Tim Carmody: Why books on the iPad just might work

In the past month or so, since Apple’s iPad was announced, there’s been an increas­ing push­back against the idea that the tablet will be a mean­ing­ful stand-in for a ded­i­cated e-reader. In par­tic­u­lar, it seems to have really dis­ap­pointed folks in the e-reading/publishing/new media com­mu­nity, many of whom expected a lot from the Jesus tablet — in some cases expected dia­met­ri­cally opposed things. It’s more ambi­ent com­plaints than a spe­cific detailed argu­ment, but the gen­eral beef goes some­thing like this:

1. iBooks is an after­thought, it’s US only and doesn’t even come pre-installed;
2. Nobody’s going to want to read a book when they’re con­stantly tempted to check their mail, play games, and browse the inter­net instead;
3. A lot of the “enhanced ebook” demos so far look pretty crummy (this unites folks who pre­fer plain-text and peo­ple who wanted enhanced books to be more interactive);
4. It’s a closed sys­tem, which means Apple con­trols it, Apple could cen­sor what you read, and keep you from tak­ing your books any­where else;
5. Nobody reads any­more any­way / Big-time e-readers have already invested in their Kin­dles / Real read­ers like print.

Now if you’re play­ing along at home, with the excep­tion of the first, none of these crit­i­cisms are really iPad-specific. #2 is the sup­posed rea­son peo­ple don’t and won’t read on their lap­tops or smart­phones, #3 is the crit­i­cism of early efforts at inter­ac­tive books on the web or CD-ROM, #4 is the iPod, and #5 is just a repur­posed ver­sion of the anti-Kindle argu­ment, except here it’s strangely (but only occa­sion­ally) mounted in defense of the Kindle.

So here’s my argu­ment as to why books on this thing will work. It doesn’t have much to do with the future of Flash or HTML 5 video (or any of the other stuff brainy futur­ist web peo­ple think about), the agency vs retail model of sell­ing books (or any of the other stuff brainy futur­ist pub­lish­ing folks spend a lot of time think­ing about) or with the future of mul­ti­me­dia unbooks (or any of the other stuff brainy futur­ist new media folks spend a lot of time think­ing about). It’s all based on my imag­ined psycho-anthropology of an aver­age iPad user.

I’ll start with an axiom. The iPad is not intended to be an ebook reader, or even a music or movie player, or even really a cloud­book. In fact, it’s bet­ter if you stop think­ing about it in terms of the kind of media you’d like to play or cre­ate on it at all. It’s not really about that. Or rather, media is only inci­den­tal to it.

It’s bet­ter if you start think­ing about it in terms of the geog­ra­phy of the human body. This is how the iPhone worked. It had great soft­ware, han­dled all sorts of dif­fer­ent kinds of media. But its real suc­cess in incor­po­rat­ing all of those dif­fer­ent media, and dif­fer­ent appli­ca­tions, is that it con­quered what had been a highly com­pet­i­tive place on the human body. It con­quered your pocket.

It’s not all that dif­fer­ent from the kitchen gad­gets we see adver­tised on late-night TV. “You can get rid of all of these gad­gets, replace them with the ______, and finally get your counter space back!” It’s weird because we don’t think about our com­put­ing devices this way. But that’s really how they work.

The iPad obvi­ously can’t fit into your pocket. And Apple wants you to keep your iPhone there. No. The iPad wants to con­quer your backpack.

It wants you to leave your lap­top, your books, your mag­a­zines, your note­books, your portable DVD player, your net­book, your Kin­dle all at home. Or it wants you to never buy them. It wants to monop­o­lize your mobile bag. If not at the air­port, then def­i­nitely for short trips.

Now, let’s say I buy the first-gen, cheap­est avail­able iPad, the model that comes with 8GB 16GB of mem­ory and Wi-Fi only. What is the geog­ra­phy of this device? I could use it at home, as a sec­ond com­puter, espe­cially if I don’t have a lap­top. But if I do have a lap­top, either the lap­top or the iPad may begin to feel redun­dant. The iPad’s supe­rior porta­bil­ity sug­gests that it’s best used as a portable device.

But unless you sprung that extra dough for 3G, or you’ve got a local café with decent free wi-fi, you’re stuck with what­ever you’ve got on packed away in local stor­age on the device already. This might be a movie, sure, or music, or a video game. But you don’t have very much room for a lot of any of these things. The only thing you really have a lot of room for is text.

(This is actu­ally why I sus­pect plain-jane, text-only books are going to have a long life as the de facto default for a while. Ded­i­cated read­ing machines like the Kin­dle or Nook can’t sup­port any­thing else, and more ver­sa­tile porta­bles like the iPad don’t have the built-in mem­ory or everywhere-internet to sup­port a whole library of these things. Add our iner­tial devo­tion to doc­u­ment for­mats like PDF and it may be a very long time before mul­ti­me­dia books or mag­a­zines become main­stream items.)

Now, video games are a good exam­ple of another phe­nom­e­non that bodes well for books on the iPad. I’m going to call this “the prin­ci­ple of adja­cent media.” Here’s the the­ory. When you buy a heav­ily mul­ti­func­tional device, you usu­ally have a fairly lim­ited set of things you’d like to do with it. For instance, when I bought my iPhone, I wasn’t really in the mar­ket for a video game machine. I wanted some­thing like could make calls, keep up with email and my cal­en­dar, browse the inter­net, maybe play music and show pho­tos and maybe even read some books. I like video games, but I was pretty much web– and console-only; I never even had a Game­boy, or bought a game for my com­puter. In other words, video games had no claim on my pocket. But soon enough, I said, what the heck, and bought a few games for my iPhone.

That’s what’s going to hap­pen to books on the iPad. For every user who does a bunch of read­ing on their iPad, you’re going to get a dozen who are going to buy books based on the “what-the-heck” fac­tor. It’ll be bet­ter than buy­ing a book in an air­port, or at a shop­ping mall. The store will be right there. There will be sev­eral of them. (iBooks, Kin­dle, B&N and more will all have apps.)

And I bet that the rel­a­tive weak­ness of the entry-level devices, the low mem­ory and lack of 3G inter­net, will all actu­ally drive iPad own­ers towards read­ing. First it will con­quer their bags. And when they run out of inter­net, then they won’t have any­thing else to do.

(That, at least, is my wholly spec­u­la­tive the­ory about the whole thing.)