How information today is woven into our lives

Great new series of slides by Pew’s Dr. Kristen Purcell

Rise of the tablets

Where we’re going as consumers:

Tablet fever will grip more than a third of all U.S. adults by 2016, according to Forrester analyst Sarah Rotman Epps.

In a report released yesterday, Forrester upped its estimates for U.S. tablet ownership, now forecasting that 112.5 million adults, or 34 percent of the population, will own a tablet in another four years. If that prediction proves correct, it means the industry will sell almost 293 million tablets in the six years from 2010 to 2016.

The CNet report continues:

Tablets are also on the rise in the workplace. Currently, 37 percent of U.S. tablet owners use their devices on the job, according to Epps. A Forrester study of businesses abroad found that employees in Brazil, Russia, India, China, and Mexico led the way for tablet use at work.

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“We believe that Amazon and B&N have actually expanded the addressable market for tablets in the U.S. by launching their tablets at significantly lower price points than the iPad,” the analyst said.

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Ultimately, though, consumers need a better reason beyond a low price to buy a tablet. Forrester’s own data found that the main reason many people still steer clear of tablets is because they don’t see the need for one.

That will be solved by the economy of scale, of course. As more people adopt tablets as part of their media consumption more of our content will be developed with the tablet user in mind. After that tipping point — and, hopefully, finding a tolerable price point — the tablet will become as ubiquitous as the cell phone or PC.

Conde context

Sometimes you have to find a series of stories and read them together to get the proper context. Here are two recent business stories from Conde Nast that illustrate that point:

Condé Nast aims to unify tablet and mobile magazine production

Condé Nast plans to digitize archives for tablet long tail

The first story is simply a savy move. And if their track record is any indication Conde will do well here where some have succeeded and others have failed. Ultimately, look for their magazine design to ultimately look like a hybrid blend of their print and tablet products.

About the second story: the folks at Conde are very progressive and very sharp. Long tail planning has to do with the effect of probability in customer use. The more you have online, the more people will find it through your site, through your archives, through latent social media links, dormant sites and the always important search engine.

Just this weekend a friend was telling me that some 40 percent of his business, ancient photographs and hi-res posters for purchase online, comes from the long tail. Archives are a good thing, even if you have to go digitize your analog material.

There’s always an audience.

Disclosure: I previously worked for a Conde Nast sister company.

Apple and tablet reading

Poynter: Why Apple’s virtual Newsstand is driving a surge in magazine, newspaper iPad app subscriptions.

(P)ublishers are reporting similar experiences with a Newsstand bump. What’s going on here? In part, discoverability and convenience.

Khoi Vinh: ‘I just can’t see the end-to-end magazine format surviving’ for iPad apps’

“Some folks will continue to like the magazine format, but as social distribution becomes the way we discover and receive more of our content, it won’t make sense to sell it in these virtual boxes any more,” he tells Jack Marshall. Instead, publishers should try to package content based on relevance, a goal that remains elusive.

Alan Mutter: Paid news potential limited on tablets.

The potential for selling news through applications on iPads and other tablets appears to be “limited,” according to a study released today.

Although consuming news on a tablet is one of the most popular activities discovered in a survey of 1,200 tablet users, only 14% of them had subscribed to a paid news app, according to a study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism in collaboration with The Economist.

Of those who haven’t paid directly for a news app, “just 21% say they would be willing to spend $5 per month if that were the only way to access their favorite source on the tablet,” said the study. “Of those who have news apps, fully 83% say that being free or low cost was a major factor in their decision about what to download.”