A few weeks ago my wife gave me an iPad. I had talked vaguely about getting one in the distant future and I had no expectation that she would get me one for my birthday. Needless to say, I was both utterly surprised and delighted. Over the intervening time, I’ve bought some apps, downloaded some books, and have generally gotten to know it to a certain small degree. What I’ve discovered is that it is changing my life in some very unexpected ways.
- I use the Internet in trivial ways at any time, anywhere. It usually sits on the kitchen island, which is dead center of virtually any path through the house. Since it’s trivial to grab it, fall on the couch or some other spot, and check out the latest happenings in the world via the New York Times’ Editor’s Choice app or Flipboard, I do. I also take it with me places I would never lug my laptop.
- I read more frequently, but often in smaller chunks. Since I keep the iPad handy because it has so many other uses, I find myself reading more, but often in smaller doses. Typically, the print book I’m reading at the time sits on my bedside table, which isn’t convenient to me during the day. Now I find that there are times when I pull up iBooks and read a few pages of the latest book I’m reading (presently Matterhorn, if you must know) at odd moments during the day.
- The experience is as seamless as I’ve ever seen. You can move from a special purpose app to the web and back in a way that seems so natural and easy. Apps will often pull up web pages natively within the app, therefore avoiding the mental discord of leaving one environment and entering another.
- The touchscreen interface is a revelation. I really didn’t think touchscreens would feel as natural as they do. I suppose if I had thought about it some more I would have realized how natural it is for us to point, touch, and manipulate with our fingers, which is all that the iPad requires. And I’m not the only one. Note Emily Clasper’s tweet about her child getting angry at other (one might say medieval) devices that lacked such a natural way of interaction.
In other words, I believe the iPad experience is revelatory. It has changed my perspective on computing devices and how I will likely use them in the future. It has changed the way I think about computers. It has changed my life.
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All true. As a librarian I find myself using my iPad all the time both at work and at home. I do presentations on it, keep reference PDFs with me and read more books and magazines than I had since I was a teenager with all the time in the world to myself.
Will the Ipad allow us to create a truly “Mobile reference librarian” with the Ipad becoming a one stop shop reference desk?. It is a game changer for those of us serving rural communities away from the cities.
Too bad you can’t read an ebook from your library on it. (grrr).
Here at Sweet Briar College, we are conducting an experiment using iPads as teaching tools. Several of the librarians are participating. I am Associate Director/Head of Public Services. The iPad gives me more proof a library needs only a service desk/info point and not a reference desk. Mine is my reference desk.
Completely agree. And it will be even better when (non-jailbreak) multi-tasking becomes available and that flash thing is fixed! Wait until you can take one to a conference. For taking with you during the day it is the best.
And, I agree that interacting through touch is just amazing. Extremely natural. The total game-changer for computing (rather than mobile phone). I got a new MacBook at about the same time and find myself going to touch the screen continuously (not on my PC laptop or PC desktop though – I think because the MacBook display is more like the iPad whereas the PC display is, well, not).
If I could have a touchscreen on the MacBook, I’d never look back. Or, if the iPad could have a slip out keyboard and mouse (for serious typing and copy/paste the touchscreen is awkward and slow).
Roy describes perfectly what my own experience with the iPad has been like. And I love that the screen is larger than a netbook’s. The only drawback I’ve seen is the limited playing capability in video format, since so much video is available only in Flash.
I’ve also found the touch screen technology addicting. I find myself touching my PC or laptop screens occasionally, ditto on ebook readers (I don’t own one but I’ve played with 1st generation Kindles and Sony readers). Using touch screen may put the B&N Nook ahead in the ereader sompetition, but you can’t beat the iPad for the way it connects everything so effortlessly.
Roy, when you say a touchscreen interface is a revelation, do you say that as someone with experience with previous touchscreens (iPhone, etc.)?
In other words, is it the touchscreen on a relatively big canvas that makes the difference, or the simple fact of a touchscreen?
(I am a fairly new iPhone user, and do find the touchscreen very natural, but it’s a tight enough screen that my stubby fingers lead to miscues.)
Norman, yes, it is using a touchscreen at that size that seems revelatory to me. Although I recently purchased a keyboard dock, even typing on the screen is not all that bad. And the simple gestures you can make to control it (even just turning it) somehow make it seem more integrated in my life than a laptop that is bigger, heavier, and overall less engaging.
I’ve had an iPhone for a while, and that was amazing in its own right — especially the ability to use web sites as they were intended to be used instead of some dumbed-down mobile version. But the iPhone is still a phone. The iPad is a completely new kind of computing device, and one that is now solidly inhabiting a hole in my life that I had no idea I had.
