It ain’t going to save the newspaper biz, but it is going to change book publishing—in a good way, in my personal opinion. (Operative word “change” not “save.”) Who cares about paper. Bring on the literary downloads.
Okay, now onward to USC to teach. (Must stop obsessing.)
See you after that other, you know, presentation: the SOU.
PS: The iTampon jokes are really, really dumb. It’s like hearing people endlessly talk about shopping at Tar-jey.
PPS: Here what David Pogue says.
PPPS: Who cares that it doesn’t have Flash. It will, however, eventually need a camera and video—if only for Skype.
I will always love good old fashioned paper books! My dream as a kid was always to have a library in my house lol. I just love books on shelves. I guess the iPad is the new high tech device but it do not seem appealing to me.
“but it do not seem appealing to me.”
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I guess there is no love good old fashioned gramar paper books. lol
I want one of these things too, and will probably replace my Mac laptop with it, since it can handle everything I normally use the laptop for. But DON’T buy it out of the gate…wait for the second version unless new Apple products are your crack or your doctor recently informed you that shouldn’t bother buying green bananas. “Early adopter” is French for “trendy sucker who will be replacing their expensive toy sooner rather than later.” Everything we know about the successive releases of the iPhone and iPod tells me this.
“I will always love good old fashioned paper books!”
Me too but I’ve filled up my bookshelves (and I’ve got one room – our “library” – with an entire wall “shelved” top to bottom and various other large and small bookshelves scattered through the house.) I hate getting rid of books so this thing comes just in time.
I felt that way too, reg (getting rid of books) until I had a friend stop over for coffee who expressed an interest in a subject that I’d studied by way of several books on that very subject. I went to my shelf and grabbed up three books pertaining to his query and told him to “keep em”. Hey! I had the info implanted, I didn’t need the print. It was REALLY gratifying to tell him to read them and pass them on if someone else expressed an interest. There’s a moral here, damned if I know what it is. Maybe someone can loan me a book on morals?
Books are a novel idea. Books are our friends. I’d rather lend you my dog – He knows his way home. Books are patient. Page 17 will still be on p. 17 tomorrow.
Yes Joe, reading furnishes knowledge, thinking makes it ours.
Reg, rading is important – read between the lines. Don’t swallow everything.
Mrs. Salazar, reading legal mush can turn your brain to guacamole!
Woody, your reading from an empty/blank/unformatted disk.
WANT iPAD!
Smug Alert! Smug Alert!
I just bought 51% of iPAD’s stock. Gonna give Rob some shares, too. Taught me to snowboard today. Good kid. But my god, his rap music…sheesh. Should have seen everyone staring at us in the parking lot. Nonetheless, pretty good day.
Oh, btw, if any of you bought stock in the iPAD, you might want to dump. Say..like, before tomorrow morning. Goodnight.
Okay, I love books too. I have way more than makes any kind of sane sense. They’re on the verge of eating my house. And I love them as objects. But, for future reading, with certain exceptions, I’m fine with downloading.
Is it smug to point out that Woody doesn’t seem to know what smug means? I say no, but people of good conscience may disagree.
Not that I’m looking for an expensive toy right now, but the no multi-tasking thing looks like a dealbreaker.
Mavis, people with Mac’s and hybrid autos tend to be smug about them.
Mavis, you bring up one of the reasons that it’s better to wait until the 2nd generation when they start sorting out some of those issues.
How will the Christian conservatives burn books on IPad?
Why the personal attacks on reg, Woody? I don’t see reg having addressed you here.
“Cub Scout Handbook on Safe Camping.”
Are you making slanderous pedophile insinuations about people again? Is that what the blog comments are for–personal attacks?
Thanks for bringing the post to my attention, Walt. It is now gone.
Other unprovoked personal attacks may also find themselves deleted. Attack politics, not people. We’re done with that.
I’m a little put off by the 1Ghz processor, given that an iBook even at the low end has 2.25 dual core, which by my limited lights is 4 times the speed, but if the software is dedicated and efficient it might not matter even though these things will be handling lots of video. Also it needs, as Celeste noted, to be Skypeable and it needs external memory access, which I don’t think it has yet. Not ready for prime time, unfortunately.
Heard a discussion about it on NPR raising some practical points (besides the Skype issue) like that if it’s as fragile as the i-Phone, which can give out with a few drops of rain, it’s not going to be as mobile as it’s being advertised. Which they felt undercut some of the promise of keeping books alive: you can drop a book and get some raindrops on it without ruining it. (It might just add lived-in “character.) AND making fun of the name, as too reminiscent of certain feminine products, reflecting a lack of test-marketing the name to women. (Actually, that one hadn’t occurred to me.) Then there’s the 1Ghz issue, as reg mentioned. Best feature: just its price, which many expected to be over $1000, so it encourages people to give it a try. (These were NOT a bunch of tech-sophisticated geeks, needless to say!) At the same initial price as the i-Phone came out at, that IS something.
Truth be told, the breakability issue is my biggest worry.
You guys try to read something into every comment that I write.
Great link, Woody. I resemble all of their remarks but I’m going to take Francine Prose’s strategy the most seriously. (I like her a lot anyway.)
I did that very clean out she recommends about a year–year and a half ago. I took many, many cartons full of books to my local library’s used book store. It was great! I felt so liberated. I still had three full walls worth of books, but there were no longer any of those large, teetery piles of books littering the floor in my office, and beside the bed.
Fast forward to the present. It didn’t last. Things are completely out of control again. There are brand new ginormous piles of books on the floor of my office.
Now please let me reassure you, I’m pretty sure that none of this is my fault. It is merely that the books themselves have babies during the night. Seriously. I’m not kidding.
Either that or it was the zillion or so books I acquired in the course of getting my MFA AND that I get for teaching AND just because I’m a maniacal reader AND because I judge book prizes here and there, which means publishers send you six thousand books consider… Yeah, it might have been that.
Bottom line: I really do want an iPad—once Apple has worked out the issues that the 1st generation of the gadget appears to have.