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.

The big event while I was absent was the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week and it delivered on its promise that eReaders and tablet devices would be the buzz at this year’s CES.

This New York Times story covers the deluge of devices announced for reading a surfing.

And this round-up story from E-Paper Central covers the main e-paper based ebook reader announcements well.

For the most part, it will be a few months before we’ll see availability of the new devices, and perhaps longer in international markets, especially if these devices take off with consumers and product shortages slow the international roll-outs. But it’s clear that consumers wanting to read ebooks are going to have plenty of choice.

But a couple of the big announcements happened outside of CES. Google got into the Android smartphone business with the launch of its Nexus One. And the already-overheated rumour mill about Apple’s forthcoming tablet device has gone into top gear with a plethora of stories appearing now that are picking a late January announcement and March ship date for what’s being billed as the iTablet or iSlate. The amount of coverage and detail now emerging makes this look increasingly likely. Another game-changing battle emerging, anyone?

[Update: 16 Dec, 11:47am. REDgroup which has Australian and New Zealand book chains A&R, Whitcoulls and Borders ANZ, is a minority investor in the new company formed for this initiative.  They expect to launch an ebook store using Kobo by May 2010. See story: Whitcoulls, Borders, A&R to launch ebook store by May 2010.

Also, Borders Inc is an investor and have announced an ebook store on the Borders.com site powered by Kobo. The broad geographical spread of the partners should be a big plus in sourcing content and dealing with territorial restrictions.]

Since it launched in February this year, the unit of Canadian bricks-and-mortar bookseller Indigo has done an impressive job of building its ebook offering, concentrating on the smartphone opportunity rather than waiting for the somewhat glacial development of the dedicated ebook reader market.

In his blog posting announcing the name change, Indigo vice-president Michael Serbinis focuses on the site’s international aspirations, claiming the new name “is a name that will appeal to readers around the world”. I didn’t think the old name was too bad but it was presumably too closely tied to the bookseller’s early, misconceived, plan to offer ebooks as part-works sold by the chapter. Thankfully they rapidly figured out this wasn’t going to fly and changed tack to put together a more conventional and increasingly credible offer. It includes their own ebook reading application, originally launched for the iPhone but now available for the Blackberry, Palm Pre and Android.

Accessing the site from New Zealand, I can buy a few titles but most are still blocked by territorial restrictions. The Kobo team are quite upbeat about their prospects for getting more international territorial rights and Serbini’s blog posting states they’re planning to offer more currencies. So it seems this name change really is part of a larger push to become a serious global ebook retailer.

Is this going to be Mac vs PC in reverse? Surely, much as we love the wonderful things Apple is doing, we don’t want to hand the prize over to one company again.

This battle is being fought on two fronts. One is the gadgets themselves. The other is the all-important marketplaces for applications and content that surround them. While we have our own fears about Google’s market power, at least the Android market is open and the Android platform is open source.

This article in TechCrunch from US Whitepages VP of Mobile Kevin Nakao looks at these emerging Android marketplaces and the opportunities around them and should help settle the nerves of early Android supporters.

Nakao admits their own Android app results are pretty mediocre when lined up against the iPhone — just 17% in fact. But he points to several good reasons why this will change, sooner rather than later. Among his points:

• Unlike the iPhone with its single Apple-owned store, the Android marketplace is open. There are more app sellers with more flexibility in what they can offer and how quickly they can get apps and content to the market. This will be good for innovation, says Nakao, and offer more purchase options for consumers.
• Google’s market strategy means Telcos will step up to the plate and offer integrated carrier billing to Android marketplaces. This has the potential to drive revenues strongly as consumers respond to “low friction” purchasing and subscription offers, one of things that Apple, of course, already offers.

Nakao makes several other useful points to support his case. While he uses US market examples, this is a trend that will play out very quickly around the world.

Read the full article in TechCrunch.

The data comes from Flurry, a company that tracks usage of smartphone apps in a similar way to how Google tracks website metrics with its Analytics product.  The data shows active usage in the ebook category, measured by user sessions.

The survey is embedded below.

The interesting thing here is that, because Flurry measures actual usage of the smartphone apps rather than just downloads, it’s a solid indication that iPhone, Android and other smartphone users are not only downloading these ebook reader apps, they’re actually reading with them.

