My two thoughts:

First, Copyright law, always complex and mushy and interpretable, is widely misunderstood and/or ignored in academia.  It is by me.  Take eReserves, for example, something I was discussing with a colleague the other day in relation to course packs.  At EMU, eReserves is the library’s “electronic reserve” system that allows someone like me to put various copyright-protected materials “on reserve” in the form of PDFs that students can download for free.   Many institutions have such systems.  The advantage of eReserves for me is I can add and subtract readings whenever, including the middle of the term (that’s just flat-out impossible with a course pack), and “free” is obviously much cheaper than even the most inexpensive course pack.  But as I understand it, it is actually illegal to repeatedly make available for free some copyright-protected text via this system.  In other words, with essays I teach pretty much every term, like Walter Ong’s “Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought,” I’m supposed to put that into a course pack so that the copyright is cleared and students pay the royalty.  Another example:  as I understand it, if I show a movie in a class, I’m technically supposed to pay the copyright holders of that film some sort of screening fee, unless I’m showing something that the university has already paid some sort of royalty on already.  (I may be very wrong about this one).

The point is this:  I don’t know anyone who treats eReserves this way, I wouldn’t even think of asking for permission to show a movie in a class, and I don’t really care about these potential copyright violations for admittedly mushy and ignorant reasons.  The way I figure it, no one is going to sue me over eReserves or showing a movie in a class or committing any other copyright crime; at worse, they are going to send me a “cease and desist” letter.  Instead of worrying about the legal ramifications of getting various permissions for use of these materials in my classes, I worry about how reading the things I assign might actually “teach” my students something.  Let the lawyers sort out the copyright violations.

Second, I have been thinking lately about jailbreaking my iPhone.  As most 3G users know, the new iPhone 4 operating system slows and/or crashes older phones.  Quite a bit, actually.  Eventually, I’ll get a new phone, though I am not entirely sure when.  On the “early-side,” maybe I’ll try to justify the iPhone 4 as some sort of Christmas present; on the “late-side,” maybe I’ll hold out for whatever is next (iPhone 5? iPhone 4S?), which, according to MacRumors (they say that the average “update” cycle for the iPhone is 218 days), would probably be sometime between about March and May 2011.  So in the meantime, I kind of feel like I have nothing to lose with attempting the various jailbreak options that are out there; heck, it might even help my older phone work “better.”

Although the author advises publishers to “read it and weep,” this doesn’t mark the beginning of the end for the publishing industry — at least not yet. What Murakami is releasing is not an e-book in the traditional sense, but a full multimedia experience that can’t be replicated in print. In some respects, it’s similar to Alice for the iPad, an app that brings Lewis Caroll’s beloved Alice in Wonderland to life with full-color animations and interactive features. Furthermore, the author is also still in talks with its publisher, Kodansha, about releasing a hard copy of the novel.

In other words, Murakami’s project should be hailed less as a blow against the monopoly of big publishing houses over authors and the circulation of their work, and more as a celebration of the kinds of opportunities that devices like the iPad can provide for creativity and cost-effecient distribution.

The iPad is the perfect device for this sort of thing, and without a doubt, we’re going to see more of these fusions between novelistic “words in a row” text with audio, video, games, interactivity, and who knows what else.  One of the glib little comments I like to make in my writing classes is that the reason why it’s often a good idea to include an image, video, or even audio file as part of a writing project is because nowadays, you can.  So it seems just obvious to me that there will be writers who want to break out of the paper confines of “the book” and take advantage of the new technologies available.

Of course, this can go too far and just turn into a gimmick that can backfire.  I for one don’t need to see another 3-D film anytime soon– well, maybe the sequel to Avatar. But it’s also hard to figure out what will be a gimmick and what will be the next big thing until we try.  And this is also the main reason why I for one would like to figure out what it takes to program for the iPad so I could try to make something like this.

Incidentally, I’ve never heard of this writer and I have no idea when this is going to be released, and I have a feeling that unless this gets translated into English, I’ll be limited to reading about this instead of actually reading/experiencing it.

