It’s been nearly a week since Apple announced it’s newest product line, the iPad. My first reaction to the announcement was that it’s just a larger iPod Touch. It has no camera, like the Touch. It has no phone capabilities, like the Touch. The only thing going for it seemed to be the larger screen real estate.

But I’ve been approaching the whole concept all wrong.

Follow up:

Yes, the iPad has the same capabilities as the iPod Touch. But it’s also Apple’s ebook reader, built to compete with the Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (and other smaller brands). The “big deal” Apple brings to the table is all their content deals. The iPad can not only read books bought from Apple’s new iBook Store, it can also read any “ePub” format book, including those from Amazon’s bookstore. There’s already an Amazon Kindle app available from the App Store, so you can buy books from publishers that have an exclusive deal with Amazon too!

I don’t know if I agree with writers who think Apple has created a whole new category of computer. Some say the iPad is the first of the next generation of the PC. If that’s true, it’s a sad next step. I’m sure content providers agree that they’d like everybody to have a restricted, locked down, DRM aware computer that bows to their desires to make a profit on every copy of everything they sell. No more lending DVDs or books to your friends, or renting them from the library. I hope the general purpose, programmable, open desktop computer never goes away in favor of this “new generation".

Some people I’ve discussed this with think ebooks are just wrong and will never replace the feel and experience of reading a “real” paper books, but I think there is a very useful niche for ebooks. Weekly/monthly magazines and regular pulp paperbacks that I regularly purchase and carry around, bookmark, have trouble reading while eating. That can all be easily replaced by the iPad. And it’s backlit LCD, so no more reading light worries when I go into a dark restaurant.

I don’t see the iPad replacing ALL books, but I have long thought ebooks would be great for students, if educational publishers consented to selling their wares in ebook format. Imagine carrying your entire 4 years of books in a 1.5 lb 10″ tablet. Amazing reference material always at your fingertips. But ebook readers need to change too, to allow the reader to “highlight” certain passages and make notes while reading, to share those notes with other students and teachers. That would be a real game changer. And I have no doubt it’s coming soon.

One of the things that differentiates the iPad from the Kindle and Nook is that the iPad has access to more fonts. The Kindle and Nook just use ONE font for all books! You can resize it a little, but that’s it. They DO allow you to read PDF files, but I don’t know if they format them all with that same font as well. The iPad won’t have that limitation, which is nice for the publishers, and very nice for readers as well. It maintains some of the “art” of publishing. Another big difference is color. The iPad is the first major full color ebook reader on the market. I think that’s a major concern for the educational material, because color charts and graphs are a huge deal, and they suck in monochrome. Also, lots of books have color graphics inserted into them. The iPad will be able to display them.