TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Jason Snell thinks the best model for Apple’s tablet is to let publishers build their own applications:

This is why if Apple’s developing a new tablet device that will be (among other things) a compelling reading device, its best approach is to carry the App Store through to that device. Rather than compete with Amazon and Barnes and Noble and all the rest, Apple can sit back and let them compete with one another while profiting from the popularity of its latest hit gadget. Why should Apple build its own comic-book reading app and set up a system for comic publishers to submit content, when it can just allow the existing comic-book readers to compete with one another while it sits back and rakes in the dough?

Snell later comments that Apple may find “print” content on the tablet so crucial that it will build its own reading experience. That’s very likely.

The tablet seems ideal as a reading device, and most of its other uses are unconvincing. (Watching movies on a bigger screen is nice, but not a reason to buy it. It’s a secondary, and not primary, feature.) Perfecting the reading experience for a majority of content types — books, magazines — and leaving other content types to third-party developers would be smart.

The benefit of making an inclusive reading platform (an excellent reader application, and a content “store”) is users would be more likely to subscribe to them. This is because they know what they’re getting with every subscription. They don’t have to worry about the application, because they’re already comfortable with it and how it works. They’re just thinking about the content.

If each publisher had their own application, users would have to make a larger investment for them. They would have to decide if they like the application or not, learn its design, and then deal with a separate application every time they want to read a different content source.

This shifts the focus from the content and to the application, and would make it likely that users would select one application that they like and only use it. I’ve done this on the iPhone with news applications — I have both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal applications, and I settled on the Journal’s because the Times’s application is cluttered, clunky and slow. The result, I think, would be that publishers would have to release their applications without charge (and without subscription), and so nothing really changes.

The tablet’s potential is to make users willing to pay for content again, by delivering it in a form that is as good as or better than print. I don’t think relying on third-party applications would do this.