noble which just a few hours earlier cut its Nook eReader’s price from US$259 to US$199.

These big price cuts from the top sellers mean the gap has narrowed considerably between them and the low cost Kobo Reader. In the US, the Kobo is sold by Borders at US$149. While its no-frills package of essential features looked attractive when the gap was large, it will put pressure on that strategy now. Rather than cutting the Kobo’s price, Borders in the US has offered a US$20 gift card to effectively cut its price to US$129.

No sign at this stage that Australian and New Zealand prices for the Kobo reader will change. In Australia, where both the Kobo and Kindle are available, the Kobo is still A$199. A Kindle including freight will cost A$235 at the current exchange rate, plus GST if any is levied. In New Zealand, the Kindle — frustratingly — remains unavailable so the price drops in the US are mostly academic at this stage. But, if it were available in New Zealand, a Kindle would be about NZ$290 landed. The Kobo is currently NZ$295 incl GST.

While it might be tough on margins, the momentum of the iPad and the push for further price drops for the e-Ink devices is going to be great news for ebook sales.

• Apple’s iBooks
• Amazon Kindle for iPad
• Barnes and Noble eReader
• Kobo Reader (which is also the Borders eReader and will soon be the Whitcoulls eReader for the iPad)
• Ibis Reader (this is interesting because it’s actually an HTML5 web app rather than a native iPad/iPhone app)
• Stanza
• vBookz (actually a text-to-speech reader app rather than a traditional e-reading app)

Among Perlow’s findings:

• Apple’s iBooks is the flashiest but “of all the reader applications we’ve looked at, it is actually the least functional. Apple designed iBooks to behave and act like a real book, and focused more on the aesthetics and UI than actual App functionality with the initial release.”
• Amazon’s Kindle wins in terms of the size of its 600,000-title ebook store but “from a feature perspective, the Kindle software is pretty weak when compared to its hardware counterpart.”
• Interestingly, it’s the Barnes and Noble eReader that wins the highest plaudits from Perlow. “Of all the paid content readers, by far the best one in existence is probably the Barnes & Noble eReader application.” But it’s probably not so useful outside of the US because of its ties to the very US-focused B&N store.
• Of particular interest in this part of the world is the Kobo which will shortly be released in this part of the world as the Whitcoulls reader app. For Perlow, it stacks up pretty well. “It’s extremely polished and very well-designed,” he says.
• The Ibis Reader is different from the others in being written in HTML5. It reads non-DRM ePub files. “Compared to the other reader apps on this list, the reading features within Ibis Reader are pretty spartan. … However, the interface is very clean and simple to use, and the reading experience is actually pretty good when compared to the native apps.”
• Stanza was the original e-reading app that popularised e-reading on the iPhone. It’s the latest to the iPad party but the result is good according to Perlow. “Stanza is by far the most sophisticated e-Reader application for iPad, as it supports not only the open EPUB format but also the legacy Mobipocket, PalmDoc (DOC), Microsoft LIT formats as well as HTML, PDF, Microsoft Word and Rich Text Format (RTF)…. If you have lots of content that you’ve collected over the years, Stanza is definitely a must-have app. There’s absolutely no downside, it’s free to use and does more than any e-book reader app on this list.”
• vBookz is a US$2.99 text-to-speech reader which works only with public domain ebooks  at this stage. Perlow concludes, “vBookz is an extremely interesting and exploitative iPad application, and one which may be good for getting children interested in classic literature and also a useful app for the visually impaired.”

Read the full ZDNet e-reader app review here.

UPDATE: ZDNet has also posted a comparison of ebook reader apps for the Google Android platform. Check it out.

That looks set to change as an influential magazine standards group, the IDEAlliance, has thrown its weight behind the development of the next generation ePub, the standard adopted by book publishers for ebooks.

Speaking at the Magazine Publishers of America’s Dimensional to Digital conference last week, Dianne Kennedy, vice president of Media Technologies at IDEAlliance said her organisation was working with the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) to bring rich media and magazine content to the ePub standard.

IDEAlliance is the group behind PRISM, the XML standard for magazine and journal metadata.

The book industry’s ePub standard is widely supported by device manufacturers, publishers and distributors.  Convergence with the magazine and newspaper industries would make a lot of sense for publishers, consumers and device manufacturers.

While ePub currently lacks some features that are important to magazines, its general approach based on XML and web technologies including HTML and CSS is very sound. Combined with its widespread support among device manufacturers and industry heavyweights Apple and Google, it offers a good foundation for digital magazines.

The standard will also be developed “with an eye to advertising”, says Kennedy, another key feature for magazines.

The working group hopes to have the first draft of a standard published by September 2010.

Among the 14 goals that the IDPF’s working group has identified for the next ePub specification, currently designated ePub 2.1, several are particularly important to magazines:

Need for rich media and interactivity support.

Need for enhanced article support. The fundamental atomic unit of magazines and newspapers is the article … it is desirable to support a work flow where PRISM content can be delivered as EPUB.

Need for a means to convey page-level layouts and target multiple display surface sizes in a single publication.  … This is a barrier to supporting books with more complex information designs, as well as digital magazines …

Currently there is no mechanism to identify and include advertising in publications, which is required in several markets.

