iCloud will sync e-books from iBooks across all of a consumer's Apple divices

Today Apple unveiled its much-anticipated iCloud service, set to debut this fall along with the next iteration of its iOS iPhone operating system. iCloud is a digital media locker on steroids, syncing all of users digital content, especially the contend bought from Apple–music, e-books, apps, documents, even user-created photos–to all of a users different Apple devices.  All of this content is stored in the cloud, available for re-downloading at any time. For the full story, check out Engadget’s extensive coverage of the announcement event, during which Apple also announced 130 million e-books have been downloaded from the iBookstore, though that figure includes both paid and free e-books.

This is big news on many fronts, especially for the music industry, which has been resistant to this kind of buy-once-play-anywhere access until now, but it certainly beefs up what iBooks has to offer, too.  One of the features of iCloud will be automated back-up and syncing of all purchased content between devices, so that means if you buy and e-book on your iPad, it will also pop up on your iPhone the next time you open iBooks there.

Consumers will increasingly expect their digital content to be available on any device they happen to be holding, and that may be the biggest implication of Apple’s iCloud, spurring other content vendors to make digital goods–music, books, whatever–available across devices lest they be left behind.  This is also what Amazon is after with the forthcoming Kindle for the Web and the recently unveiled Amazon Cloud Player.

The Main Point:

• Buying digital media no longer means buying a single download of a file.  Now it means buying perpetual access.