How many books or magazines can you read during that one train ride back home from work? What good is it to have a thousand books with you? Can it really change your reading habits?
With iPod, it was different. I would not carry many CDs so that I could listen a bunch of one hit wonders in a row, one from each CD. Books or magazines are different. One can easily occupy you for half an hour, so I doubt the amount of reading will change much in the long run. The same people who were already reading regularly will keep on reading in whatever format. The convenience factor may give it a nudge, but I doubt it will make much of a difference.
This is fairly perceptive and, I think, correct. There are *many* differences between digital books and digital music, and so comparisons between them should be looked at skeptically.
First of all, music tends to be something that you listen to repeatedly; books (novels, anyway) tend mostly be read first. I read *a lot*, but have probably only reread 2% or so of the novels that I have read. Most books I read once and then move on. So the fact that I can carry hundreds or thousands of books on the the iPad (or any e-reader) is not as useful to me as the fact that I can carry thousands of songs on my iPod.
There is some convenience in carrying 6-8 unread books with me, of course, but that's not the same as being able to carry all of my music with me at one time.
Second, one of the great advantages of mp3 players is that you can transfer all of your existing songs to the mp3 player, for free. There's no functionality like this for an eReader.
Third, buying digital music through iTunes was generally cheaper than buying a CD - and clearly cheaper if you consider that many people would buy an entire CD because they only wanted one song. E-Books do seem to be somewhat cheaper than hardbacks, but are not any cheaper than paperbacks, which is what most people buy.
Fourth, (at least for 99% of the population), an iPod played back music just as well as any other portable music player. E-book readers do not have the resolution of even the cheapest paperback - and of course you don't have to worry about reading a paperback at the beach or by the pool, nor do you need to worry that someone might steal your paperback, generally.
And of course there's no digital equivalent of libraries.
So I don't think that the iPad is going to change publishing much - e-books will remain a niche item, which only a small percentage of the population will embrace.
The big exception to all of this, however, concerns textbooks. *If* textbooks were as usable on the iPad as they are on paper (a big if), there would be tremendous advantages to an iPad or other e-reader.
