First, the reason why many of you are probably reading this: the eReader experience. The iPad is the single best looking and feeling electronic book reading device I have ever encountered. This includes using PCs to read books, the Kindle (which I finally got to play with last month!), and the Nook. There’s a button on the device that lets you lock the screen orientation so you can read in single-page mode even while lying down on a couch, etc. The screen is positively brilliant and the page-turning experience is great too. The buying experience is seamless and even faster than the Kindle for downloads. I love how full-color book covers show up in a screen that literally looks like a bookshelf. My only complaint about the book reading experience is you need to avoid high-glare situations because unlike e-Ink, you have trouble seeing the iPad screen in high intensity sunlight.

The battery life on this device is insanely good. I have played high-resolution fast-paced driving games for hours, read books, read e-mails, taken notes in meetings, and watched Netflix movies and then forgot to charge the device for two days and still picked it up to find it at 40%. In fact, I’ve never even seen my iPad go below 20% and I am really, really bad about plugging it in at night.

Netflix. If you have an iPad, you absolutely, positively need a Netflix subscription. Being able to kick back and watch episodes of the A-Team on my incredibly bright 10″ screen with the headphones on – priceless.

Evernote. Evernote for the iPad is an incredible piece of software. I have actually started taking the iPad to my meetings at work. It’s roughly the same size and only a pinch heavier than the notebook I normally take to my meetings. I flip the case into “angled typing” mode, open a new note in Evernote and take notes during the meeting. By the time I get back to my desk, Evernote has already synchronized my note via the cloud and it’s sitting on my work desktop and will be available the next time I turn on my home PC or Mac.

Games and Education. I’ve discovered some educational games that I plan on having my daughter play. I picked up a Modern Warfare game that is ridiculous in the level of enjoyment and only has minor touch-related annoyances. I’ve got a racing game for the pad that is SO much fun because the added weight and size of the pad gives me far better accelerometer-based steering accuracy than phone-based driving games.

As I mentioned before, the new interface for reading and composing e-mails is outstanding. The book reading experience is incredible. I’ve actually integrated this device into my daily routine at work as well as at home and, having it by my side has actually caused me to turn on my laptop MUCH less in the last month. In fact, my small laptop has only been turned on twice, both of those times just to get to local files.

If you are considering getting an iPad, don’t listen to people who have only used it once or twice. It felt strange and awkward when I first got it. After two weeks, I was truly loving it. After four weeks, I absolutely, positively cannot live without this device. It is as much a part of my life now as eating and breathing. It is also the invaluable device for capturing writing ideas while on the go – far easier than doing it using the phone or a laptop.

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On the surface this looks like a nice deal, and it probably is, but you know that Amazon is in it to make money and dominate market share. Their M.O. has always been to make it financially irresponsible for anyone to compete with them in a market segment that they intend to dominate. If you’re  a Trek fan, think of Amazon like the Borg. Little shops are either assimilated (become Amazon partners and give a cut of their business in exchange for not being disintegrated) or they fail. There are obviously exceptions but overall this is how it works.

Amazon’s plan here looks a lot like a plan to cut Apple off at the pass.  Apple has been in talks with Harper that we know of, which means they’ve probably been in talks with other publishers as well. The iTunes store is currently the largest media distribution hub on the planet, and certainly the most profitable. Apple is about to unleash a Tablet on the world, a 10″ piece of technocandy that will have geeks fauning and eReader lovers drooling. If Apple is allowed to create eReader buzz with their tablet, hook it up to the iTunes store so that downloading books from the tablet is as easy as downloading stuff for an iPhone, and Apple gets a bunch of publishers on board with eBook distribution through the iTunes store – you can see where this might end: with Apple dominating the eBook market the same way they dominate legal music downloads. If this happens, then the Kindle will become 2nd fiddle in a market that is rapidly expanding and gaining in popularity. Amazon doesn’t want that.

So what do they do? They offer a 70% royalty deal that includes a clause to prevent you from offering digital copies of your book anywhere outside the Kindle store to intice people into their camp. Lowered eBook prices could generate a huge increase in sales volume for eBooks, which will make publishers see more profit potential in eBooks and the entire thing becomes a self-feeding, beneficial cycle, the “network effect” as it were.

A lot of people in the publishing industry might not know this, but 70% is what application developers get as royalty from sales in the iTunes store. What this really means is that for an indie developer, the entire production chain is taken care of for them – the only thing they need to concern themselves with is building the software. There is no distribution cost to them, and Apple only taking 30% is actually a bargain considering what the independent developer might have to pay otherwise to get their application out in the world.

The conspiracy theorist in me figures that since the developer royalty rate on the App Store for the iPhone is 70%, and Apple is about to unleash a Tablet, and Apple has been talking to publishers, and Apple is currently sitting on the biggest media hub on the planet, that Amazon figures Apple’s going to offer a 70% royalty rate as well. This is why I think they’re trying to cut Apple off at the pass. They get people to start coming up with plans to adopt Amazon’s DTP, Amazon gets their hooks in, and by the time people get ahold of the Apple Tablet, they’ve sold their souls to the Kindle.

This whole business reminds me of the HD-DVD/BluRay format wars. Do I get a Kindle and read only Kindle books? Do I get a Nook and read only Nook books? Do I get an Apple Tablet and read only iTunes eBooks? At some point the house of cards will fall and there will be one winner. Only time will tell if any of this is good for the consumer and how it will change the publishing industry as we know it. As I’ve said before, the bottom line is that if authors and publishers do not embrace change, adapt, and move forward they will be left in the dust.

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Are our bookshelves going the way of the CD case?

Regardless of the answer to that question, that’s still the wrong question to be asking. Lots of people are worried that printed books are going to disappear the way CDs have “disappeared” (I use quotes here because you can still buy CDs in stores, they are just losing popularity). What happens to writers if printed books go away? Are we all just going to go extinct like the dinosaurs? From talking to some people and listening to their fear, one would think that one day all writers on the planet are simply going to sink into a tar pit and disappear, to be replaced by the proverbial “thousand monkeys” sitting in a room typing out Shakespeare (eventually).

We’re not looking at an extinction here. Everything evolves, including the art of storytelling. Writers can either put themselves on or ahead of this evolutionary change or they can be left behind. There will never cease to be a market for storytelling, the only thing that changes is the medium through which the story is told. Primitive cultures that had no written language told stories, including oral histories, to each other. Once people figured out how to paint on cave walls, stories depicting great hunts were painted on those walls. When people figured out how to write on papyrus, great stories were told on papyrus. When man invented the printing press, great stories were told to larger numbers of people. When man invented the eReader, great stories were told to people riding buses, sitting on trains, or wiling away the hours on a beach.

Writers will always write, and people will always crave a great story. The medium through which people crave those stories is going to evolve as technology evolves and people’s lifestyles change. It is my opinion that writers need to embrace these new mediums and be part of the evolution of those mediums, helping bring about fantastic new ways to tell stories. Historically, artists who cling to the “old ways” and refuse to accept new mediums are left behind.

So, in conclusion, I don’t think that our books are all going to disappear. I don’t think that we’re going to lose the pleasure in visiting a library that smells like books or visiting a big book store and spending hours just browsing. We are, however, going to have more options available to us that are tailored to our specific needs and lifestyle and that represents great new opportunities for writers, not a death knell.

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