Just to back up a second here:  as I previously mentioned, I bought the WIRED iPad App when it came out with the June issue of the magazine, and I was pretty impressed.  I thought most of the critiques about it, while basically accurate (a lot of ads, you can’t copy and paste, etc.), didn’t take away from the experience for me.  While there’s no way I would pay $5 an issue to read WIRED on my iPad, I would pay the same amount of money as a paper subscription to read it for a year– I think that was something like $25 or so the last time I subscribed.

Anyway, I plugged in my iPad yesterday to my computer for charging and synching and when I was prompted that an update of the WIRED App was available, I did what I always do and agreed to automatically update all apps.  But the WIRED App’s “update” replaced my purchased June issue with a free preview and the opportunity to buy the June and July issues issues for $3.99 each. In other words, I was downdated.

So, here’s my review of the new WIRED app on the Apple iTunes Store site:

If you bought June 2010 WIRED, DO NOT UPGRADE!

I bought the June 2010 WIRED (18.06) and was quite happy with it.  Then I “upgraded.”  This new version of the app overwrote the previous version, which means that my previously purchased issue was erased and replaced by a “free” promo that does nothing more than show me the covers of the June and July issues and invites me to spend $3.99 to buy what I already bought.  And I’m guessing that if I WERE to buy either of these issues, it’d disappear again with a new upgrade.

Not cool. Not cool at all.  Conde Nast and WIRED owe me $5 and I most certainly will not be buying any WIRED anymore, electronic or print.  Boo. Hiss.  Boo.

I don’t know why I said “upgrade” instead of “update.”

So I poked around the web site WIRED has for this app a bit, and at the bottom of it, there’s some information on how it’s supposed to be– my June issue was not supposed to be deleted. I don’t know if this is the difference or not, but the instructions here make it sound like I was supposed to update the app while my iPad wasn’t hooked up to anything, which is something I almost never do.

Then there was this:

If you’ve purchased the June issue but it is not available for installation after you’ve updated your app, please send an email to WIRED [at] cdsfulfillment.com requesting assistance. Our customer service team will get back to you with further instructions.

Which I did; they haven’t responded yet.  Grr.

Having the same static thick paper stacks left and right in your e-reader application on the first as well as on the last page, is not just visually wrong, it is also confusing; it feels wrong and it is wrong. It’s kitsch.

I have to say that this is one of the things that I don’t particularly like about electronic reading on my iPad or my iPhone, and I’m not quite sure what it says about me as a reader.  Do I really need to know how many pages are left?  Is that a bad thing, always wanting to know where the end is?  Especially when I read before I go to bed (which is about half the time before I go to bed), I often will look ahead to see how far I’ve got to do before a logical place to stop.  Reading on an iPad doesn’t facilitate this that well, and some of the elements that the current designers are doing to help people bridge that gap between paper book (like these fake page stacks) and electronic book don’t help much.

I’ve also been thinking lately and again about the definition of “book.”  The experience of reading electronically– be it on an iPad or a phone or on a computer screen– has bubbled up in the news a bit lately because of Nicholas Carr’s new book, The Shallows. I’d buy it to take on my upcoming vacation/trip and also because it sounds interesting, but it isn’t available for Kindle or iBook yet.  (Yes, that irony is intended.) But as far as I can tell, it is a book-length treatment of Carr’s 2008 article in The Atlantic, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” To over-simplify, I think Carr’s basic point in the article and (probably) the book is that reading a book on the page is a more “real” and meaningful, deep-thought experience than reading it on a screen.

This is problematic for lots of different reasons, but the one that struck me again this past weekend is the definition of “book.”  What I think Carr means is the same sort of thing most of my students mean when we discuss the anxiety around the end of “the book.”  Generally speaking, I think Carr et al thinks of books as the sort of thing you buy in Borders and take with you on a trip or you give as a present or you read while in bed or in the bathtub or while sitting in an easy chair listening to soft music and drinking Chardonnay.  But a lot of books aren’t these kinds of “books” at all.

Last Saturday was the annual Normal Park (my neighborhood) yard sale, where there are like 100 yard/garage sales all going on at the same time on the first Saturday in June.  We didn’t have anything to sell really, but I put out some boxes of “books” that were in the garage and that needed to be disposed of with a sign that said “free.”  There were a couple of things that did actually get taken, a twelve year old copy of What to Expect When You are Expecting, for example.  But most of these books were textbooks, anthologies, writing handbooks, and instructor manuals, and those books, even free, were not taken.  And as I tell my students all the time, computers have eliminated all kinds of things that we used to think of as “books,” things like research databases and indexes, the MLA bibliography, dictionaries, and soon (more or less now), the phone book.  No one seems particularly broken up or wistful that these “books” are no longer.

