now, for the iPad

As for the iPad (as opposed to iPod)… Even though I still really don’t know what I’m doing with this new device, it’s already having a major impact.

Consider today. I corrected the whole set of proofs for The Prince and the Wolf on the iPad. Given that I’ve been working in the Jardin du Luxembourg anyway (it’s a stone’s throw from where I’m living on the rue St.-Jacques), it seemed appropriate to correct those proofs in the portion of the park right outside Latour’s old office at the École des mines, which adjoins the Jardin.

Here’s what I love about the iPad. I read the proofs sitting on a park bench. I read them after moving to a chair. At times I would stand up and pace while reading them. Halfway through, I left the Jardin and walked over to that little Syrian restaurant on the Boulevard du Montparnasse for lunch (La rose de Damas), and read some of the proofs there.

And then it occurred to me that two of the major reasons why intellectual work can be so exhausting is the following:

1. It usually must be indoors, under stuffy atmospheric conditions.

2. It usually is done for long periods of time in the same physical posture.

With the iPad, I was able to shift at will between sitting and standing positions, while moving across fairly good-sized swathes of southern Paris, all while getting my day’s work done at a rapid clip.

Under normal conditions, I would feel exhausted after having just corrected a set of book proofs. Instead, I feel refreshed and invigorated.

And, I repeat, that battery is something else. It lasts for a long, long time.

The big downside, of course, is that I still see no good way to type on these things. It’ll be awhile before someone figures out a convincing way to drop tactile keyboards. I still hate typing emails on my iPhone. The iPad has a nicer, bigger keyboard than that, but no one’s going to write a book on an iPad, and few people will even be able to write short articles on them.

However, I think the iPad breaks a lot of new ground, and we’re probably headed for a cascade of related innovations over the next decade or so. I’m old enough to remember using a typewriter in high school; old enough not to have had an email account as an undergraduate; old enough to remember being a 26-year-old in Germany and having my tech-savvy brother email me and say: “See if the university computers in Leipzig have a program called either ‘Mosaic’ or ‘Netscape’,” and not having any idea what on earth he was talking about. And old enough as well to remember the summer of 1989, when I not only visited “East Berlin,” but also received newspaper clippings in the mail from a friend in the States. Newspaper clippings. Hilarious.