What do you mean you haven’t got an iPad yet?
Not to get all Steve Jobs on your ass, but the iPad really has rewritten the book. Let me count the ways.
- It liberates words and causality.
- Stories told through the screen will no longer be bound by numbered pages and sequential thought.
- Navigating by touch makes stories a tactile experience.
- Having a book run out of power is a humiliating experience.
- All the classic are at everyone’s fingertips. (Reading Aristotle’s “Poetics” in the closest form we have to the wax tablet it was first written on around 350BC is strangely humbling and liberating.)
- It’s an empty vessel, waiting to be filled with content.
- You can read in the dark.