There was a time in my life when I proudly wore the crown of “Apple Zealot”; it was a culture that appealed to me greatly, and I tried to assimilate into it as best I could. But when I started looking at things from a more holistic level, realizing the detriments of zealotry, I decided to come to my senses. Not to the extent that I renounced association with that community entirely, but rather that I decided to approach the world of consumer electronics in a much more ecumenical manner. For that reason, I now consider myself a “recovering zealot” and feel that bias has escaped me, and I am now worthy of providing practical analysis of the iPad and what it means for the publishing industry.

            Whenever any new platform is introduced, adoption is often slow. This was true of television, the Internet, and even cell phones. In the case of the iPad, the public seems to have gotten used to the concept of a multi-touch interface and buying applications through a central app store. Apple would have never released a device like the iPad without first releasing platforms such as the iPhone and iPod Touch. It almost seems like Steve Jobs, the company’s savior and CEO, was sitting in the conference room one day at Apple headquarters in Cupertino saying “ Alright everyone. Here’s what we are going to do: Release a phone with a new revolutionary multi-touch interface, integrate it into our existing iPod line, and finally release a device called the iPad that ties all of this work and technology together”. I admit, this may be giving Steve Jobs too much credit, but one does often wonder just how much foresight went into the iPad’s release. It is the perfect nexus linking all of Apple’s properties; things like the iTunes Music, App, and Movie store, all accessible on one device. I don’t think anyone could dispute the inherent genius in creating a product that is so dependent on a company’s own properties, which are almost monopolistic already. For Apple, the iPad is the result of years of careful planning, and the belief that they won’t fail.

            At the start of this article, I promised the dear reader that I would analyze the iPad’s role in the publishing industry without the usual Apple fanboy hype. This was a hard task, to say the least, but I now feel that I am ready to accomplish this. From what I have gathered, publishers have been very excited about the iPad’s value as an entirely new platform for rich, interactive publishing. The industry has not been doing all that well in recent years, so the opportunity to get involved in a whole new market is very attractive. Despite all of this excitement, devices like the Sony e-Reader and Amazon Kindle still have not taken the public by storm; millions are still content with carrying around “dead tree” print editions of their favorite books. This situation is very similar to the state of MP3 devices in the early 2000’s, before Apple created the iPod and iTunes, which made the portable media player industry take off. The iPad’s iBook store seems like it may be able to do the same thing, but at the same time the hardware is lacking. Specifically, it seems that no matter how much eye candy Apple slaps on the iPad’s interface, the fundamental issue of staring into a bright LCD screen for any significant amount of time is problematic. What makes the Kindle great, along with Amazon’s mature e-book store, is its e-ink display that comes about as close you can get to the real paper reading experience, and provides extraordinary battery life. In these two areas, the iPad is not very formidable. I simply cannot see reading any work of even modest duration on a screen that is even brighter than a laptop. Battery life also becomes an issue because the iPad, with its array of censors, will drain down in 10 hours, by Apple’s somewhat unrealistic estimates. Now, this may sound like a lot, and it is in the world of notebook computers, but for an e-reading device it is rather meager. An e-ink device, such as the Kindle, is the sort of thing you plug in once a week, use it, and then charge it sometime later the next week. There is never this thought that you are going to run out of battery in the middle of reading Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (Ok, maybe this would be a good thing for some people). Nonetheless, there have been reviews already published that make the argument that the iPad is actually a better e-reader than its opponents. Andy Ihnatko, of the Chicago-Sun Times, raves “… I can confidently put the iPad at the top of the tree in the e-reader competition. If the price and the size aren’t obstacles to you, then it’s the clear winner”. Such a statement seems very apt in my mind. It is certainly in the top 3, but the price happens to make it less fiscally attractive than both the Amazon Kindle and Sony e-reader. In that same article, Ihnatko goes on further to say that the chief issue for the iPad is not the device itself, but the iBooks store, which is launching with 60,000 titles, a small selection compared to Amazon’s library consisting of over 475,000 titles. But let us not forget that Amazon, in a very wise move, has confirmed that they are developing a Kindle app for the iPad that will be able to read and download books from their own e-book store. So, it seems as if Amazon has realized that their role moving foreword is not to be the hardware vendor, but instead the company selling the books to the hardware vendor, who in this case is Apple. What I see, in the near future, is some type of merger between Apple’s iBook store and the Amazon’s e-book store. A marriage like this would make a lot of sense, and certainly benefit the millions who already happily use Amazon everyday.

            The last area I’d like to touch on is the iPad’s role in the space of digital comic books and magazines. It seems that for years, the comic book industry has been awaiting the release of a device that could faithfully allow for the proper reading of comic books. Size has always been the issue, and many devices in the past had poor quality displays that did not do comic book art justice. Often times, the screen would be so small, or the interface so poorly designed, that the comic book formatting would be completely destroyed, ruining the experience. With the iPad, digital comic books will actually look better than their paper counterparts, and will be displayed in nearly the same layout as the print version. Marvel, a comic book publishing giant, has already developed a quality iPad application that allows for digital comic book purchasing, management, and reading. Then there is a whole other space for magazines like National Geographic. Just think, powering on your iPad, tapping the familiar National Geographic yellow on black logo, and being able to browse the latest issue with all sorts of rich, interactive media, like video and audio. And just the ability to view the gorgeous photos in National Geographic on a screen that is worlds better and more accurate to the original photo than the print version is fantastic. Even better, imagine being able to browse through every issue of National Geographic, or some other magazine of your choice, while sitting on the runway waiting for your plane to take off.  The 3G connection that the higher-end iPad includes makes instant gratification a reality.

            Ok, I got a little carried away and excited during the last paragraph. But it’s hard not to when one simple device can offer so many possibilities for the world of books, magazines, music, movies, and games. Granted, it is fairly expensive, if you are looking at it as simply an e-reader, and it is even expensive for a netbook ; however, the iPad transcends all of these cute categories that the industry seems to love make up. The iPad, quite simply, is the device that you will have lying on your coffee table, or somewhere in the house, when you want to do just about anything your normal computer can do, but without the overkill of an operating system like OSX or Windows. It reaches out to you and says “ Forget about all of that normal computer stuff you’re used to and just focus on what you want to do”. And that seems to be what every piece of technology ought to do; help people accomplish what they want to do without thinking about all of the things that go into it. We just know that the task is accomplished; there is no need to know every step that went into it. In that sense, for lack of a better word, the iPad is almost magical.

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