Anyway, while I would like my iPad books to have more of a look and feel of a “book,” I have a feeling that Carr et al’s anxieties about these new electronic books will fade sooner than later.  And then we can all lament the loss and feel if the iPad book for something new that comes along.

• Jakob Nielsen doesn’t think the iPad is that cool in terms of usability. I dunno, seems a little like he’s a hater, though Nielsen does raise some interesting points about how the iPad exhibits the growing pains of moving from one kind of literacy technology to another.
• How to self-publish a book for iPad. Really, how to self-publish a book for ePub format period.  This combined with this NYTimes editorial from Garrison Keillor, “The End of an Era in Publishing,” makes me think.  On the one hand, I don’t think that “self-publishing” is automatically going to spell the end of publishing business simply because there has always been self-publishers trying to get their work out there. Some were, for their time, pretty successful too– I believe Leaves of Grass was initially self-published.  On the other hand, this certainly changes the ease and scale of delivery possible with self-published electronic books.  Print something up on paper and your distribution point is pretty much limited to the street corner, maybe the trunk of your car; make an ePub book and the distribution point becomes international.
• An interesting review of reading on the iPad, comparing iBooks, Kindle, and GoodReader. I personally think the differences between iBook and Kindle are pretty negligible, and really, Kindle has two possible advantages right now.  First, amazon.com/Kindle has A LOT more books available than Apple/iBooks.  Second, I can read Kindle books in multiple places.  So, for example, I have been reading (very slowly, in fits and starts) The Omnivore’s Dilemma on Kindle.  Sometimes, I read it on my iPad, but as often (maybe more often, since I do this at the gym while on the stationary bike) I read it on my iPhone.  What’s nice about Kindle is the book syncs up to my place.
• I think a lot of the “love of the object” of the book is sort of misplaced, sort of like the sentiments in this NYTimes editorial, “Further Thoughts of a Novice E-Reader.” Verlyn Klinkenborg is mostly lamenting the loss of paper and look, probably smell and touch too.  Interestingly, it seems to me that a lot of what’s going on with the iPad is also a love (or hate) of the object.  I don’t think that the iPad or other tablets is going to completely eliminate the sort of fine books that Klinkenborg feels she (or he?  what is Verlyn?) might miss, but what might be a good thing is that these devices might save a lot of trees.  As the post “To Kindle or not to Kindle?” from “Limited Prerogatives” points out, a lot of those wonderfully smelling and feeling paper books end up wasting a lot of trees.  She quotes a NYTimes article about how the book and newspaper industries harvested something like 125 million trees, and something like about a third of books printed are returned to the publisher and/or “pulped.”
• And while I don’t have any links to it, I’ve heard some interesting reactions to the Wired iPad App, which I (of course!) bought.  I don’t think it’s fair to complain about it because of all of the ads, because a) the print version of Wired is basically a Geek Glamour magazine, intensely heavy on ads that many of its readers actually want to read; b) a lot of the ads are pretty cool and interactive, and c) it’s how magazine publishers make money (dirty little secret).  I don’t think it’s fair to complain that it is just the print version on the iPad since I never had a print version of Wired that included video and audio.  And I also think it’s only a little fair to complain about how the Wired iPad app doesn’t allow for “cut and paste” copying or bookmarking, because while I would agree that these features would be nice, Wired is not exactly the kind of thing I read to “cut and paste” from.  Besides, they still have a web site.

  What I thought was more interesting with the new Wired App and all of these other things is how they are the latest in a long history of what happens when we make the transition from one literacy technology to another.  A number of people talk about this with the transition from early handwritten manuscripts into printed books:  at first, the printed books looked a lot like the handwritten ones, but then, after people figured out the capabilities of the technology, they looked different.  We still call web pages “pages” because they initially looked a lot like “words in a row” pages with some links, and once we figured out the technology, they ended up looking a lot different.

