Will Tablets Rule?

Michael Jensen | 03/15/2010

The answer is, not in 2010—but possibly by 2011, and likely by 2012.

I’m a longstanding, hardcore laptop user whose first, twenty years ago, was a two-floppy no-hard-drive Toshiba. I probably won’t be one of the “tablet majority” ... except on plane flights, or except when I’m having a videochat with a colleague, or except when I’m reading a long ebook.

I expect to have a laptop (for my serious writing, serious email, serious programming, serious work), as well as a tablet (for most of my other digital engagement).

In the States, it’s not just the geeky early adopters who will go for the tablets. In fact, for geeks, they’re not optimal tools. But Apple, Microsoft, HP, Google, and other manufacturers hustling onto the tablet bandwagon, will be promoting tablets not as Microsoft Office machines (though they will function for that); not as database-entry devices (though, in a pinch, they’ll also function for that).

Instead, the promotion is going to be for entertainment, enjoyment, and interaction. The tablets will be promoted for chatting with your kids or grandkids from 2000 km away, and watching their videos. For tweeting about something you just saw on the tablet. For drawing, annotating, mapping, photo-ing, audio-booking, and (more to the point) for reading.

That promotion will encourage a relationship with the device—one that is very different from the clumsiness of a laptop, and that is more akin to the friendly, cuddly warmth people feel toward their iPhones.

If Canadian publishers’ books are absent from that environment, we’ll disappear from many markets, because other forms of distraction and enlightenment will replace what we do. When an existing niche is sparsely filled, after all, it gets filled by other things.

In the big media markets of the US, the tablets will rule the kingdom of onscreen reading—not as a tyranny, but as a preference, and in addition to other “work” devices.

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