The iPad’s scary counter-revolution

The iPad’s scary counter-revolution
By John Gapper
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010
Published: April 7 2010 23:35 | Last updated: April 7 2010 23:35
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/94139c84-4273-11df-8c60-00144feabdc0.html


Last Saturday, a man in brown from UPS came to my door with an Apple iPad. On Sunday, Twitter brought adoring sighs from people who had also bought one. On Monday, the internet delivered a backlash.

Things move faster these days. We have already been through several news cycles on the pros and cons of what Steve Jobs, Apple’s co-founder, calls “a magical and revolutionary product” and the device is not even for sale outside the US yet.

Many companies – from newspapers to book publishers and broadcasting networks – are keen on the iPad because they think it offers a chance to sell a professional product in a controlled setting. They hope for an alternative to giving away content on the internet, hoping forlornly for advertisements (or something) to save them.

Thus, a lot of commentary centres on the issue of whether the iPad can “save publishers”. Since that is a rhetorical question requiring the answer “no”, I will instead address another one – whether it is good for publishers. Having played with my iPad for a while, I think the answer to that one is “yes and no”.

The iPad is a curiously seductive device for something that is, on the face of it, a touchscreen laptop with the keyboard removed. Microsoft has made repeated attempts to introduce “tablet” computers with very limited results. Hewlett-Packard will soon have another go with a Windows 7-based tablet.

Mr Jobs’ famed reality distortion field must be working at warp factor 10 because to pick up the iPad is to feel you are entering a different technological world. The sceptics dismiss it as a compromise between an iPod Touch and a MacBook, but they are wrong.

Actually, the iPad feels much more like a cross between a computer and a television, one that you hold in your hands. It manages, more than anything I’ve seen before, to fill the gap between “sit back” screens and “sit forward” computers and video games consoles.

That is, I think, one reason why it has upset many traditionalists in Silicon Valley, who see it as a counter-revolutionary, not a revolutionary, machine. They fear that it will turn engaged and interactive internet users back into passive couch potatoes.

Cory Doctorow, co-editor of the Boing Boing blog, wrote an eloquent lament for the passing of the open source, fix-it traditions of personal computing and mourned the iPad’s “palpable contempt for the owner”. The device was a throwback to the early days of AOL and its walled garden alternative to the internet, he lamented.

I would say it was more subversive than that. The iPad is (despite lacking a flash drive or a camera) a fairly open device, which gives its users a choice between internet browsing and devoting time to games and media applications sold by developers and publishers. They are not being forced to spend their time and money in ways that Mr Doctorow disdains.

Yet they are likely to do so because it is simpler and more entertaining. That is why the iPad helps publishers: it restores a comparative advantage that the computer-based internet took away. It is much easier on an iPad to navigate the full depth of content in some publications, and to appreciate the best photos and videos.

One of the difficulties publishers face on the internet is that it is laborious to navigate websites much beyond their home pages, which has encouraged many consumers to consume snippets of material from many sources, rather than engaging deeply with one publication. I found it far easier, for example, to navigate the digital Wall Street Journal on the iPad than on a laptop.

That is the good news for publishers, but there is a catch. While I think the iPad is good for them as a category, I’m not so sure it is good for those that now exist – certainly not all of them.

The problem for publishers is that the iPad is a demanding medium because it is not sufficient to publish text, or indeed photos or videos, on their own. Media apps work best on the iPad when they combine depth of information with a lot of visual material in innovative ways; that is what makes them shine.

The Time magazine app will, for $4.99 a week, give you the text of the magazine filled out with videos and photo slideshows – there is a nice display of Matisse paintings in this week’s edition. I found it pleasant to scan but I am not sure it is deep enough to pay $20 a month, and it has already been harshly criticised for being too similar to the magazine’s print version.

Danny O’Brien, a technology writer, identified this on his blog Oblomovka as a revisiting of the old CD-Rom problem. The medium allows publishers to go to town with words and pictures – indeed, it demands it – but that is expensive and hard to make profitable.

That favours publishers with the resources to create multimedia content and a bank of information to be remixed and repurposed. Both Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters, which have other ways to earn a dime, have launched free apps with lots of such material.

Rising costs and flat (at best) revenues in a fragmented industry generally lead to consolidation and that is where the iPad, and successive generations of information/entertainment tablets will take publishers. There is a high barrier to entry, and many will not clear it on their own.

The iPad is an alluring vision of the digital future for publishers, but a scary one too.

john.gapper@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/gapper