  But I’m not going to keep paying $5 a pop for it.  They either are going to have to set up some sort of subscription service (the print version delivered was about a third of the price on the newsstand), or they are going to have to drop the price for me to be a regular reader.

• Finally, I downloaded and installed onto my iPad (as part of my iBooks library) Cory Doctorow’s new YA book For the Win. Despite his dislike of the iPad, I like Doctorow’s thinking and writing a lot, and I very much admire his practice of putting books up online for free.  But the iPad and similar devices raise an interesting question about the sustainability of this practice:  before the iPad, I might have been inclined to buy one of Doctorow’s paper books because as a matter of convenience and form, I would much rather read the paper book than the PDF (or whatever) on my computer screen.  As a result, Doctorow (and his publishers) would still sell a lot of books.  But if I’m inclined to read one of his books on an iPad or similar device anyway, why would I do anything but download the free version?  In other words, since the “free” version is no longer is a means of selling/promoting the “not free” version, how long will it be before Doctorow starts charging something to download the ePub from his site?

Before I left for Purdue, I printed out my two talks– good ol’-fashioned paper, which I probably would have been using with or without a laptop, though I thought about going for the truly unnecessarily repetitive and redundant by bringing my laptop to project my presentations and my iPad to read from my script/notes. As I mentioned before, I prepared my Keynote presentations on my iPad itself to avoid the “translation” problems of converting a desktop presentation– basically, the desktop version of Keynote is just different enough from the iPad version to screw up fonts, some graphics, builds, etc.  Better to skip that hassle and just start with the iPad in the first place.

Both of the Keynote shows I put together were fairly simple, but not uncomfortably so– in other words, I ultimately didn’t feel like I was “lacking in power” by just using the iPad version of Keynote.  My shows had “builds” and graphics and the like, and the presentation I did about YouTube included about 8 minutes worth of video.  The “trick” to including the photos and the video I discovered through a little trial and error was to put together an album of photos and video I wanted to use for my presentations together on my desktop first and then uploaded it to the iPad, making note to check the box for including both photos and videos onto my album.  From there, building the presentation with videos and photos was easy.

I had heard the day before my presentation that some people were having “issues” with connecting their iPads to the projectors at the conference, but I did not find that to be the case at all.  Basically, I just plugged in my iPad Dock Connector to VGA Adapter and I was good to go– well, good to go for my Keynote presentations and a few other functions.  The reviews of this product on the Apple web site are accurate in that this adapter allows you to project Keynote presentations (and it’s not quite as nice as the dual monitor mode you get with a laptop), it’ll project photos/slide shows, and I think it’ll project movies (I haven’t tried it on anything long that I’ve ripped yet), and that’s it.  It is not a “mirror mode” device that projects whatever it is you see on the iPad onto a projector.  This lack of capability disappointed me after I bought it, but for my purposes generally and at this conference, it was not a big deal.

For all of my other basic “computing needs” while at the conference, the iPad worked fine.  I never had any wifi problems (though I heard that some folks with iPad did have problems connecting to the Purdue network), email and basic web surfing were fine, etc., etc.  There was only one time where the lack of Flash was a problem, and that was looking at some videos that Alexis Hart’s sixth grade niece had done– not exactly mission critical stuff.  And I was even able to open that with CloudBrowse, though it is slow and probably not worth it for most Flash applications.

And of course, the iPad was a pretty good conversation piece– not as much with people curious about what it’s “like” but more with people who have one and who want to know what I was doing with mine (and vice-versa).  There were quite a few people sporting iPads at this conference, too.  I ran into Kathy Yancey and we talked for a good 45 minutes, her mostly asking me questions about this or that piece of software.  It was interesting to me because we were coming at the device quite differently.  She admitted to coming at all this from a Windoze sort of background, and she wanted to know where the manual was; me, I always just “play” with stuff, and while the iPad is different, it is close enough to the Apple nomenclature to be pretty easy for me to pick up on quickly.  I think the iPad is one of those things that doesn’t really need any explanation; Kathy thought it would be good if I did a workshop on what worked well.  I’m not sure who is right, but if someone wants to bring me in as they iPad expert….

