Paper is dead. The culprit is, oddly, an oversize phone that doesn’t make phone calls. It could also be described as a computer that doesn’t run computer programmes (at least, not as we know the. It’s supposedly a good device for email, but it doesn’t have a keyboard. Every developer and media company out there wants to write software for it, but most of what’s out there, so far, is pretty awful.
None of that matters. The iPad is the “game changer” in the business of communications technology. It is the device that we’ve been waiting for: the first to raise the very real prospect of a computer providing a more enjoyable reading experience than a book or magazine. And though we’ve had “home computers” for decades, the iPad is the first truly domestic computer.
The first thing to note about the iPad is its sleekness. This isn’t merely a design touch. Roughly the size of a table place mat, it hangs around in the house far less obtrusively than any laptop computer. It doesn’t have to be opened, or even turned on.
This combination of accessibility and responsiveness is likely to provoke a radical shift in how computers are used in the home: it will prop up on a cookbook stand, for example. Once they develop an RTÉ Guide app, it will be as easy to check the telly listings on it as in the magazine (perhaps easier). And, after three months searching for something I can do while bottle-feeding newborn twins in the middle of the night, the iPad is finally it – illuminated, large enough to read comfortably, and easy to manipulate with one hand.
The second thing about it is the quality of the reading and viewing experience it offers. This makes it the decisive blow to paper. It will be a long time before any computer can match the utility of the cheap paperback novel, but all other print formats are under severe threat.
The most obvious victim will be textbooks. One of the intriguing apps getting a lot of the early attention is The Elements, an iPad version of a seemingly obscure book on the periodic table of the elements by Theodore Grey, a science writer and developer. A short text on each element is accompanied by illustrations – and not only are the illustrations luminous, they are interactive. A flick of your finger makes the sun spin on its axis, or shows an explosion, all alongside the text. Not merely beautiful, it offers real utility.
The iBooks app offers a more basic e-reader, which is more responsive and attractive than the Kindle and has the surprisingly compelling feature of allowing you to flick over the page. The key feature of iBooks, for students, is its note-taking ability. With a couple of touches, you can highlight any text and save it as a “bookmark”. The app automatically assembles all these notes in a new “chapter” at the front of the book. Combine that with searchability, and the iPad becomes significantly more efficient for studying than a shelf-full of books.
Doing a cull of our own bookshelves recently, I was sorely tempted to give away a magnificent, huge volume of photos of Africa by Sebastião Salgado. We don’t have a coffee table, it doesn’t fit on the bookshelf, and it’s too bulky to leave lying around. Image-rich books – photography, art, cookery – can’t possibly compete with the iPad. Not simply for convenience, but for aesthetic quality. The most stunning example I’ve seen is the Marvel Comics app, which gives original comics in near-original size and layout, and is likely to revitalise the genre. A National Gallery app could prove a surprise hit (keep it simple, and it would be inexpensive to develop).
But what of the news media? It’s clear from the early attempts that the US newspapers are hoping the iPad will resuscitate their traditional models. Both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal have gone for apps that mimic their print editions rather than their websites. They look well and are easy to read and navigate, but gain little added value from being on the device, with ineffectual use of photos and uninspired integration of video.
The Guardian, on the other hand, has sought to tease out the strengths of this new medium with a minimalist but well-targetted app based on the Eyewitness double-page photography spread in its print edition: simple, and beautiful. GQ has merely replicated its magazine digitally, and the 30-odd pages of ads at the front provide a very good example of how not to deal with this new medium. Time Magazine strikes a much finer balance between old media and new, making a real strength of its photography and with smart, seamless, embedded video.
But the death-knell for the print industry comes not from any of these, per se. Instead, it is sounded by what may prove to be the iPad’s “killer app” (if not in itself, then as the spearhead of a genre). This is a small, free app, called Alice, and it tells the story of a small girl who falls down a rabbit hole.
With Lewis Carroll’s original words and the classic illustrations by John Tenniel, this seems at first to be simply a children’s book on a screen. That is, until the rabbit takes out his pocket watch, and the watch itself swings across the screen, according to actual gravity (replicated by the iPad using its motion sensors). Even more than the comics, it is a marvel, a digital wonderland.
The biggest user of the iPad in our house has been our two and a half year old daughter, who is obsessed with a colouring app (touch the colour, then touch the picture), and can turn it on herself. She loves books, and will thrill to Alice when slightly older (and to younger-age books as soon as they’re available). This is the game changer: if the iPad can not only compete with, but outdo, the finest in children’s literature, as well as providing a vast array of other educational and entertainment materials for them, the prospects of the traditional publishing industry surviving till my daughter is an adult are bleak indeed.
Over a century ago, Lewis Carroll foresaw this. At the start of Alice, she grows tired of trying to read her elder sister’s book. “‘What is the use of a book,’ thought Alice, ‘without pictures or conversation?’” The iPad make the prospect of books with pictures and conversation very real, and not just for children.
In the meantime, though, there are plenty of glitches with this first iPad, and also plenty of absurdities in how we’ll use it. I researched this article on my iPad, slouched on the couch. But I had the day’s papers spread out beside me, and Vincent Browne on the telly in the corner, while I used a spiral bound notebook to jot ideas and then wrote the article up on my laptop (and that’s not to mention my phone, on which I could, technically, have done all of the above).
Some would say that suggests a severe case of attention deficit disorder. They’re probably right, but it also suggests the power of habit. The potential of the iPad will only be realised by a generation that isn’t hidebound by the habits of old media. It’s impossible to predict how it will evolve, and how the news media will evolve with it. The only thing that seems certain is that it, and its ilk, will kill paper as a mass communications tool. Those of us with the habit will miss it; but it would be churlish to regret its passing. The future is too exciting for that.
Published in the Daily Irish Mail, July 22