iPad adventures

I have, a number of times, read entire books on my Touch for the DJ. We receive about a quarter of our submissions electronically, which, given that approximately 102% of all writers work electronically in the first place seems a little odd to me, but publishers are nothing if not inefficient (which is why so many of them are in trouble in the 21st Century). On our end, we have not been issued any sort of e-readers, unlike some editors at some houses, so we have been on our own recognizances, as W. S. Gilbert might put it. My recog has been the Touch which, as a book reader, does do the job, but just barely. Obviously, the damned thing is too small. To be able to read on it, you need to blow up the type size, and then you get maybe a paragraph at a time, and you click your way through it like a little house afire.

Not optimal.

One of the reasons I bought the iPad was to get a better reader. I never really wanted a Kindle much, or any of its single-purpose cousins, because my desire to read electronically isn’t all that great, aside from the needs of the DJ. I mean, I’ve got a few books on paper at home that I need to read first, and some I need to reread, before I would need to start collecting an electronic library. But the idea of a multi-purpose device that also reads? That was pretty attractive. Of course, most of the functions of the iPad look, on the surface, to be the same functions as the Touch, which was my original reaction to the thing, so I didn’t dive in immediately. After all, I brought the Touch with me to England and carried the internet in my pocket for two weeks, which was a miracle of convenience that can’t be beat. There was wireless everywhere. There will be more wireless in more everywheres in the future. I would not have lugged an iPad as willingly: my pockets aren’t big enough (and I’m already lugging an SLR and an extra lens, making me more sherpa than tourist, to tell you the truth).

So what got me from “I’ve already got the iPad nano” to buying the iPad? Satisfied customers. Not just Bietz (who loves all tech on first blush and can’t be trusted until the first six months have elapsed) and O’C (who got his for free and therefore can’t be trusted because of the lack of fiscal investment), both of whom are talking life-changing, but the tech people I follow either on Twitter or on podcasts. Even Cory Doctorow’s dislike of the device played into my wanting one. You know, it isn’t 1982 anymore. The computer isn’t a tinkerer’s toy that comes with not just a manual but a guide to Basic plus a complete guide to the machine language of the beast. Apple may control the apps in a Big Brother fashion, but at the same time I can access anything (except flash) from the browser, so it’s like Big Brother with Benefits, if you get my drift. Anyhow, everyone who loves the thing says that it has its own niche and that it’s a niche you weren’t aware of and once you find it, there you are.

This may be true. So far, and it’s still early days, one thing that is clear to me is that I’m going to have to redefine my Touch usage. No need to watch a movie on that screen when I can watch it on the iPad screen. Civilization? Oy! And then, of course, there’s iBooks.

It took a couple of days (literally) but I finally found out how to get from whatever I have to a book in iBook. Basically you get yourself a pdf, then you run a program called Calibre which converts the pdf into an epub, and then you drag the epub file into your iTunes library, and the next time you sync, you read, all of which is easier than it sounds.

And you know what I really love? Playing with a new device, a new computer, whatever. Figuring out how best to use it, getting it organized with the rest of my machinery, experimenting. For instance, I haven’t yet found a good solution to RSS. You can’t really run the Google Reader efficiently because it doesn’t scroll correctly. I tried an app that I’m not happy with because it lost the connection to Google and a hundred login attempts wouldn’t reconnect it (although I’ll try again today). The best Twitter app (as in “free”) only allows one account, unless I want to “pay,” which I’m not ready for yet. Come to think of it, a lot of what is hard to do on the Touch, therefore requiring apps, is easy to do on the larger screen in Safari, obviating the need for those apps. As I say, that’s what I love, sorting out the pluses and minuses and working out the details to my best advantage.

There was a short period of time when I considered buying a netbook. I would like to now publicly thank the gods of commerce for stopping my hand and keeping me ready instead for the iPad.