On iPads and Tablets

Michael Jensen | 02/23/2010

The US is all a-buzz about Apple’s iPads, and about What It All Means.

What it all means is both small and huge.

On the one hand, tablets may become the perfect reading device—with processor smarts, page-turning grace, color, multimedia capabilities, likely (eventual) 3-D display capabilities, and an Amazon-Killer App with a business model, the iBookstore or other ebook stores, thrown in.

Yet that’s the small meaning.

The larger meaning has to do with a transformation of technology into consumer commodity. Steve Jobs didn’t talk about the gigahertz, about pixels, about storage. He didn’t announce a new operating system, or the implementation of Apple’s new chip, or the SDK or the API.

Instead, it was about coolness, and sexiness, and a lush reading experience.

Of course it also means that Apple is trying to define the landscape of the next few years, and that they’re asserting that their vision of computing is the right one. Whether it works or not will be seen around Christmas, 2010… but regardless, what Apple has done is frame the discussion, and massively raised the profile, of digital publishing, simply by bringing out a cool, sexy bit of proprietary hardware that is not about the hardware, but about the experience.

This first iPad version is a placeholder—the even better versions will be released rapidly, by Apple and others, with cameras, multitasking, phone, and 3-D videoconferencing, over the next year or two.

But Apple has made the digital-product experience luscious, and attractive—which is likely to be good for most quality publishing.

Watching to see the uptake of this mode of invisible, nongeeky computing, and the iBookstore in particular, may indicate how rapidly we need to ramp up our ebook offerings for export to the world market.

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