Mobile Monday London came back yesterday with a jam-packed session about tablets. Rumor has it there were people from LG, Blackberry and Google showing non-iPad versions of the thing.

This might sound a bit daft, but the main point of the night was the very bold statement: a tablet is a tablet. It's not a phone, it's not a netbook, it's not a laptop. We therefore must try and figure out what tablets are for, since they must be for something different, right?

The books

David Roth-Ey, Group Digital Director at Harper Collins, had a few interesting things to say about how book publishers are dealing with the digitalisation of their content.

• Book lovers feel guilty about abandoning the physical book. He thinks they'll need a powerful reason, a truly wondrous digital book-reading way if they are to leave the paper incarnation. I have to agree with him: I will not migrate easily.
• There is life beyond the book reader. Harper Collins are experimenting with new ways of delivering content, and apps is one of those ways. Check out the SAS Survival Guide for iOS
• All-you-can-it subscriptions for books are a no-go. When asked about a monthly subscription model for books (pay a monthly fee, read as much as you want), Mr. Roth-Ey replied that's one of his worst nightmares. He explained digital business models must compensate for the value of the content book publishers provide.
• Buy once - read anywhere. For Harper Collins, it's all about accessing the content you buy from any device. Once you pay for the book, it's yours to read from your iPhone, your iPad, your Kindle, your IdeaPad, your Inspiron Duo and whatever next. This poses a few interesting content adaptation and multiple user interface questions: what's the digital equivalent of folding the page?
• The ubiquitous promise of the web. HTML5 vs. native came up of course. Mr. Roth-Ey was quite bold about the whole thing. He explained how fragmentation is not a big problem for publishers, since they can easily piggyback on existing readers for multiple platforms. But their moto is maximum reach, and the web is, from all platforms, the best positioned to deliver it.

The telly

David Gibbs, Director of Mobile Applications and Services at BSkyB, always strikes me as an unusually focused person. These Sky guys know what they are about:

• Consumption. They don't care about people producing their own content. They only care about people consuming Sky's content.
• and TV. They are years ahead of the other TV providers in the UK when it comes to incorporating portable devices into their offering, but their strategy keeps television as the centre of gravity.

For Sky, portable devices have limitations: they cannot offer access to all TV content through phones and tablets due to rights issues. They have however discovered their strengths in 2 areas:

1. Self-service, with the web as the preferred platform to deliver it.
2. Remote control capabilities, with native applications as the preferred platform to deliver them.

Sky's clarity is incredibly rare in the cross-device world, and it's probably paying off handsomely.

The promise

But for the rest of us earthlings, what are tablets for? Someone from the audience confessed himself underwhelmed by what has been offered through tablets so far: clones of smartphone and desktop applications, mere scans of print magazines and newspapers. Sure we can do better, but how?

Harper Collins replied: developers should be working more closely with our writers. Add your readers to the mix, Mr. Roth-Ey, and you might be onto something.