But now the fabled iPad has arrived and it has book reading built in, complete with support for the open ePub format. Of course that pleases those of us who like to read books from Project Gutenberg and Google Books on our iPods, but Apple has done something very strange with the look and feel. Having read books on my iPod Touch for a year and a half now I’ve broken free of the need for pages that look like pages. When I’m reading a book that’s all text, all I need is text. It’s certainly an improvement for books with pictures, but I can’t help thinking Apple’s iBooks look a little cheesy with their flippy-over paper-like pages.

Books though are not the most exciting thing about this device; it offers real possibilities for creating new categories of publication. As this post at Snarkmarket argues:

For all its power and flexibility, the web is really bad at presenting bounded, holistic work in a focused, immersive way. This is why web shows never worked. The web is bad at containers. The web is bad at frames.

What the iPad offers is a frame, and one with well-defined limitations. I’ve been arguing something similar, though less concisely, over at shiftinglandscapeofmagazines. Here is a spur to create new forms of content and perhaps also to persuade people to pay for it. That will please Rupert Murdoch of course, but the real revolution could be for smaller players; it could be a lifeline for struggling literary magazines and a new outlet for authors who want to self-publish and get paid. Writers essentially become app developers.

If the iPad doesn’t do it for you, there are lots of alternatives.

Edited 29/1/10 because WordPress originally exposed a draft. Probably my fault in some way.

“I can’t imagine he would think he could apply what he did at UWE to another institution anyway.”

I hope those words taste good. The Senate votes on proposals today and given the historic antipathy of the British professoriat to anything that might be seen as making trouble, the likelihood is that the turkeys will vote for Christmas. I hope they prove me wrong.

An interesting side issue in this though is related to the way the students have reacted. Feelings are running high and a protest is planned outside the Senate meeting. The way they have organised the protest is, inevitably, through Facebook. Unfortunately, while many students use Facebook, many of their tutors avoid it for the very reason that their students use it. There are already lots of ways students can contact tutors out of hours–email from students is a frequent intrusion on my family weekends, though it generally goes ignored until Monday–and Facebook looks like just another way to remove the boundary between work and private life. This forum thread at the American Chronicle of Higher Education (hat tip to The Rumpus for the link) shows what a vexed issue this. Many avoid the issue by avoiding Facebook.

What this means for the current protest of course is that many of the people the students might like to know about their activities simply can’t get access to the site. Facebook’s walled garden prevents anyone without an account from looking in. I take two things away from this. That the current generation of students use Facebook as a matter of course and don’t imagine that anyone might not. And secondly, that Facebook has an extremely firm grip on the browsing habits of millions of well-educated, soon to be affluent web users. Once the distinction between open web and Facebook is gone–and it looks like it has for these students–the web as a free and open environment is at risk. As some of the commenters in the Chronicle thread note, joining Facebook eventually becomes unavoidable.

I have asked the protest group to post the information openly online and have offered to do so for them. I’ll link to it from here if that happens. In the meantime, here’s the Facebook page, which I haven’t seen.