iPerry

iPad May Be ‘Black Ship’ That Shakes Up Japan’s Book Industry - BusinessWeek:
The maker of the iPhone may challenge Japan’s publishing establishment in a market where e-book sales -- estimated by Nomura Holdings Inc. to be four times those of the U.S. -- come mostly from comics on mobile phones. Sony Corp. and Panasonic Corp., Japan’s two biggest consumer electronics makers, have scrapped their e-reader business in the country and Amazon.com Inc. has yet to offer its Kindle. “There’s a strong chance that a device like the iPad will allow authors to cut out the publishers as middlemen,” said Jun Hasebe, a Tokyo-based analyst at Daiwa Securities Group Inc. “Japanese printing, publishing and distribution industries are strongly interconnected and all three face that threat.” (Brave New World)

With ubiquitous cell network coverage in Japan, every day I see many commuters on the train reading mail, watching TV on OneSeg viewers (phones and PSP support this as well as dedicated viewers), but I also see more notebooks, netbooks, and micro-netbooks. At one point I thought the iPad's size might prove detrimental to adoption in Japan, but I'm no longer sure.

And in Japan, Apple-as-a-brand has never been stronger. The original iPod became wildly popular in Japan even without access to the iTunes Music Store, as the Japanese record companies dragged their feet and were unwilling to entertain Apple's courting of their market. More than likely it came up during those negotiations that, with audio CDs available for rent in Japan, they were only going to lose money as people ripped CDs directly or traded through peer-to-peer networks.

If Apple continues to pressure iPod Touch/iPhone/iPad devs to prevent their applications from being able to locally sync their own content (see recent eReader, Stanza, and comic reading app history), Apple will be losing one of the leverage areas to pressure publishers to cooperate with them.