For more, see this article from eMedia Vitals.

iOS4 is a free upgrade for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPads. It’s rumoured that another platform will be eventually added to the iOS family when Apple uses it to revamp its unsuccessful Apple TV set-top box.

Of note for publishers:

• Apple is talking up its iBookstore as the third store platform, following the original iTunes and the App Store. It claims that, among the large publishers who’ve supported the iBookstore since launch on 3 April, sales through the iBookstore now represent 22% of their ebook sales.
• The iBooks e-reading app has now been ported to the iPhone and iPod Touch.
• The iBookstore now operates wirelessly, no PC required, and will syncronise your ebooks across multiple Apple devices. This includes your ebook library, the place you’re at in the ebook you’re reading and — a new feature — your bookmarks and annotations.
• iBooks now reads PDFs as well as ePub formatted ebooks. This will make it useful as a reader for business documents as well as adding what is still a popular ebook format and might serve as a useful interim “quick and dirty” format for illustrated books and textbooks.
• On the hardware front, a new iPhone model was announced which will improve the reading experience with a higher resolution, 960 x 640,  327 pixel per inch display and an extended battery life.
• iOS4 will also see the launch on 1 July of Apple’s mobile advertising platform, iAds. iAds will open up a new source of income for app developers, potentially opening advertising to any of the quarter of a million apps. Apple will take 40% and return 60% to developers. In a show of strength, it signed up US$60 million of A-list advertisers to support the launch, a figure Apple claims is half of the entire projected mobile ad spend for the second half of 2010. One neat feature will be the ability to launch web ads from an in-app browser so that the user remains inside the application when viewing the advertiser’s website rather than being taken out of the app to launch the Safari web browser.

Finally, in what is becoming an unfortunate pattern in Apple’s announcements, a revised developer agreement takes aim at potential Apple rivals, locking them out of the App store. This time, Google appears to be the target with its competing mobile ad platform, AdMob. Google beat Apple this week by releasing the SDK (software development kit) for its in-app mobile advertising for the iPhone and iPad. The trouble is, in a move reminiscent of its ban on Adobe’s Flash platform on the eve of the iPad launch, Apple just changed the terms of its developer agreement, making it unlikely that any app developers will be able to incorporate AdMob ads without risking being banned from the App store.

More on the launch: See the Techcrunch summary of key points from the iPhone and iOS4 launch.

The reason is an escalation in Apple’s long-running battle with Adobe over its Flash platform. Apple’s latest move bans any content generated using Adobe’s Flash software from its App Store. Flash is one of the most commonly-used systems for creating rich, interactive content.

This might seem like an esoteric spat between two tech Titans but the latest turn in this long-running dispute will be a special blow to magazine and newspaper publishers, and to book publishers who were hoping the iPad would open up textbooks and illustrated books unsuited to the more basic Amazon Kindle-style ebook readers. Ironically, this ban looks like it might catch out some of the high profile magazines and newspapers, such as Wired and the New York Times, that have been trotted out in the past few weeks to show off the iPad’s capabilities.

Publishers (and indeed other media companies such as video and game developers) are heavily invested in Adobe’s applications for creating their content. They don’t want to learn new tools, they want their existing tools to take them into the new media.

[Update: 5 May 2010. Apple's move may prompt an anti-trust probe, according to this New York Post story. ]

So Adobe’s strategy with its Flash platform — to make rich media content available on any platform without having to produce a different edition for every device out there — promised to take a big burden off publishers and open up their content to the whole market.

Until Apple came along with the iPhone and now the iPad.

Apple refused to host Flash on these devices. Now that these devices are ruling the mobile web roost, their Flash no-show leaves a big hole in this tidy strategy, moving this spat from an irritation to a serious business problem for content developers.

Recently it appeared that Adobe had found a clever work-around to circumvent Apple’s strictures using technology called Packager for iPhone. This turns Adobe’s Flash code  into the native program code used by Apple’s iPhone and iPad. It’s set to be released this week with the latest CS5 update to Adobe’s software.

Apple, however, used the launch a couple of days ago of OS4.0 — a major upgrade to its operating system for iPhones, iPads and iPod Touches — to introduce new contractual terms to its tightly-run developer programme. The new terms have the effect of stymieing Adobe’s work-around and look likely to keep all Flash applications off the Apple devices permanently.

In doing so, Apple hopes to force publishers and developers to create native applications written especially for its devices instead of using Adobe’s system to produce a single generic edition to run on many different devices such as an iPad, a Blackberry and a Google Android device.

Apple hopes its move will cause publishers to rethink their strategies. Forcing publishers to produce multiple editions, or to drop support for less important platforms is great for Apple but bad news for publishers and will also lessen the chances of competing devices succeeding against Apple.

It should certainly cause publishers to rethink their strategies but not in the way that Apple hopes.

Fortunately, there are things publishers can do. But it means they’ll have to show some restraint in the face of all the “flashy” new toys for producing great-looking content, and the smooth payment system that Apple is throwing in their direction.

