Yes as a way of consuming content it's great (but so is any $100 screen with 3G - there is nothing iApple great)
The point is that there is a fundemental difference.
The first home computers let you create your own books/fanzines, then they let you make your own websites, then make your own albums and videos.
This is going back to the 50s, you buy the hardware and pay to watch content made by large studios.
Why do you say I can't create a book or a fanzine on an iPad? What about Pages would keep a user from making a book?
Mobile devices like iPads contribute heavily to websites by uploading text/photo content. Are they the best way to start from a blank new .html file and build your whole website by hand? No, but why do they need to be? We've got computers for that.
There will be a ton of content created on iPads. I don't know why the fact that one of their main usages is likely to be for content consumption (seems like there's a hell of a lot of that going on on "computers", too) makes you think that's all they can do.
But I don't want a keyboard on the device all the time, else I'd have bought a notebook.
So I can use it the vast majority of the time without having a keyboard attached. And I can make edits or small additions to my novel from anywhere in addition to all the other things that I do, the vast majority of which aren't typing-heavy. Then when I want to sit down and focus on writing for a long time, I put it in the keyboard dock or use a wireless keyboard.
If all you ever want to do with the device is to type your novel, yeah, just get a notebook instead, it'll be better for you. Which is fine: they still exist and nobody that's buying an iPad is buying it only to type their novel on the thing.
> There is nothing software-intensive about creating a book. The hard part is typing it in. (If you don't have a keyboard, that is.)
What about dictation?
"Even novelists, working in a form so very written, have needed to write by voice. Stendhal dictated “The Charterhouse of Parma” in seven weeks. An impoverished Dostoyevsky had just six weeks to deliver the manuscript of “The Gambler” or face complete ruin. He hired a stenographer, knocked the book out in four weeks, then married the girl."
The point is that there is a fundemental difference. The first home computers let you create your own books/fanzines, then they let you make your own websites, then make your own albums and videos.
This is going back to the 50s, you buy the hardware and pay to watch content made by large studios.