Digital Diary: iPad revealed

So there you have it.  After months of speculation, the bandying about of countless names and an almost endless stream of media hype, the iPad has arrived.  Boasting a 9.7 inch screen, it has all the simplicity of the iPhone with a whole lot more functionality: a cross between a laptop and smartphone, it runs all the apps available on the iPhone and will surely be yet another fillip for developers’ coffers.

The basic device will cost $499 (just over £300) in the US and should be available across the world by July.  But what will this new mystical device mean for publishing?

It’ll almost certainly offer us a central point of distribution for e-books – or iBooks as Jobs would have it – a one stop virtual bookshelf.  With the absence of Random House, almost all major world trade publishers have struck a deal with Apple to sell their books in the new iTunes bookstore.  Those that haven’t will surely be scrambling to do so as of today.  This is how Apple would like us to see things: with them as the go-to store for e-books of every description, effectively a cicumlocution of all other e-readers.

But let’s not label it a Kindle-killer just yet.  Some reviewers have lamented that the backlit screen doesn’t come close to emulating the e-ink of Amazon’s competitor product.  That said, it does have a lot more to offer in terms of the general multimedia experience – a point in which the Kindle is sadly lacking.  The new larger screen allows the iPad to present itself as perfect platform for video and games material a point on which Jobs was strangely silent in his speech.

Further, having another big beast alongside Amazon and Google cannot be a bad thing, a point Steve Jobs sought to underline when unveiling the product.  125 million people worldwide have one-click buying with Apple, and this sort of market – even if we reach only a small part of it – has to be a good thing for publishers.  And with the competititve price point – relatively low for one of Apple’s new releases – Apple have sought to place themselves right at the centre of the e-reader market.

Only time will tell whether or not this represents the  publishing industry’s ‘iPod moment’, but Jobs et al have given us the perfect platform from which to experiment in the future,and probably made software developers fantastically happy in the process.

Read more Digital Diary entries:

• Clash of the Techno-Titans: Nexus One versus iSlate
• Time Out’s city guides
• Duck Duck Moose iPhone app
• The Zehnseiten app