I recommend Laura Miller's new Salon piece, "The iPad is for readers." She writes "One weekend into owning the thing and I've only managed to watch half an episode of "Black Adder." I have yet to play a single game. What I've mostly been doing on the iPad is reading, because this much-ballyhooed harbinger of the future turns out to be the ideal device for that most old-fashioned of leisure activities."
Miller notes some of the benefits of the iPad's one-task-at-a-time operations: "Reading a document on the iPad feels ... serene. There's no dock filled with application icons lurking at the edge of the screen to suggest that I log onto iChat to see who else is online ... or double-check the day's to-do list. No files on the desktop remind me about that other thing I need to put the finishing touches on and send. No notifications from TweetDeck pop up to inform me that Rose had insomnia again last night or that Ron found a fascinating article on the Guardian Web site or that Michele just posted an adorable new photo of her dog."
For productivity, Miller notes, this may not be the perfect tool, "but it's well-suited for the purpose I had in mind: absorption." She found reading on the device to be much better than reading on her computer (I've found I can much more comfortably read e-texts on my iPhone than on my desktop, too, and I'm looking forward to test-driving an iPad).
An interesting article for sure, and Miller offers at the end some useful tips for getting files to be read onto the device.
