Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Mark Troy's Inner Geek

Saturday, I got in touch with my inner geek. I bought an iPad. I didn't wait in a long line to get it. I was running and errand and, as I went past Best Buy, I decided to drop in to see if they had any. Not yet. The truck was on its way from Houston and was about fifteen minutes away. Well, fifteen turned into ninety during which I played with the demo model. It didn't take long before I was sold.

Now that I've had it four days, my opinion is that it is awesome! Finally, the world of electronic reading has matured.

The iPad is not an ebook reader, but a full function tablet computer. Besides reading, you can listen to music, watch videos, surf the web, do your taxes, create a presentation and write a novel. And more. Nobody knows yet how people will use the iPad. My guess is that this is the all-purpose application we've been waiting for. For students, this will replace a book bag of texts, tablets, and calculators. For the rest of us, it will unleash our imaginations.

The iPad is about the size of a Kindle, albeit a little heavier. Not so heavy that you would notice. There is a free reader, called iBook, that, like the Kindle, allows you to download books from an online store. My first choice was Michael Connelly's Nine Dragons. The reading experience on the iPad, using iBook, is terrific. The interface looks like a real book. You turn pages by swiping the page to the left if you are going forward, or to the right to go backward. You can read a single page at a time in portrait mode or side-by-side pages in landscape mode. The page turning strikes me as more natural than the Kindle's button pressing.

A year ago, March 30, 2009, to be exact, I blogged about my experience testing a Kindle. You can read it here. I liked the Kindle. My one gripe about it was the absence of page numbers. Me, I need page numbers when I read. You can read my reasons here. As a writer, I simply can't read without page numbers. It's how I teach myself to plot. Kindle doesn't have page numbers; iBook on the iPad does. Even the version of the Kindle which you can get for the iPad (and it's free) doesn't have page numbers. Kindle's "location" numbers can be made to work like page numbers, but not as intuitively.

iPad is the first truly hypertext reader. Tapping any word in the story brings up either a dictionary definition of the word or a two-function search engine. You can search for other occurrences of the word in the same story or you can search the web for that word, pictures, video, etc. It's a handy feature when reading Nine Dragons, part of which is set in Hong Kong. The book also comes with a video of Connelly talking about the book. The video itself is unremarkable, but it's exciting in what it represents.

There are other features about the iPad that I could go into, but the best feature is sitting on my deck on a warm spring evening, my music playing on the iPad while I read a mystery on the backlit screen. For a decade, we've heard about how ebooks will change our experience of the printed word. It's finally happened.

Mark Troy
http://www.marktroy.net
Hawaiian-eye

5 comments:

Marilyn Meredith a.k.a. F. M. Meredith said...

Love my Kindle, not ready to make a switch. No page numbers doesn't bother me at all. You can tell how far you have to go by looking at the line at the bottom of the page.

I'm sure things will keep improving though with every reader they come up with.

Helen Ginger said...

The Kindle and the iPad are the same size? I thought the iPad was bigger. Can you use the iPad as a laptop, with Word, etc. Can it somehow also be your phone?

You can see I have no eReader and had sort of dropped the iPad from my possible choices since I already have a laptop and the iPad looks too big to carry in a purse. And I'd like to condense, not have more things to carry. I've seen the Nook and wasn't impressed. Haven't held the Kindle or the iPad, though.

Helen
Straight From Hel

Mark Troy said...

Marilyn,
I found the Kindle easy to use, and seriously thought about getting one. I think it works great as an ereader. The iPad is the next generation. I can't
imagine want will be next.

Mark Troy said...

Helen,
The iPad has the same screen size as the Kindle DX. It's about the same weight and slightly thicker. You can use it as a laptop. It has apple's version of a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation software. Don't know about Microsoft. I think I'll still use my laptop for serious writing. It fits in my wife's larger purse. No phone calls, but I get instant updates on all my teams.

Morgan Mandel said...

I'm very jealous of you, you lucky guy! Don't think I can afford one right now.

Morgan Mandel
http://morganmandel.blogspot.com