Cisco is attempting to avoid a direct comparison with the iPad by targeting their Clus tablet as a vertical market platform.
“Cius is aimed at markets in technologically transitional stages, such as education and healthcare.”
The advantage of not having thousands of “cool” apps for your platform is that the worker bees will be less tempted to use them for non-work activities.
As PC World notes, the first video enhanced ebooks “are similar to special features you’d find on a DVD.”
Pity that Amazon’s own devices can not support the rich content they can offer on the iPad.
The limitations of the EPUB standard are forcing publishers to offer ebooks for the iPad as apps.
The other obvious advantages are that your catalog is searchable by keywords directly from iTunes and you don’t have to worry about running your own bookstore.
The obvious disadvantages are that since there are no private shared libraries each book is delivered with the entire overhead of an app (even if they all use exactly the same code), your library of books will clutter up the iPad’s “homepage” and each book will have to go through the Apple app review process.
Media Business reports on open source alternatives to closed content control systems. The take home lesson is that your content is your value added and you don’t want it being held hostage by anybody outside of your company.