Anyway, on the whole, the iPad lived up to its “netbook-like” potential for travel for me.  It’s lighter and smaller, and with a kick-ass battery life. It’s not great for updating my WordPress blog or for doing anything too complicated, but for everything else, a thumbs up.

So, for the foreseeable future, my iPad is going to remain a sort of “second banana” as a writerly device, something to use when I’m writing and not here, which is to say not that often.

Which is not to say never.  Besides travel and the occasional coffee shop trip, I do like to get away from the desk once in a while.  Here’s a picture of my iPad set-up in the backyard on a Saturday or Sunday early evening the other day.  A couple of features I’ll note about this layout:

• The Apple iPad Case holding up my iPad is a must:  very convenient, and when it isn’t propping up the iPad as shown here, it also folds over to the perfect angle for in lap typing on the iPad’s landscape keyboard, and it closes up like a portfolio.
• The bluetooth keyboard.  As I wrote about previously, the dock that Apple sells for the iPad is completely useless; this keyboard on the other hand is great.
• Wine and iPhone optional, though I will say the iPhone does help me deal with some of my multitasking needs. The wine not so much.

The iPad won’t link up with a mouse– yet.  I saw a hack where someone did connect a bluetooth mouse to an iPad, and I will bet that some kind of app will come along sooner than later to either connect a mouse or to make your iPhone behave like a touch screen/trackball mouse.  That’d be sweet.  Anyway, what this means is if you want to do something other than type, you’re touching the screen– not a big deal, but not all key controls, either.

Oh, and while there is definitely some glare off of the screen, it’s not as bad as this photo implies.  It’s still readable/usable outside, especially if you’re under an umbrella.

So far, my writerly iPad work has been pretty much limited to Pages and Keynote.  As has been widely reported/noted, neither are as good as the desktop versions.  While I understand why Apple called these iPad versions “Pages” and “Keynote,” it probably would have been more accurate for them to call them something that distinguishes these versions of the software from the real versions of the software.  I dunno, maybe “Not Pages” or “Keynote Sorta.”

The other thing that is very annoying is that getting stuff from my desktop to my iPad and vice-versa:  I believe the
technical term for the rig-a-ma-roll one has to go through to get things from the computer to the iPad and then back again is “pain in the ass.”  There’s probably a better/smarter way to do it than all the synching, importing, and exporting that I’ve had to go through, but it isn’t obvious to me how to do that yet.

That said, both of these programs are  usable and even have some interesting advantages over their desktop versions. In Pages, you don’t have a lot of menu “junk” on the screen, a factor of its limited menu options.  But there are a couple of different word processors and similar software out there (Scrivener immediately comes to mind) that sell this lack of “distractions” and just the words on the screen as a “feature,” and for those uni-tasking writing moments, I agree with that.

Once I got the hang of Keynote on the iPad, I found it easy and even kind of fun to use because you can shuffle around the slides a lot more like index cards. I also figured out that the best way to build a Keynote presentation that I intend to show on my iPad is to make it on my iPad.  So for example, I’m giving two talks at the upcoming Computers and Writing Conference at Purdue: one part of a round-table on virtual mentorship, and a presentation about using YouTube to supplement my online teaching. To write them, I did the “words in a row” and video editing part of things on my desktop.  But then I pretty much put the Keynote presentations together on the iPad set up on my desk next to the computer.

For the conference itself, I’m going to try taking only my iPad and print-outs of my script/text of my presentations– plus I’ve already created “plan B” in the form of putting my talks up online so I can access them there in a pinch via Dropbox and the blog/web versions I link to above.  I’ve got an adapter that I can use to hook the iPad up to a projector, though that adapter is unfortunately limited– I can use it to project Keynote or to show a slide show, but no “movie night” with the Netflix app, for example.  I’ll also be reading my talk off of old-fashioned “paper.”  We’ll see how it goes.

Um, okay– but what are the advantages of using an iPad like this over using a laptop?

