Publicious

After last year’s O’Reilly Tools of Change conference, I wrote a post called Is This What a Kindle Killer Looks Like? in reference to a cool prototype I saw for the Plastic Logic Que reader. To me, it was immediately evident that this device had virtues that would far surpass the klunky Kindle. The Plastic Logic device was iPod like whereas the Kindle was definitely Zunesville, Daddy-O. Y’know, for squares.

About that time I also read a piece on Ars Technica about Apple’s stance toward ebooks, which said that King Steven could rule the land of ebooks if he so much as lifted a finger to do so. But the word was that he deemed the land of ebooks to be a barren waste, unworthy of conquest. Or maybe he was busy breaking in his new liver.

Fast forward to present day. The iPad makes its debut in two weeks. The first day of pre-orders for the device was like tickets going on sale for a Lady Gaga show. If everyone attending the show got a free cone of Ben & Jerry’s and a minute in the money booth. Analysts estimated that 120,000 units shifted that first day. And Apple’s well on their way to over a million sold before they hit the stores on April 3. That’s over a million sold before almost anyone has even seen one of the things in real life. How funny would it be if the iPad didn’t even really exist? When April 3 comes, there’s just a video playing in all the Apple stores of Steve Jobs laughing and saying, “I was just screwing with you people! Can’t believe you dumb shmucks believed in a giant iPhone. We didn’t even bother to think up a cool name and you still bought it. Hee hee.”

Ah but the iPad is real, and it is not just a Kindle Killa, it is the asteroid streaking into the atmosphere, and ending on the Age of dedicated eReadersaurs. And even if the iPad doesn’t destroy dedicated eReaders by itself, it is soon to be followed by a raft of other tablet devices, by HP and others. There could be 50 or more models on the market by next year, and with sales expected to be 10.5 million units this year, and 50 million per year by 2015, well, you get the picture.

So why am I so convinced that the iPad will destroy everything in its path? Well, I have 3,000,000,003 reasons. Give or take. The 3 billion comes from the number of downloads from Apple’s app store. And the three are my mom, my wife, and my daughter. Current users of a Windows laptop, a MacBook Pro, and a Nintendo DSi, all of which could be replaced with iPads to great effect, methinks. The laptops are overkill, and the Nintendo is underkill. As long as we can keep watching Harry Potter Puppet Pals on YouTube, we’re good.

So Steve, please put us down for three iPads, come Christmas time. And some gift cards for the iBooks store. You need any more organs, I got a kidney I could probably spare.

Of course the iPad has its nasayers, who have been saying nay from the rooftops. It doesn’t do Flash, it doesn’t have a camera, it doesn’t multitask, it’s not widescreen, it’s a walled garden, the app store has draconian terms that treat developers like crap, it’s got a dumb name, etc.

For a rebuttal, we go now to Senior eBook analyst Stan Broflovski. Stan, what do you say to all the iPad critics’ charges?

“Dude, we don’t care.”

See, Stan agrees with me that the iPad heralds no less than a new new age of computing. It is the asteroid dealing the death blow to not only to the Kindle, the Nook, and plodding dinos like my mom’s laptop, but also sending my wife’s velociraptor of a MacBookPro scurrying for cover. My daughter’s DSi is probably small enough to survive for now, but she will soon graduate to an iThing, no doubt. The simple fact is, outside of work, most people don’t need computers to accomplish the vast majority of their digital tasks. In fact, when you get right down to it, most people don’t even want computers.

Right, Stan?

“That’s right Dude. Computers are complicated, expensive, time-consuming, pain-in-the-ass appliances. Most applications are bloated, slow pieces of crap with a million useless features. Even mice suck when you really think about it. People just want to do what they do: find, use, and share information, communicate, connect, and create. They need to shop and pay bills. They like to listen to music, play games, doodle, and watch Terrance and Philip videos. People put up with crashes, viruses, slowness, upgrades, drivers, plug-ins, backups, etc in order to get the good stuff. They just want things that work fast and work every time. And if a tablet running sandboxed apps lets them do what they want without all the crap, well, then tablets are the future of computers. And reading books and magazines will be just one of a million things you do on a tablet. Nobody will even think twice about it a few years from now.”

Thank you Stan. I’ll put you down for an iPad too, m’kay?

Filed under: Apple, Books, ebooks | Tagged: Apple, ebook, iPad, Kindle