Last night I took a closer look at the Ipad (the technology itself as well as the marketing phenomenon), and I concluded that there was no particular reason for me to shell out seven or eight hundred dollars to replace my existing laptop with what appears to be a lightweight and verticalized version of a laptop. What underwhelmed me the most was to read that if you want a real, physical "keyboard" (as opposed to the flat, vertical version which can be made to appear at the bottom of the screen), you need a docking station contraption to plug the whole screen in. What that means is that instead of my existing laptop, I'd have a new, two-piece unit that would look like this:

It looks like an awkward, top-heavy laptop with a vertical screen. Considering that the only reason I use my laptop is to get online, check email, and write blog posts when I am on the road or in the event of a power failure, I'm tempted to ask "What's the point?" but I know I'd sound like an old grouch.

The point, according to Charlie Martin, is that it's all part of "Apple's Plan to Conquer the World." He makes an excellent argument that the idea is that it will replace paper -- "Paper print is dead; accept it. With the release of the iPad, we can see Apple's strategy to replace it." I think he's probably right, although I still like real books. There is something tranquil about them that simply does not apply to an electronic screen, no matter how cool it is. I'm in no way opposed to this new technology, mind you; I just don't see any compelling reason to ditch my books and my laptop.

What's also fascinating is what Martin says about the cost of content:

...financially, the tail is wagging the dog. The editorial costs, the cost of making the content, are way overwhelmed by the cost of making the big bundle of paper. So we don't need to make up the revenue -- most of the revenue was going toward something we're not going to provide any longer.

Existing publishers are worrying about how to prevent their electronic publishing business from cannibalizing their print publishing business; they have made arrangements with e-book publishers to keep the prices high enough to at least stay close to the price of a printed book.

This is a great deal for the publishers, of course: it means their margin on an e-book is about 90 percent. But that can't last; pretty quick someone will figure out that they can take less margin, and those great physical objects will become just for collectors, hobbyists, and fans, like vinyl records have become.

Let's back up, and start again. First principles: the real product is content, and if you want content, somebody has to pay for producing it. There are only two known ways to pay for that content: pay for it in the purchase price or pay for it with advertising.

Is that necessarily true? The content here is free. No one pays me to produce it, and no one has paid anything to read it. The millions of page views this blog has generated cost nothing either to produce or consume.

I am hardly alone. Almost everything that I read and link is free. True, there may be sign-ins required at some of the news sites, but that's not an out-of-pocket cost. But I don't think Martin is talking about the free stuff; he's talking about magazines and books, yet all of that paid production content has to increasingly be competitive with what's produced by volunteer work. Sometimes in my darker moments I think that what I am doing is slave labor, but no one cares. Like any other junkie, I can quit whenever I feel like it, and if I quit or burn out, whatever void I leave can be filled by another peon among the millions of voluntary online slaves. And the point is, many of them generate content superior to paid content. The fact is that words -- no matter how well put together or esthetically pleasing -- are not as valuable as they once were.

But that's a side issue, as the Ipad doesn't seem to have been created to facilitate the existing free content. Martin concludes with an analogy to iTunes (something I hardly ever use, but which people don't mind paying for):

prices must come down, way down, below what we pay for content on paper. That doesn't mean content has to be free, although it can be nearly free.

Third, there has to be a really convenient way to get the content.

An attractive way of getting content, low prices, easy shopping, and payment. That's iTunes. We think about it for music, but data is data; it can be music, movies, video, or print.

While the publishing companies try to preserve their print-based models, Apple has dug the foundation out from under them. What we are really seeing is a coherent, long-term strategy to replace the traditional models of publishing, with everything delivered over the internet to inexpensive devices like the iPad.

My only real worry is that I like books, and I hope I'll still be able to get them.

In that regard, I hope that the news of this technology can be kept from the greenie-weenie AGW environmentalists, because the way some of them talk, they might decide it's time to ban books to save trees.

(Something like that would fly directly in the face of the First Amendment, but that's off topic...)

UPDATE: Apple might want to rule the world, but in what may come as a shock to some of its trendy green customers, it appears that the Ipad will not save the planet.

Under cap-and-trade, Apple company would pay for the 400,000 tons of carbon dioxide emitted annually by its U.S. buildings and domestic operations, and also for the 500,000 tons of carbon dioxide emitted by shipping its products. But the 3.8 million tons of CO2 emitted by its manufacturing -- 81 percent of the company's total -- would be exempt from a carbon tax because the emissions would be in China.