On the iPad

I wrote about the iPad for the LA Times, focusing on the reading experience and what it means. I compared it to Amazon’s Kindle; e-ink and light weight notwithstanding, Apple’s iPad came out ahead.

Although the Kindle is, as an Amazon.com spokesperson told me, “purpose-built” for reading, it seems to have lost an essential connection to books. You can do many things with its e-books — search them, make notes, leave bookmarks — but you have to learn its interface. The Kindle feels like an e-reading device, whereas an iPad feels like reading.

It’s possible that all the iPad’s book-like touches will eventually be shadows of a left-behind technology. But to me, it signals something more elusive: that books have a specific and unique shape.

Now that we consume so much content electronically — websites and news and blogs, e-mails and text messages — it’s unclear how the book will adapt. Will it have embedded video? Will it include links, like a Web page? The best aspects of the iPad’s e-reader show that even as books morph, there are certain things that make them distinct.

The story that ran in print is far from where I’d started. I’d wanted to write about how the iPad would affect publishers, about how Apple selling ebooks was heralding a new era in which publishing houses could see a challenger to Amazon, and that the Apple business model for electronic sales would change not just the retail model but administrative accounting details, and possibly more. And I reported some of this, but the fact is a newspaper freelancer like me, with blogging and teaching commitments, can’t write that story.

You know who can? A staff writer at the New Yorker, who can settle in and take the time to do it all. And  that’s Ken Auletta, who has written that story wonderfully. Here it is.

PS The photo above is owned by the LA Times. But I was there when they took it, and had to bring in the iPad for the photo shoot. So I’m hoping they don’t mind me borrowing it.