My pal Laurie demonstrated to me an iPhone app which will listen to any song playing in the room you're in, and will compare it to a huge database, and more likely than not, find a match, and then of course you can buy it from iTunes.
This kind of thing is new. It did not exist before the iPhone and the app store. I think this too everybody by surprise. Certainly the scale of it did.
Now maybe the iPad considered as a new publishing platform is not quite as surprising as that, but I still have to make a comment on it, because I really have a profound feeling that it is just right for it. It's perfect. Especially for graphic-rich ebooks. (Comics, art books, illustrated books, etc etc.)
Penguin apparently want to make all ebooks into interactive applications. I think that's a mistake. It's simply no longer a book when it's a toy, and books still have and will have forever a communication value which can't be replicated in anything else. You're not thinking in the same way when you're playing.
I am so looking forward to using the iPad in the future, both as a reader and even more as a publisher, writer, and photographer/artist. I feel that for this use, the Internet before now was like cars without any roads. Now we can go, for real.
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