Disruptive Proactivity

A day after my last iPad mumblings, here are some more.

In a lazy day yesterday, i downloaded and read a couple of short books that have been on the to-read pile for a while. O’Reilly have a nice programme where if you register books you’ve bought from them, they’ll sell you an ebook version for about £3 ($4.99 – use discount code MB499), which is a bargain. As they’re primarily a tech publisher, that’s easy fro them as they have a the ability to to that to their back catalogue. And they’re ok layouts, buts they’re clearly automatically done; not manually. And there are layout issues which will take time to be fixed as ideas and best practices evolve.

Rather than buying the e-book versions of all O’Reilly books that I own (which is about 100), I picked the ones I most wanted electronically. Mostly based on those I had bought but not yet, or to search as reference in a way they previously weren’t. I include a screenshot of the table of contents of one fines book; content wise, it’s great, but you can clearly see that the layout has an amount of work to go before it matches the aesthetic beauty of the print book.

Hopefully O’Reilly will look at their e-book sales, and tidy up a bit the books that are selling well and worth the effort to get more resources into the books that people want. Because of their free-new-versions policy, I’ll get the benefit of that effort despite being an early adopter.

Searching for some of the other 300 books i own, almost none were available as ebooks. Which for some that I would really like to have electronically, that was somewhat of a disappointment. But for their publishers, is there a lesson from the O’Reilly approach? Will someone publish the bulk of their back-catalogue that is available electronically at minimal effort, and put more resources into books post-sales and give updates to the books that are popular. It rewards those with specific interests, early adopters who are willing to accept low standards in the first instance don’t get burnt.

Another thought is that I’m now mostly used to the iPad keyboard once typing on it for a while. It’s still not completely second nature, but its getting there at a decent rate. This entire post is being written on it. The wordpress admin UI is not entirely iPad friendly, and adding in the pictures and proofreading is something that will happen later on my MacBook [there wasn’t much]; but I could type on this for a moderate period. I do need to get the USB dock so i can plug in a keyboard (they were out of stock). One thing that has proved useful is using the iPad rotated through 180 degrees (so the dock port is at the top), which let’s you stand it up on the short end, but still have it plugged in to things using the dock connector.

I’ve not said anything about battery life, principally as I’ve never got to the point of noticing it. When it’s plugged into my laptop, it charges, and I neve need to think about it at all. Which is nice.

It has also promoted reading a book to the same type of activity as Instapaper, watching a (TED) talk, or my RSS reader, or email. Normally my morning routine was read email while the kettle boils, then RSS while eating breakfast. It being a bank holiday here with nothing happening, continuining with the book I was reading last night is now an equal choice, in the same context. Which I only realised I’d made after 20 minutes nice reading before realising I’d not had breakfast, made the cup of tea, or read my email. If twitter is to email what tarsands are to oil, or toe-veins are to heroin addicts, then the iPad seems to have, singlehandedly, reset that addiction back to the balance of also reading longer forms.

That was a nice surprise. Now if I could get more fiction onto it…