Well, for me, I guess there are four, maybe three and a half:

• The iPad is lighter (even with the keyboard) and more compact.  Now, I don’t do a lot of traveling of the sort where it makes a big difference to me if I’m packing/carrying something that weighs three pounds instead of a pound and a half, so the literal lightness doesn’t make that much difference to me.  But lighter is still lighter, and a bigger advantage is the iPad’s compactness.  I haven’t tried this thing out on an airplane yet, but I assume it will be a lot easier to work with than a laptop.  Probably sans keyboard, I admit.
• The battery life is super-duper long, which is always a problem for me with a laptop.  Even with my relatively new Powerbook Pro, I can run off of three hours on the battery only if I’m not doing much– e.g., not online, not doing any video, etc.  The iPad laps that three or four times easily.
• It is much MUCH more responsive than the laptop, and for a spelling-error prone typist like me, it does a MUCH better job of auto-correcting my errors.  In that sense it has a much more “snappy” feel than my laptop, and like I said, I’ve got a pretty decent laptop too.
• It does kind of “disappear” as a device a bit, which I think does make me think of writing a little differently, more akin to typing or writing on the page.  I don’t want to make too much of this (this is the “half” part) because I’ve always been a little dubious of various writerly habits like requiring a certain kind of paper or a certain color of pen or specific chair or whatever.  Those claims always strike me as somewhere between too pretentious and too precious.  And it could simply be the newness of the device.  Still, there’s something there about that.

More than you perhaps want to know.  As I’ve said before, the iPad is no substitute for a “computer”– that is, a more full-blown work station, be that a desktop or a laptop.  But for me, it’s starting to emerge as a reasonable substitute for a laptop.  We’ll see how the iPad only experiment goes at C&W.

• Folks have said some very nice things about my iPad posts here and comments elsewhere, which suggests something about obtaining ethos that I hadn’t really thought of before:  if you don’t necessarily know what you are talking about, it is best to  a) be first and b) be willing to say what you think, wrong or right.
• In my role as an iPad “expert,” I have been asked by people “why I need an iPad.”  This has happened surprisingly frequently.  Well, “need” is a concept that can be reduced to the very basic (e.g., water, food, shelter) or it can be rather frivolous (e.g., chocolate, scotch, snow globes), and everything in between.  I will say this though:  I am of the opinion that in modern American culture, almost everyone “needs” easy access to a computer, a television, and a radio (which is often replicated by the computer, of course).  I don’t know if everyone “needs” an iPhone, an iPod (which for me is my phone), a DVD player, a coffee maker, high speed internet access at home, or a car, but for me, all of these things are indeed “needs.”  Then there are things like washers and dryers, lawn mowers, and dishwashers:  these are kind of on the edge for me.  For example, when our dishwasher broke a few years ago, it took us almost a year to replace it.Anyway, for me, I think the iPad is somewhere between an iPhone and a dishwasher.  If something happened to my iPhone today, I would go out and buy another one, pretty much no matter what the cost.  If something happened to my iPad, well, I could probably go without for a while.
• I continue to be amused and puzzled by iPad polarization, the “this is the end of civilization as we know it” versus the “this is the best thing ever.”  The latest thing in this category is this whole “the device just disappears” argument, as retold in this Wired Gadget Lab piece.  That strikes me as a little much.  (BTW, Wired has lots of good iPad articles collected here).
• In more examples of how the iPad is actually useful for developing content:  check out this cool video of drawing on/with the iPad. The fingerless glove is a nice touch to prevent unintentional touching.
• Obama apparently said something about not liking the iPad, though his comment (as discussed in this Salon.com piece) is more along the lines of “the kids today.”  Not that interesting.  More interesting to me is this comment that comes from Fox News Channel psychiatry correspondent Keith Ablow in response to this:  “The president is doubly correct. First of all, he is right (as I have written a number of times) that the Internet, Facebook and, yes, the new iPad and many other devices can interfere with people becoming wise and knowledgeable, rather than simply deluged with facts. They can also become estranged from real relationships and from themselves as they become obsessed with pretending to be stars on YouTube or worthy of “followers” on Twitter or popular with thousands of “friends” on Facebook.”  In other words, pretty much the same thing that Socrates said about writing in Phaedrus.
• Here’s an interesting piece about reading on the iPad versus reading good-ol-fashioned books.  I don’t know if books are going to “disappear” or not, but this guy’s reaction here is different from mine.  I will admit that I don’t do a lot of reading on my iPad– I’m still mostly a paper kinda guy when it comes to magazines and books, for example– but I do find it very readable and light enough.  And I don’t constantly fear that I will be robbed if I take my iPad in public nor do I get a lot of inquiries about it from strangers.  Of course, I tend to take it out in public in “too cool for school” Ann Arbor.
• “Two weeks of travel, Ten iPad lessons” by Michael Gartenberg over at slashgear is very good advice about using an iPad for travel instead of a laptop.  Every one of these lessons rings true to me, and I will find out a lot more about that and other iPad travel experiences very soon since I’m going to be going to the Computers and Writing Conference this weekend without a laptop and with my iPad. (See below).