Flurry Smart Phone Industry Pulse July2009 Final

But unlike Stanza, for instance, it doesn’t support open standards such as ePub. What it does is open up the large Kindle ebook catalogue to iPhone/iPod Touch users. And, just as a deluge of smartphones from other manufacturers is about to head our way, Amazon is also expected to make its Kindle reader apps available on other platforms – Kindle ebooks everywhere.

For those who think Amazon is crazy and will end up cannibalising sales of its own Kindle ebook Reader, Amazon has an answer. It will actually increase sales of the reader and Amazon thinks many customers will want both their smartphone and their Kindle to read books on. They see the smartphone as good for short reading and the Kindle for longer sessions, especially with its superior battery life. Reinforcing this will be a feature that will synchronise your reading so both your iPhone and Kindle will open the book you’re reading to the same page. On the point that it will actually increase Kindle sales, I wholeheartedly agree. Once again, Amazon is showing a lot of undertstanding of the digital domain.

One reason is that it also helps address a big objection that’s been levelled against Amazon’s Kindle, namely that its proprietary format and limited support for any other content formats locks you into using a Kindle once you’ve bought your books. Well, no more. It certainly locks you into using the Kindle-formatted books on Amazon-developed  technology, and it gives Amazon a lot of control over its technology development, likely to be a critcal competitive advantage. But consumers will shortly have plenty of choice over which gadgets they buy to read their Kindle ebooks on.

At this stage, you can’t buy Kindle ebooks from within its iPhone app. You need to go to the Amazon website to make your purchases. This will no doubt be addressed at some stage as, presumably, will be the continuing restriction on sales to readers located outside the US.

More coverage from Teleread, ReadWriteWeb and the Wall Street Journal.

What’s particularly interesting about Indigo’s move is that they’re not waiting for the dedicated ebook readers such as Sony’s Reader to get established. They’re placing their bets on the increasingly sophisticated and ubiquitous smartphone market.

Michael Serbinis, Indigo’s vice-president of information technology, marketing and online business, cited the highly successful introduction of the Apple iPhone in Canada in 2007 as, “what really triggered our commitment.” As a model for markets such as New Zealand, it will be an interesting one to watch since waiting for companies like Sony to establish a critical mass of dedicated ebook readers could delay the market’s development by a couple of years or more.

Shortcovers isn’t just a bookstore. The Indigo division has reportedly developed its own reading application

iPhone reading using the Shortcovers ebook reader application

which will be available immediately across several platforms including the iPhone, the new Blackberry Storm, and devices built on Google’s Android mobile platform.

The momentum around smartphones as reading devices is building rapidly. Leading the field, but by no means alone, is Stanza, the ebook reading application that became a surprise early hit in the iPhone App store. Stanza has had 1.3 million downloads since it launched mid last year. It’s led the Economist, in a recent editorial, to speculate that the ebook reader might be on the verge of what it calls “an iTunes moment”. This is a reference to the game-changing moment of take-off in 2003 when Apple’s iTunes music store created a new market for legal music downloads.

Interestingly, too, Indigo’s early strategy calls for it to launch with a full quota of international (particularly US) bestselling fiction and non-fiction. Provision of local titles from Canadian publishers will be a low priority at launch. This is partly determined by the simultaneous launch of the service into both Canada and the US, taking on Amazon in its home territory.

Among the early licensees are Lexcycle, the developer of iPhone ebook reader Stanza, and iRex who put out the iLiad ebook reader.

Importantly, this mobile PDF format supports reflowable text, a feature introduced in Adobe Digital Editions for the PC. This is a key feature that’s been needed if mobile devices are going to use PDF effectively. It will mean that users can read the same document on mobile devices or PCs. And, of course, it plays to Adobe’s strength as the main provider of content design and production tools.

The SDK also includes support for Adobe’s Content Server, the hosted platform which allows Digital Rights Management (DRM) encryption for PDF content.

One benefit of PDF is that it is a better system for controlling how content is displayed on different devices than formats based on HTML/XML standards such as ePub. The latter have to deal with the issue that the same document will look different on different readers’ screens because of how their devices are configured.

Read the full announcement from Adobe of the SDK for putting PDF on mobile devices.