Why iPad Owners Will Read More, and Faster
The more we learn about the Apple (AAPL) iPad, the more excited everyone seems to be about the some of its flashier talents: killer accessories, brilliant games and the like. But what's most disruptive about the iPad and its competitors is that they will goad us into reading more.
When it happens, this uptick in reading will be about as salient a behavioral change as we've ever ascribed to a technological device -- especially if you remember back to the 1980s and 1990s, when common knowledge held the opposite: that we were all quite slowly becoming soporific, TV-guzzling stooges. And it will happen because, for the first time in 600 years, reading will have finally gotten easier.
Here is why e-book readers will increase reading:
Tons of Choices. For a while, it seemed that e-books might squelch smaller publishing companies, who wouldn't have the leverage to make deals with both Apple and Amazon without getting punished by one or the other. Luckily, the indie houses seem to be holding their ground; two of the biggest have just signed on with Apple, despite rumors that Amazon (AMZN) would delist their paper titles if they dared. Once-reticent big sellers like John Grisham are also slowly becoming okay with e-books, meaning you won't have to be without your most recent pulp, either.
Not only that, but e-books may help the industry thrive, driving more niche book-growth and more variegated imprints. As I've written, the coming Bookpocalypse will provide some entrepreneurial opportunities for small editorial groups, and the e-book industry is drawing a lot more revenue with every passing quarter.
Beauty. E-magazines, like this one exhibited by VIVMag and written up by the New York Times, is will hold your eyes like no perfume-stuffed paper rag ever could.
Faster and More Fluid. Constant reading will become more feasible, and not simply because e-readers can carry more books. Apps like Amazon's Kindle keep your books synchronized across all your devices; that means if you read 10 pages of a book at your desk with Kindle for Windows, and you walk out the door with your iPhone, the latter will know where you left off.
The devices will also make existing reading filtering tools like FlipTop even more fantastic, because they'll allow you spend less time surfing around on the Web for interesting stuff and more time actually reading it. FlipTop is kind of like an RSS reader: it lets you subscribe to a website's content without actually visiting the site. But it goes one step further, allowing you to filter that site's content by topic, keyword, category and so on.
Tools like Google (GOOG) Bookmarks will also gain renewed purpose in the same vein. Bookmarks is a service that lets you create (and, as of mid-March, publicly publish) lists of links, kind of like your own personal Digg. If you and your friends use services like this, and you can access them on your e-reader, that's another source of hyper-selected reading material that's available anywhere. (David Carr has also argued this is also the main benefit of Twitter.) No more plopping down at the computer to poke around CNN.com looking for headlines; instead, the worthiest articles will come to you.
More Comprehensive. "Read-this-later" apps like Instapaper for iPad save articles you want to keep around for reference, letting you keep track of all the webpages you might want to reference in the future (or have been getting around to reading). If you've got all those articles in a list, at least you have a fighting chance at actually someday reading them.
No Spam. Remember when everyone thought spam would bring the Web to a screeching halt? Luckily we've avoided that doomsday scenario; after Facebook's rash of phishing scams last year and Twitter's burgeoning spam problem clogging its search function, both companies seem to be crap free, with Twitter's recovery being especially impressive.
They Read to You. Sure, it's dubious territory from a copyright infringement standpoint, but both the iPad and the Kindle can read to you if you plug in a pair of headphones. Remember that scenario above, walking way from your PC to read on your iPhone? You'll also be able to keep reading as you drive by plugging your device into the speakers in your car.
Reading hasn't kept pace with the improvements of our other human pastimes: listening (to music), talking (by phone) and watching (movies and TV). Unlike with other other media, books have hardly changed. It's as if they're mired in roughly the same time period as the daguerrotype, the record, and the telegraph. Paper books aren't searchable, can't be easily excerpted, don't have links to footnotes and can't backup your notes. They can can show pictures, but not video; they can be released yearly, but can't be updated every 24 hours. (This isn't to say I dislike paper books -- it's simply that not every book needs to exist in print.)
There are still obstacles, of course: e-book pricing could still end up over-inflated, and e-magazine prices will need to reach approximate parity with their paper counterparts, despite more production cost -- but at least we have a good array of devices emerging, and the comfort of knowing that in 20 years, we may be more literate than ever.