Game changer: ebooks better reading experience than books – survey

According to a recent study: “User satisfaction with reading on e-book devices — with the exception of the PC — was higher than printed books”source.

The interesting thing to note here is that the ipad is better than printed content but the more obvious and banal comparison between the ipad and PC shows how the ipad will transform electronic literature and information as we know it.

I know I’m not the first to say this but I would like to go on record as claiming that the ipad is going to reinvent the internet entirely.  

When you think about the net you think ‘web’ but the web is really a format for desktop publishing.  

Reading a webpage is the experiential equivalent of reading a word document.  

Sure there are hyperlinks and multimedia and lots of add ons, but the act of reading a web page is so unsatisfying, so draining, so much like proofreading an essay before printing it, that the only content that is even tolerable online is short form.  

The logical extension of this phenomenon is obviously twitter but even without twitter, the dominant form of written content that is actually read online is short.

So by making the reading experience more like a book, websites themselves will become more book-like and writing will become more book-suited and ideas will become more brain-intensive and thoughtful.

This is my bold prediction and also my hope.