Gulp! It's another e-book reader. The Apple i-pad....

Is this it for books then? First the Sony e-book reader, then Amazon's Kindle now, the much anticipated, Apple i-pad arrives on the scene; so TonbridgeBlog asks: are books doomed? I sound like Frazer, the Scottish undertaker, from Dad's Army! It's a question which all booksellers must be asking themselves right now. I keep saying to myself that it'll be a slow process and that books, in their paper form, have been around forever and reading them on a plastic screen will never catch on. Then I consider that books have only actually been around even loosely in their present form since Gutenberg first printed his bibles in the mid 15th Century and only properly since the late nineteenth century because, before that, they were hand produced and bound and therefore too expensive for most people. So it is probably inevitable that they'll be replaced before too long, the only big question is how quick will it be. If it's to be as quick as in the case of the music industry, which has seen a revolution since the i-pod stormed onto the market only a few years ago, we really are doomed Capt Manwaring! But let's step back a little and consider the differences in the two markets. Music is very much a dip in and out of kind of experience; we listen to the odd favourite track here and another from this album and that one; we create playlists of musical genres. The average track only takes three or four minutes to listen to and it's a relaxing, interactive experience, we could lay back, close our eyes and the music could be coming from a cd player. Contrast that with trying to read and store books on a device: the quality of the screen becomes vital, you certainly need to be able to see it in various types of light, you can't hold them very comfortably, you don't feel like you're reading a book, you can't easily flip back pages to review the bit of the plot you've obviously just missed. In short, at the moment, they are, pardon the pun, a bit of a novelty. They're, at least for now, nothing more than a glorified small laptop for gadget nerds. Don't get me wrong I can see the attraction of i-pod touches and therefore the i-pad, which seems to be essentially a bigger version of it, I can see that children and adults love to play games and use apps for many different things; I just can't see that reading novels is one of them. Now school text books, thus getting rid of the need for back breaking school bags, is another advantage entirely, that I can see catching on very quickly. Time will tell, but I'm putting my money on there needing to be something more more advanced, cheaper and more reading-experience-friendly before they'll catch on for the vast majoity of book readers....

PS. click on the link below to see what, national treasure, Stephen Fry thinks about the new i-pad. He reckons it's a "game changer!"