Why the iPad will never replace newspapers….

Why the iPad will never replace newspapers….

Though the video is a joke, it should remind us that devices such as the iPad generally don’t always directly replace an existing medium or technology. We still have plays even though we also have books, cinema and television.

Yes it has an impact and in some cases quite a big impact, think how the car has replaced horses… though sometimes it doesn’t always happen as expected, for example cars have not yet totally replaced trains and we are still investing in railways and trains.

I do see the iPad having an impact on the book, magazine and newspaper markets, but I don’t see the iPad (at this time) replacing them. It will enhance and enrich the reading experience, but will not be a total substitute. I now read a lot on the iPad, but in the main it has replaced reading from my laptop rather than paper based media. I still buy and like reading newspapers, I still like buying or borrowing and reading books. I do buy magazines on the iPad, but in the main these have been “new” magazines and I have continued to purchase the paper magazines as before. The Kindle App (and my Kindle) have had an impact on my reading, but generally in a positive way, in that I read more now than I did before.

Do you think the iPad is going to replace paper media, or is it just a different way of accessing information and content?

2 thoughts on “Why the iPad will never replace newspapers….”

  1. I don’t think the iPad will replace anything. I think that pad tyechnologies in general will replace many of the functions currently served by print media (why oh why do people fixate on brand names, like ‘iPad’?).

  2. Hi James,

    I agree wholeheartedly with your post and to a certain (but less pointed) extent with Stephen Downes. I can’t get too precious about the terminology, I own an iPad – I don’t own any other ‘pad technology’ – in fact I steered well clear of the original Windows driven tablets and wouldn’t have the iPad if I hadn’t been given it by kind and generous colleagues.

    Unlike you, I don’t read daily newspapers (Sunday sometimes) because their content is often scurrilously one sided and just as often untrue. I do use the iPad however, to trawl a variety of news publications to elicit my own opinion of various stories. Of course I could do this on my laptop too (I no longer drive a desktop computer) but let’s be honest I never really did and don’t now. Prior to the iPad I used my iPhone (sorry Stephen) to do my News research (my ‘better phone’, a Nokia N95, was rubbish at navigating the ‘net). Before that, and for a long time I used my Compaq HP iPaq with a very early version of Winmob to do the same thing.

    So yes – pad technologies (well, handheld touchscreen Internet connected devices) will always be the choice of discerning individuals for finding out what’s going on in the world. However, not everyone can afford such a device, not everyone sees the need in the same way that we do and newspapers are not on the edge of extinction.

    As for Kindle and it’s like, contrarily, give me a book any day.

    πŸ™‚

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