We read this week of Dorling Kindersley’s agreement with media content company Mobifusion to globally deliver branded mobile content to consumers. Earlier this year a similar deal was struck with Encyclopaedia Britannica for their Concise 2008 encyclopaedia and in Decemeber another deal with Oxford University Press was sealed to create and deliver mobile editions of Oxford's dictionaries to mobile phones and devices through key wireless operators and other sales channels.
If we forget the service what this indicates is that the reference publishers are starting to see the potential of porting their materials on to the mobile platform. Many believed that this was the domain that the ebok reader woulds secure but it makes just as much sense for this world of quick search and retrieval to go straight to the mobile. After all you need look no further than the market acceptance of the Blackberry and mobile emails and graphical capabilities of the iPhone to see that an ereader would just be a clunky device.
As we said before all we need is a iPhone and an Airbook all the rest are mere pretenders.
