Ahem: apropos that 2007 post of mine, I will stand right behind it. Back in March 2007, it was right on the nail. In case you've forgotten: - In March 2007, m

Ahem: apropos that 2007 post of mine, I will stand right behind it. Back in March 2007, it was right on the nail. In case you've forgotten: - In March 2007, most book titles from the big six were not available as ebooks at all. - Kindle did not exist. (Launched November 2007) - Those ebooks that were available were usually priced at the same, or higher than the equivalent paper edition "in order to avoid cannibalizing sales". - We had a systematic problem with proliferating, rival ebook file formats: ePub wasn't a standard yet (not until September 2007 - that blog entry was from March '07), Mobipocket was still out there and competing with weird shit like Aportis Doc and iSilo for the PalmOS market, Microsoft was still performing CPR on .LIT format, and so on. - Sales of ebooks amounted to less than 0.5% of the total sales of books. The big six were ignoring them, basically. - The iPhone as an app platform did not exist. (The original iPhone was announced on January 9th, 2007, but was to only run web apps. The app store lay in the future.) Android didn't launch for another year, and the multitouch big-screen smartphone (capable of running an ebook reader app) simply did not exist. - Cheap ebook reader devices ... are still a minority pursuit today, even though the price has pushed down to just under $99; the real breakthrough has been the [free] ebook apps for Android and iOS which turn every smartphone into a potential ebook reader. Back in March 2007, a typical e-ink ebook reader cost around $399 (something like the Sony PRS-505 or the Irex Iliad) and the nearest thing to a smartphone you could buy had buttons and a stylus. Not to mention an eye-stabbingly bad screen (anyone else remember having a Treo 650 with a 320x320 pixel display and being so happy because it was an improvement over what they had before?). I will plead guilty to not having predicted the disruptive effect of iPhone apps in March 2007, sold from an app store that Steve Jobs had pretty much ruled out. How about you?