When I’d gone to wait on line to purchase an iPad a few weeks ago, I had a gut feeling it’d be a game changer — along with devices such as Sony’s Reader and Amazon’s Kindle — in a lot of ways, but not necessarily to the extent I do now. I knew the multimedia applications such as Netflix and sports apps like MLB At Bat would be major improvements on the experience those of us with smartphones, netbooks and even laptops had seen to date, but I hadn’t gone as far as to grasp what the device might make us rethink as far as concepts we all take for granted and consider “eternal,” such as pages in a book, newspaper or magazine.
Before I continue, I’d just like to clarify that this is much less of an Apple-specific fan commentary, and much more of a sea-change-via-technology commentary.
After buying the iPad, one of the first applications I downloaded was Amazon’s Kindle application. As I’d mentioned earlier, I’m a pretty dedicated Amazon customer, and had been holding out a bit on the Kindle to see what it might evolve into — but this device gave me the best of both worlds. The first book I’d purchased at the Kindle store was Stephen King’s Under The Dome, and I’ve been reading on flight after flight taken this past month, instead of racking up paperbacks in airports.
After a few accumulated hours of reading, I realized something was awry in my head…I had no idea what page I was on, and barely knew what chapter I was in.
Why, you might ask?
Well, first off, the ability to alter the font size renders what most of us have considered a “page” for our entire lives obsolete. The page numbering shifts from how many words — or characters, spacing and formatting, really — fit on a printed or “fixed” amount of area into whatever *I*, as the reader, choose to fit on my screen, in portrait or landscape mode, with the click of a button or tap on a screen.
In fact, the tap on my iPad’s screen tells you what percent of the book i’ve completed. Maybe I’m on page 673, or 701, or 376. Who knows? (I’m 90% done with his book, if you care)
Does it matter? Is it just that the “page” has gone from bring “controlled” by the author or publisher and shifted to the reader? Maybe.
What matters to me is that it got me thinking, mostly the fact that saying “I’m about 2/3 of the way through so-and-so” might become more common than saying what page you’ve read up to with someone else in your book club.
The more I think about it, the more i realize that maybe we’re looking less at the eradication of a concept such as a “page,” and more at just the latest incarnation of what “page” means to those of us with reading, writing, and drawing skills. For all I know, those cave walls we all continue to find more and more amazing across this vast planet we live on were called pages by our ancestors. Maybe each side of the Rosetta Stone was a “page” and the concept is more about the limitations of the medium being used, and pages are indeed eternal.
This concludes my latest rambling from 35,000 feet. Please return to your regularly scheduled reading. I’m going to count page views on my blog.