While Apple is exercising an iron grip on its App Store, it’s still open to the web. So developers and publishers can sidestep the App store’s strictures and use standard web technologies – including HTML, CSS, and Javascript – to produce rich, interactive content that will run on the iPad, iPhone or the many other devices that offer web access.

Ironically, this is made easier by Apple’s solid support for web standards and, in particular the emerging HTML 5 specification. Many useful HTML 5 features are already widely implemented, including the ability to run offline web apps so you don’t have to be connected all the time. Others, such as native support for video and audio (no external plug-in programs required), are not far behind. The Safari browser and open source Webkit framework that Apple uses in its iPhone and iPad are, so far, being good corporate citizens in their support of these important emerging standards.

In this regard, a useful development framework is Phonegap. This system allows you essentially to turn a website built using HTML, CSS and Javascript into an iPhone app. And according to its developers, their system, while superficially in the same boat as Adobe’s Flash platform, will survive Apple’s change to its developer terms. It offers a path to Apple’s iPhone App store as well as the Google Android app marketplace and the Blackberry.

For publishers, the downside of this is that the toolset is more the domain of web developers than their graphic designers. But they’re going to need to upgrade web capabilities anyway and sticking to web standards will make a reasonable fist of cross-platform rich content.

This is especially true for book publishers who already have a widely adopted ebook standard called ePub which is based on (X)HTML and CSS web standards (and is the standard adopted by Apple in its new iBookStore). Newspaper and magazine publishers have yet to rally behind a standard but it’s almost certain to be based, again, on web standards.

If the publishing industry can get its act together quickly enough, it’s quite possible that all of the print media could use the same standard. For instance, work on the next version of ePub should have better support for interactivity, rich media and the more story-centric structure that newspaper and magazine publishers need.

In the short term, this approach won’t offer the same slickness as a hardware-specific iPad edition, but it still offers a credible way to produce mobile media that will work for readers and advertisers. And it — or its threat — might just help nudge Apple off its path to world domination of the media business.

Kobo on iPad from Kobo on Vimeo.

According to the Kobo blog, they’ve been hard at work on this since the iPad was announced two months ago. What was intended to be a slight tweaking of their iPhone app to suit the larger screen turned into a complete new app, built from the ground up to take full advantage of the iPad.

Kobo say they have yet to get their hands on an iPad so they’re relying on Apple’s developer tools, including the iPad simulator, to test it. They’re also relying on Apple to approve it since, like all Apps, it has to go through an approval process with Apple first. All going well, Kobo expects to be on the iPad at launch.

The iPad is due for US launch on Saturday April 3, right in the middle of Easter. Interesting timing … slow news day, plenty of photogenic crowds queuing for iPads? Other markets will follow in the coming months.

Meanwhile, not to be completely left out of the iPad hype, Amazon showed this snippet of its iPad App in the making.

The background colours of the reader sitting under the tree apparently change with the time of day, a nice touch. Apple certain has a way of getting designers’ creative juices flowing when developing for its platforms.

With this Kindle for iPad (once again, subject to Apple’s approval), Amazon’s Kindle reading and purchasing is now on its own Kindle hardware, PCs, the iPhone, Blackberry, Macs (just released a few days ago) and now the iPad. Interestingly, there’s still no Kindle app for Android. Nor, notably, does its Stanza iPhone app have an Android version yet — or an iPad version announced.

Others will be piling into the iPad with Barnes and Noble reputedly having a team of 14 developers at work and Skiff, the Hearst magazines initiative, also rumoured to be heading to the iPad. And, of course, Apple itself will be in the game with its iBookstore.

It will then be available in late April in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK, Apple says. No word yet on whether the Aussies will be sending some of their units down to New Zealand. If not, it seems like it might be a long wait. “iPad will ship in additional countries later this year,” says Apple’s press release. International pricing will be announced in April. The first units will be WiFi only with the 3G units beginning shipment in late April.

Meanwhile, Penguin is not wasting any time showing off its own planned iPad ebooks with Penguin Books CEO John Makinson making some very bullish predictions during the demo, including the claim that ebooks would make up to 10% of Penguin’s book sales in 2011.

“The iPad represents the first real opportunity to create a paid distribution model that will be attractive to consumers,” an excited Makinson told FT’s Digital Media & Broadcasting Conference. “The psychology of payment on tablets is different to the psychology on a PC.”

But Penguin’s thinking bigger than just the one device. Makinson said he sees ebooks hitting 10 percent of book sales next year (it’s currently four percent in the U.S. and Penguin’s ebook sales)…

“We will be embedding audio, video and streaming in to everything we do. The .epub format, which is the standard for ebooks at the present, is designed to support traditional narrative text, but not this cool stuff that we’re now talking about.

“So for the time being at least we’ll be creating a lot of our content as applications, for sale on app stores and HTML, rather than in ebooks. The definition of the book itself is up for grabs.”

“We don’t know whether a video introduction will be valuable to a consumer. We will only find answers to these questions by trial and error.”

Read more from this Paid Content UK story.

And take a look at this video showing some of Penguin’s iPad plans. It’s not clear how advanced these products are or how close to release but it’s clear that Penguin plans to be using the iPad to start pushing the boundaries of the electronic book.