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I suspect the iPad has some potential to transform the periodical industry. Newspapers are pretty hopeless on the Kindle, but look as though they will be considerably better on the iPad. In terms of ebooks I think it is very much a case of horses for courses - some books e.g. technical/image based will be clearly better on the iPad due to the fast colour screen, whereas in the case of standard print only books it will be pretty evenly matched - depending on other issues such as need for long battery life/ability to read in bright sunlight etc. These devices are merely tools, no point in becoming too wedded to the actual technology. I wonder what people were expecting of the iPad...world peace? epaper is merely ok as a technology, it suffers from poor refresh rates and relatively poor contrast, albeit with excellent battery life. I am not sure there is far to go with the current crop of epaper devices, I think they will be a commodity item fairly shortly. Content that is the important factor, I think for commercial publishers there may be a lot more mileage in producing content for an iPad type device. The hardware is not the issue here, more the interaction of the software and the media content.
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