The iPad is coming. I’ve ordered one, and I’m hoping (against hope) that it arrives at my office on Friday so I can tinker with it over the weekend and not have to wait until Monday. We’ll see. So I’m all in, is what I’m saying, even if I do not believe (and am, in fact, a little freaked out by) Apple’s claim that the device is “magical.” (Can you believe it’s really right there in the release?)

Why am I in? Because I think the device will accelerate the mass adoption of e-books, and I like and distribute e-books. How will the iPad do this?

The most important part of this might have already happened with the release of iTunes 9.1, which includes a tab for managing and syncing EPUB-format e-books with the iPad. (You can go to Feedbooks right now if you want, download my books, and pull them into iTunes, just like you would with mp3s. They’ll sync up when your iPad arrives. I’m also trying to gain inclusion for my first e-book, Single, into the iBookstore via Smashwords, although I have a feeling the cover will be ruled geometrically non-compliant. I will change it if I have to, I suppose, although it’s had this cover longer than Smashwords has been around.) The integration of e-books into the iTunes ecosystem alone is huge. Lots of people (myself included) use iPhones to buy, download, and read e-books through third-party apps even without this integration. Adding it can only accelerate this trend.

The other part has to do with something I’ve noticed about my own reading behavior. I’ve been working on the web for more than 10 years, and as websites and blogs and social networks ascended, my consumption of books and other long-form writing declined. I sporadically read longer things on  a series of Windows Mobile phones I owned—and I would occasionally go on a months-long “real” book binges—but books were fading from my life. And I love books. The best job I ever had was at a bookstore. My wife and I were married in a bookstore. Nevertheless, they were becoming less relevant than the web to the way I lived. (One of the reasons I distributed my first e-book in 2006 was because that’s the way I was reading at the time, and it felt a little ridiculous to not circulate books where I myself might find them.) So there’s the darkness, from a bookish perspective, but here is the light.

Now that mobile is getting its act together—I begrudgingly admit that it’s Apple that got it together, although they won’t have the stage to themselves forever—I am reading more than ever. More than I have since grad school, all on my iPhone. I save long articles with Instapaper; I download books from Feedbooks and Smashwords; and (get this) I buy books from Amazon and Kobo. I can’t get enough. The missing piece, I think, was mobile. Books and long-form texts have always been available online, but who wants to hunch over and read off a desktop or a notebook? The Kindle and (almost unexpectedly) the iPhone were the beginning of a mobile reading revolution and the iPad will make it an easy option for even more people.

I still run into people who are shocked by the thought of reading off an iPhone screen. The iPad will solve this problem and give lots of other people the opportunity to give e-books a try. To buy a Kindle, you have to already be convinced. If you already have an iPad, on the other hand, you can dabble. (And you can really dabble, sampling books from Stanza, Kobo, Amazon, Ibis—all in addition to the iBookstore.) Some people will dabble and some people’s reading habits will change. Enough to save publishing!?! I have no idea. The issue of whether publishing will or will not be saved is an issue I’ve realized I don’t care so much about. For publishing to be “saved,” the loss of print readership has to be offset by an equal gain in digital readership. This didn’t happen for newspapers and magazines, so I don’t see why it would happen for books. There will be disruptions. But from my perspective—with no industry to save—I’d just like more people to download my books, and the iPad will certainly help, if not overnight, then at least over the weekend.

As you can probably tell, I’ve become increasingly interested in e-books, digital storytelling, and the future of the media business generally. I read a lot of feeds and share the best on these topics—and a few others—on Google Reader. (I thought these might spark some discussion via Google Buzz, but well, you know.) But if you want to crib the articles I’m sharing as the iPad apocalypse approaches, grab the RSS feed.

Posted via email from The Hanex