Okay, with all that out of the way….

First off, it doesn’t fit into the dock unless I take it out of the protective rubbery case I bought for it. I suppose this isn’t a complete deal-breaker because it probably isn’t a bad idea to take the thing out of its case once in a while, but it is definitely a pain in the ass, and it is not something I’m all that crazy about doing every time I plug it in. I’m sort of surprised Apple did this.

Second, with the dock sticking out of the keyboard is a) kind of awkward, and b) kind of ugly. If it was just a keyboard, there would be a certain level of “sleekness” to it all, but the dock thing sticks out like an appendage.

Third, I’m locked/docked into portrait mode– probably not bad for most keyboarding-type things, but I think we all like flexibility.

And fourth, a bluetooth keyboard is smaller (and thus easier to carry around/on a trip), and it can actually be used for more than just the iPad (and thus is automatically twice as functional as this keyboard.

So, back to the Apple store tomorrow. Fail, Apple, fail.

Being an iPad expert (as I have owned one for an entire week now), I’m still pretty darn happy and impressed with it. So far, it’s mostly for me what it has been billed as:  a great “experience” for reading/consuming text, audio, and video.  It is not (for the zillionth time) a computer, though for me, it is something like a netbook.  I realize that this wouldn’t be true for everyone, especially non-Apple computer people, but since the rest of my computers are Apples, the iPad syncs and “just works,” which wouldn’t be the case if I was working with some kind of Windoze netbook.

Typing is an issue, but that’s the case with netbooks too, right?  For me, I can touch-type well enough on the iPad when it’s landscape mode, but if I’m going to type anything longer than a couple paragraphs or an email response (or this blog post), then I’m going to use a real computer.  I might break down and eventually buy a keyboard for the iPad, but that would kind of defeat the purpose of the lean simplicity of the iPad.

And it doesn’t strike me as particularly “magical” either, though given the fondness for fantasy and science fiction in my household, perhaps my standards and definitions of “magical” are different than Steve Jobs.  All the things the iPad does best– stuff like IMDB, Yahoo Entertainment, Netflix, various weather and newspaper apps, photos, music, videos, etc.– are all great, but not really beneficial for my job as a writing professor.  Safari is okay (very quick, but, as the entire world knows, no Flash) and email is great, but neither are reasons to get an iPad.

I have played around with Keynote and Pages a bit, and while there’s some potential, I have to say I’ve been a little disappointed.  On the plus-side (as I wrote about with this post earlier), both Keynote and Pages demonstrate that the iPad is indeed a device with which a user can make content.  But the problem with both apps is that they don’t quite synch with my desktop versions of the software– different fonts, not all the effects and builds work, etc. Plus there are the previously mentioned keyboarding issues. It’s not a deal-breaker by any means, but it does mean that if I take only my iPad to a conference or something instead of a laptop, I’ll have to make some adjustments.  Again, not a reason to get an iPad, at least not yet.

All that said, I do think there are so far two (or three, depending on how you look at it) potential “killer apps” for the iPad:  PDF annotation and books, both iBooks/Kindles, and “books” that are really applications on their own.  Too long of a ramble/review after the jump.

First, about PDF annotation: it’s all fine and good that the Kindle (and other readers I’ve seen) can deliver trade books and best sellers, but what I need is something that can read all the PDFs I get from academic journals.  This makes up the bulk of my reading for teaching– especially graduate courses– and scholarship, and it seems like more and more academic presses are making entire books available as PDFs.

