An offbeat Apple keynote prediction

Well, not so much a prediction as an entertaining thought for WWDC.

Amazon's Kindle is at least marginally successful, though most of the people I like to read seem to think it's not an enormous success. It has, however, made a lot of people very nervous about Amazon's power over publishing.

So I think Barnes and Noble, the big publishers, and Google might be willing to get together around a response to Amazon. Book publishers are very slow to move on anything, so they'd have to be passive-aggressive partners at best. The energy would have to come from B&N and Google.

Apple has an interest in an always connected touchscreen slate device that will do video display and conferencing, does audio and has a data-revenue stream associated with it.

So Apple will do a touchscreen slate device with a subsidized price, AT&T 3G data services, a required subscription model including the dotMac successor, and books through the (to be rebranded) iTunes store in partnership with Google and Barnes and Noble.

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