I’ve found the same things. I’m now using the internet as an extension of myself more then ever before, makes twitter and social networking a lot easier and more fun. Only gripes would be the wonderful touch-screen gets so dirty with finger marks, but that’s the nature of the beast, and it’s deceptively heavy for it’s thinness. @ No. 3 David W – you can use an app called Txtr, which means library books lent using Adobe’s DRM and Adobe digital editions will download through the iPad. I look forward to other manufacturers coming up with even better tablets, supporting flash and USB slots. It’s definitely the future.
Tom, yes, it does get messy with fingerprints, but for that I just carry one of those computer screen clothes with the iPad. Since I have a case for it, it’s fairly easy to just lay the cloth on the screen and close it. When I have it open, there is often a place where I can tuck the cloth out of the way but handy. I agree that it is heavy for its thinness, which I chalk up to a battery with an amazing charge. Watching movies while on a coast-to-coast flight? No worries, and you can land with plenty of juice to check your email, use Google Maps, the web, or whatever. Nice.
Good column, and I agree with almost all of it, but is the twitter post necessary? Are you advocating that we have the patience of babies? Please respond before I cry. Too late.
Raynor: the twitter post was used to back up my claim about the impact of the touchscreen — simply that the interaction is so easy and natural that an 18-month-old expects other devices to work the same way. It wasn’t intended to imply that we should mimic her reaction.
As a day one iPad user and Newton owner, I second your comments Roy.
I knew from my experience with the proto-iPad, Apple’s Newton of the mid 1990s the value of a well executed touch based interface.
I’m waiting for the Library vendors to develop ILS based Apps so we can use our iPads on the Reference floor and free ourselves from the shackles of the desk based refernce computer.
Enjoy the iPad!
I am really confused by Roy’s position on the iPad. I would expect someone who champions openness in Integrated Library Systems would shy away from the iPad. How does any library expect to support a hardware/software platform so tied to the appstore? See how handy your iPad is when you refuse to give Apple your credit card number to download a free e-book reader. Are libraries expected to deliver credit card numbers with their iPads? The alternative is web apps for all the content we would like to see on the iPad. Doesn’t that make the iPad (firmware) irrelevant (once there is an alternative).
This one loyal Apple consumer stopped using apple products after they made me login to iTunes to play mp3s I owned. Come on Roy, look beyond the pretty app.
Todd, admittedly, this post was written more from the angle of myself as an individual user rather than a library, and how it might wish to respond. Please note that I haven’t (yet) advocated that a library buy iPads and make them available to their users. Frankly, I think a library can make a much better case to buy and loan Kindles than iPads, which are much more than simply a book reading device and therefore probably not all that well-suited to a library environment. Also, it is a much more effective use of resources to buy low-end Kindles than high-end iPads.
Having said that, personally I think the iPad is fantastic. From that angle, I think you have mistaken me for a religious adherent. I am much more likely to choose the practical, efficient, and effective device no matter whether it is “open” or “closed”. I am reminded about when the Macintosh first came out. There were those who decried it’s closed architecture, since you could not pop open the case and exchange the motherboard. Well, later while they were still disdaining the Mac I was doing the layout for my first book — something they certainly could not do as easily or well at the time on a PC (1992, when Windows 3.1 — the first usable version of that operating system — had only just been released). Just choose the tool that will do the job. “Pretty” or not.
Thanks for the thoughtful response Roy. I am hopeful that we can all keep our eye on the prize, so to speak. We are in the midst of a movement of a consumerization of IT. A movement that libraries have been struggling to ignore for years now. Library patrons are really embracing library core values in a big way. These citizen librarians are cataloging their music, movies and books in ways never before available. We should do more to embrace and support this as library technologists.
Anyway, I would love to see a post on how HTML5 will change everything. The promise is everything the iPad offers without the corporate bugbear.
Just saw this. Interesting to see everyone’s take. I’m personally disappointed in the iPad due to it’s lack of a USB port, stylus, and Flash support. Yes, I know you can buy a stylus from a 3rd party vendor, but why not include one?
@ Todd #14: I don’t see how openness in an ILS is an issue for the iPad unless you forget to use the browser. Other than the Flash issue, Safari has been pretty standards-compliant in my experience. So an open ILS should work fine.
@ Mike #13: I’ve been thinking about ILS apps as a way to help judge where to spend our money on a new system. That is, if a vendor isn’t at least considering (or won’t consider doing it), I’ll consider moving on. Not a deal-breaker, but worth including in the process, I think.
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