So, what I’ve wanted for a very long time in a tablet reader device (and what I was hoping for with the iPad even when it was first announced) where I can read, search, annotate, and share all those PDFs I now have to print out and annotate on paper, printouts I inevitably lose, misfile, can’t search electronically, etc. This is probably not the kind of thing your “average user” is that interested in, but it is something that just about every academic-type I know says they want too.

Well, as the saying goes, there’s an app for that.  A couple apps, actually.

iAnnotate from Aji allows you to mark-up a PDF on the iPad pretty much the way you would with a highlighter and/or pen on a paper version of the text.  Here’s a video from them demonstrating how it works:

The process of getting PDFs to your iPad is a little wonky at this point because you have to use an Aji provided reader software that is running on a computer– in other words, you can’t just download a PDF directly to the iPad at this point.  I suspect there are some ways to work around this a bit with Dropbox and the like, but I haven’t figured it out.

What’s also nice is the annotations stay on the document when I transfer it back to my desktop computer and vice-versa, at least using Preview– I haven’t tried Adobe Reader or tried it on a Windoze computer yet. Assuming it does work as well with Adobe Reader though, I’m thinking that I might be able to use this to mark-up/comment on student work too, just making this that much more useful for me. It’s on sale now for $7 (the regular price is $10) and worth every cent.

Of course, if you just want to read PDFs, the iPad does that with no problems at all as it is, and you can extend the functionality of your reading experience quite a bit for $1 with goodiware.com’s Goodreader.  It doesn’t annotate, but it will read darn near anything and it is easy to get stuff– download, synching, etc.  Here’s a demo video from some folks at Tidbits:

I suspect these two apps will either join forces or copy each other, and when they do, both apps will be that much better.  As it is, iAnnotate is “killer” for me.

The other (potentially) killer apps that might in and of itself justify an iPad purchase for the academic-type is the various book applications. Now, there are books and then there are “books” which are really applications.  There’s already a lot out there on books as delivered by Apple’s iBook app or Amazon’s Kindle; Kathleen Fitzpatrick has a nice write-up about both on ProfHacker here. Basically, iBook or Kindle for the iPad (that’s right, you don’t need a Kindle to read Kindle books– just the free app for either the iPhone or the iPad) pours the “stuff” of a book into these apps so you can read it very much like you would the old-fashioned paper kind.  iBook has the advantage of being able to display color, but otherwise, it’s pretty similar to the Kindle.

Since the format for iBook is the open format ePub, I think we’re getting closer to electronic textbooks, and I’m talking about textbooks from both the big publishers and individuals.  It is not particularly hard to convert stuff into the ePub format, and readers can read these things on all kinds of devices, including iPads.  I’ll probably be converting my own textbook to an ePub format over the summer, just for the heck of it.

But what I’m more excited about are books that are actually applications.  I’ve played around with two examples of what I mean here so far.  There’s a couple of Dr. Seuss books adapted to the iPhone/iPad by Oceanhouse Media.  Here’s a video of this working on the iPhone (it’s obviously similar on the iPad):

The other app that has really blown me away with this stuff (though I will admit it is a little buggy at this point, too) is The Elements: A Visual Exploration which is the first product from Touch Press.  It is an intensely multimedia experience of the Periodic Table– sound, moving images, links to Wolfram |Alpha stuff, on and on and on.   Here’s a little video for that:

In my view, these sort  of book apps have the real potential to revolutionize publishing and make things like electronic textbooks worthwhile.  The applicability with the sciences is obvious, but imagine a literary anthology that includes all sorts of multimedia or composition books that have various writing tools for writing (citation tools, for example) embedded right in them.  Seemingly every computers and writing anthology that  has come out in recent years has promised some sort of “beyond the page” experience in the form of a web site or whatever; well, now all that multimedia that we keep writing old-fashioned books about can truly be a part of the experience.

And here’s the thing: as far as I can tell, books as apps would completely eliminate the used textbook market, meaning that whole gimmick of coming out with a “new edition” every two years just to keep making money on new books could go away.  Eliminate that and the expense of production and textbooks might even become cheaper– well, might, assuming the textbook business is actually willing or able to change their business model and drop their prices for these kinds of books.

Anyway, that’s what I’m seeing after a week.  Get back to me in a year and see if any of this is remotely right, or maybe the iPad and its inevitable competitors will produce an entirely new need/killer app.