There was a WHOLE LOT of anticipatory hype surrounding Apple’s new iPad and though Steve did his Jobs last week, once again, it appeared to be nothing more than a really big iPhone.  That is, of course, if you are not trying to sell Kindles or Sony ebook readers.  To me, it appears, Apple is trying to do for the eBook what it did with digital music.  However, this theory assumes that there are billions of consumers out there who are just waiting for the right device to present them with thousands of pages of digitized text.  While I’m not so sure this is the case, we must face the fact that our Reading Material MUST evolve.

A few weeks ago I gave a presentation on Digital Media to some very attentive Junior High students.  I coined the term ISARS  (Information Storage And Retrieval System).  The Book and other paper based media represent STATIC ISARS.  Their information does not change, they don’t require an energy source(other than light) and they pretty much last for multiple lifetimes, if properly preserved.  The iPad, Kindle, Laptop and Desktop Computer are DYNAMIC ISARS.  Their information can change in a subsecond, they require varying amounts of energy and they pretty much last until they are replaced by next year’s technology.

I just built a website for my 40 year High School reunion.  The primary record of our graduation in 1970 is recorded in our Yearbook…A Static ISARS.  Using a scanner I digitized many critical pages from this document and was able to build an online directory of all our grads with an accompanying picture.  It is fully searchable and updateable as current information is retrieved and stored in the internet “cloud”.   Clearly, this is a vastly superior, greener way to share information.   However, without someone to oversee the presentation of this information for even the next 10 years, it will not be around for our 50th reunion.  So, as much as we all want to save trees, we MUST print at least one Static ISARS to ensure, at least, this year’s updates will be available for those of us lucky enough to make to to the 50th.

As a society, we have made the delivery of information more important than the content delivered.  My iThink device tells me this is wrong, but it’s over 57 years old and  is very selective about what information it retrieves, PROCESSES, and stores.  So what does it know?