As Digital Book World -- the first of the two big post-Christmas US e-book conferences -- opens, last week's education announcement by Apple shows how easy it is now for any of the big digital companies to hijack the publishing conversation. As publishers gather to jaw-jaw in New York, Apple has overnight opened up a new front in the war (against Amazon) enlisting education publishers, educationalists, teachers and students as its foot-soldiers and, as digital Dan Franklin pointed out in a tweet during the announcement, arming them for free with its iBooks Author application.

It's a breathtaking attempt to establish the iPad as the 'teaching/learning' device, which if it works will make Amazon's Kindle-play look like something out of kindergarten. Will students used to unlocking their world via an iPad migrate to a basic e-ink device for pleasure reading? Of course not. Will publishers be able to resist Apple's digital hand-cuffs and eschew a potential audience of millions for their content? The actions of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, McGraw-Hill, Pearson, and Dorling Kindersley suggest not.

There is, of course, a feeling abroad that Apple is somehow on the side of publishers (if not the angels) and that when compared to Amazon's iron fist it offers designer compromises. On the upside is the opportunity to create relatively cheaply enhanced content in an area where it might actually prove useful within a walled-garden of Apple's own making: the downside being that Apple will own the customer, control where and how that end-product can be sold, and possess the platform.

The bigger worry is that the iBooks Author tool unleashes thousands of new competitors not only in the shape of traditional 'indie' authors but also teachers, university professors, course leaders, and even students, who suddenly find that creating and self-publishing textbooks is both easy and lucrative--though it remains to be seen how Apple will go about letting this content through its gates, and how it will police the very many rights headaches that will inevitably ensue.

But let's not get bogged down in the detail: the point here is how publishers are now caught in a conflict between digital giants that means we will all have to be nimbler and clearer about where we add value. We also need to be wise about who we label as enemies and who we regard as 'frenemies'. Amazon's self-publishing push is a real threat to publishers, but Amazon becoming a traditional publisher is not. Ditto Apple.

None of this adds to an easy environment within which to do businesss. Ahead of DBW, the conference organiser unveiled a survey that showed that publishers were less optimistic about the state of the book publishing industry in general and much less optimistic about their own company’s chances at survival and growth. James McQuivey, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester, which conducted the survey, said: "Publishers have started to do the hard work of making the digital transition and they’re finding that it is, indeed, hard work." And, as this piece in the Wall Street Journal indicated, the results are variable.

Except. EXCEPT when has publishing not been hard work? Publishers have never controlled the routes to their own customers, the retail intermediaries have always had the whip hand (or so it has seemed), and bestsellers have always been hard to guarantee, or repeat. Apple's education play shows how easy it is for the new giants to dominate the conversation, but not stop the conversation. And as Amazon is finding out, there is a reason publishers select and edit and invest in good content, and there's a reason why some of them are very good at it.

Of course none of this is getting any easier: but then it never was.