New Media

Over 25 years, Apple has earned the privilege of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to their tribe. They can get the word out about a new product without a lot of money because one by one, they’ve signed people up. They didn’t sell 300,000 iPads in one day, they sold them over a few decades.

—“Secrets of the biggest selling launch ever”, Seth Godin

The iPad reviews are in, and whether positive, negative or on the fence loaded with caveats, the most common underlying thread is that Apple has created a device that could eventually change the way we acquire, consume and interact with digital content.

This potential change is important to publishers of all kinds, but particularly to those of books as the eBook experience on the iPad is arguably one of its weakest features.

While iBooks, Kindle and Kobo (the three eBook apps I tested) are all solid readers with varying appeal, replicating the reading experience of a print book via static EPUB files (on a device that weigts twice as much an average book!) is like driving a Porsche to the corner store for a six-pack of Old Milwaukee. While test-driving eBooks on the iPad, I limited myself to free books, samples, and in the case of Kindle, ebooks my wife and I have already purchased for her Gen 1 device (which she loves, BTW, despite the limited inventory of books she actually wants to read), and I wasn’t terribly impressed by any of them.

(more…)