You don't want to know what I paid for my iPad. Call it waiting list frustration, irrational fanboy exuberance or just plain stupidity - but it got the point when I convinced myself that no self respecting futurist should be without a MessiahPad. Now that I've had a few months to contemplate the depths of my Apple avarice, let me offer a few thoughts on what Steve's new toy might mean for news, books, authors and publishing at large.
Firstly, a confession. I've fallen in love with newspapers again. The digital revolution was not kind to the world of print. After tearing its money making heart out (classifieds, subscription revenues and finally, display advertising), it disaggregated whatever content was left, and placed it at the mercy of a search algorithm. But fire up the Financial Times or the New York Times apps on the iPad, and there is no doubt that the newspaper is back - in aesthetics, if not quite yet in financial vigour.
Still, these are early days and upon closer inspection it is clear that tablet applications reflect imaginations trapped by metaphor. The FT app looks beautiful, but just try selecting text, sharing articles on social media or performing the digital equivalent of tearing out a page to keep. My workaround is saving screenshots, but that is far from an elegant solution. On the flip side, RSS readers like Pulse and Reeder excel at making my thousands of feed subscriptions intelligible and infinitely share-able. But lets face it, RSS is still the lingua franca of geekdom not the newsprint reading masses.
As for books, I'm also a tablet convert and as much as I hate to say it - Amazon's Kindle is far better in emulation. Last year's personal zeitgeist moment was when I decided to move seventeen packing boxes of books out of my house into storage. Yes the smell and touch of books is wonderful, but the weight of them in my travel bag is not. I thought that was the end of it, but this year I've added my Kindle to my paperback mass grave. As it turns out, all the things that made Kindle great, are even greater on iPad - highlighting, high speed scanning of books and the presentation of your library.
Well, almost everything. Seriously Jeff, where the hell is the search button? Does its presence violate some antiquated book licensing agreement? And why can't I select text in a book and share it on my blog? In fact, why can't I share what I'm reading with the people in my social network? Apple's iBook store is not much better. OK, so Apple has scripted some neat animations of page turns and books sliding onto virtual shelves - but is this any different from the early e-commerce websites in the nineties that had corny animations of shopping carts and supermarket aisles? Be not deceived!
You see, the real reason why the iPad is not the future of publishing is that re-inventing the art of reading has nothing to do with technology. To make real progress, we need escape velocity from the limitations of the metaphors that bind us. You can have the world's most innovative device, but unless we rethink our business and content models - we are doomed to merely port our limitations onto new, shinier screens. Everyone was amazed at the Alice in Wonderland ebook - and for good reason. It was more than just a book on a tablet - it was an entirely new form of content that tapped into the inherent strengths of a new medium. But how many other brilliantly interactive publications have you seen like that since the launch of the iPad? Almost none. Even the second issue of Wired was a let down.
All of this poses publishers with an interesting conundrum. Making books, marketing books and distributing books has, for as long as there have been printing presses, been a tough job. That's why us authors largely don't self publish. But if publishing in the future means selling and marketing an application in the App Store, how well are today's publishers placed to achieve that task? And if others are better suited to that job, how will the new economics of royalties and commission splits reflect the reality of tomorrow's reading market?
As I write my next book, all of these thoughts are bouncing around on the trampoline of my mind. In a way, my first book Futuretainment was an analogue work designed for tablet world. Not a Kindle mind you, but certainly a device capable of giving life to the interplay of images, words and motion. We are in the midst of a publishing shift that should excite content creators with its potential. In some ways, creating a book in the future will be closer to producing a movie or a video game. You will need a team handling visual production, application development, mobile distribution, and social awareness. The simple days of a writer, an editor and a royalty contract are almost at an end.
But some things will also stay the same. The book, as a conceptual archetype will persist, as did the music album even in an age of digital singularity. Books are more than just analogue containers of related paragraphs - they represent a totality that collectively stands for something more. In a way, without them, we would have nothing to blog about.
