This week saw the birth of the Apple iPad. In spite of initial skepticism Steve Jobs has decided that the tablet has a future, and he is right. It will also change the way we search. Pandia argues that publishers should support a tool that lets tablet users surf the web and subscription based content at the same time.

There has been a lot of negative comments on the iPad. It doesn’t do this, it doesn’t do that, and nearly all of these comments come from geeks comparing the iPad to a regular computer. This is not a netbook, even if it can do much of what a netbook can do. Nor is it a plain ebook reader.

It is what I for a lack of a better word will call a media reader on steroids.

The reference tool

Back home we have an old laptop lying in a shelf in the living room. We don’t use it much for word processing, heavy calculations or for designing web sites.

We use it as a reference tool. If we watch a movie, we look it up at IMDB. If we need a recipe we search for one using Google. If we want to convert some measures, we find an appropriate tool. We use it for YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. And we use it for reading news.

My wife also uses it for games, and I pretend not to notice.

We do use the keyboard, but not for heavy lifting.

The ebook reader

On another shelf you will find the Amazon Kindle my wife gave me for Christmas.

I love it! I am a parallel reader, and tend to read several books at the same time, fact and fiction. If the book I am looking for is available for Kindle I download it to my Kindle using the Kindle itself or the Amazon store. I use the simplistic interface to switch between the various publications.

It remembers my latest position for each book, and I can write in comments with the small keyboard and store clippings.

The black and white epaper screen is crisp and easy on the eyes, and for reading plain text it is a dream. It works very well for reading fiction, although the screen is often too small to get the full benefit of scholarly publications. The pictures are too small, and it is hard to navigate between the main body of text, footnotes and references. You should buy the big screen Kindle for that, or go for the iPad.

But this is only the beginning. The Kindle is not there yet, but I can see what Apple is going for.

First you may subscribe to newspapers. Not just selected articles on a web site, but a whole newspaper.

I am subscribing to the International Herald Tribune on my Kindle (the Tribune is the international version of the New York Times). Every morning the 3G has downloaded the latest issue — all of the text and a few black and white pictures.

It works very well. Still the number of pictures is limited. Any color supplement will be missing. I do not miss the ads, but I am sure the Tribune would have like to add some to keep the paper going. And would it not be great if they could embed video?

You cannot do that on the Kindle, because by using epaper Amazon has sacrificed speed and colors for readability and a long battery life.

Apple goes the other way. By using an LED screen, they sacrifice readability and battery life for the wonders of color, design and moving pictures. But by doing so they have turned the ebook reader into a media platform.

Kitchen and airport computing

This is the future of kitchen and airport computing:

1. An ebook reader.
2. A newspaper and magazine reader.
3. A gaming platform.
4. A reference tool (dictionary, Wikipedia, phone catalog etc.)
5. A viewer for short videos (YouTube)
6. A social communication platform (chat, twitter, Facebook)

The iPad can be used for a lot of other purposes as well (like listening to music, word processing, watching movies and more, but there are other tools more suitable for that kind of thing).

Tablet search

Search will become an essential part of the user experience of the multimedia tablets. You need search to find facts, applets, videos, news, friends and colleagues.

Given the larger screen, the regular search engines should be able to provide the services without much fuzz. In fact, present day Bing, Yahoo! and Google can perform this task well.

There will be room for a new type of combined search tool, however. As I noted, the temptation to subscribe to magazines and newspapers is big.

It is cheaper to by magazines this way. You get them on your doorstep as soon as they are out. No, strike that! You get them in your lap as soon as they are out, and they include a lot of information that is not available online.

Accessing the hidden subscription based web

What I would like to see, is a search tool that lets me search both the web and the content of the magazines and newspapers I am subscribing to at the same time. I want this tool to be able to search not only the downloaded issues of the Tribune (or the Economist, the New Scientist, Time or whatever it is I am subscribing to), but also the content of the online archives of the same publications.

Then I want to be able to access that historical content by clicking on the relevant link in the search results, in the same way as I would go to any of the free content available on the web, and without having to go to their web site and log in as a subscriber.

So listen up, you old fashioned paper publishers! You are constantly complaining that Google and Craig’s List have been taking your livelihood away. Make sure that someone makes a search tools that lets me search your own databases, and help them do it.

If you do so, you will see that the decline of paper based publication will be compensated by the rise of tablet subscriptions.

The future of the Kindle

For Amazon the iPad poses a huge problem. In the US you may use the Kindle for some kind of web browsing and searching with Google, but given the limitations of the screen, it isn’t that useful. Since I live in Europe I can use it for browsing the Wikipedia only. That is helpful, but it cannot in no way replace a proper web browser.

Given the Kindle’s reliance on epaper (which is slow and can only “print” in black and white), video and colors are out of the question for the time being. For this reason the Kindle will remain primarily a good ebook reader, and nothing more.

Amazon could launch another iPad like type of Kindle, of course, in order to compete with Apple. I am not sure they will. Amazon’s main objective is to sell ebooks.

You can already read Kindle ebooks on the iPhone. That app can be used on the iPad as well. They will probably also make a new app for the iPad, making it easy to read Amazon ebooks on the Apple tablet. In other words: They can use the iPad in the same way Apple will be doing with their new iBook store. They can use the iPad to beat Apple in the ebook selling game.

I doubt very much that Apple will dare to stop them from doing so. Stopping Amazon’s iPad app would give them too much bad press, even if the Kindle ebooks are cheaper than Apple’s iBooks. If Apple is to fight Amazon in this game, it must be by making exclusive agreements with publishers that let the iBook store sell their books earlier than Amazon.

photo credit iPad: nDevilTV

photo credit Kindle: oskay