Opinion:Study, iPad, DRM and Me

Recently I pos­ted about ebook read­ers and why Not Owning an E-​​Reader or Buying E-​​Books is my philo­sophy. Combined with the announce­ment this week of the Apple iPad I also twittered about why I would buy one, which seems to go against what I have pre­vi­ously said.

What’s Different

I expect that the iPad will do a few key things for me:

• Draw net­work dia­grams in OmniGraffle {ref}
• Offline access to my PDF col­lec­tion of Cisco Press books and vari­ous PDF files
• Better access to OmniFocus for GTD
• iCal cal­en­dar management
• bet­ter email cli­ent than the iPhone
• cas­ual web surf­ing when away from desk

and here is what it won’t do for me.

• Fiction and iBook content
• Movies
• Music
• Entertainment.…in just about any form

Cisco Press Books, PDF and Safari

I have recently been spend­ing some amount money to buy and down­load PDF ver­sions of Cisco Press text­books from Safari at O’Reilly Press. This means that they are saved on my com­puter and I read them when I on my laptop which has been enorm­ously use­ful since I have my laptop handy a lot more than I have all my textbooks.

Although the O’Reilly Safari HTML inter­face is much improved (if you are in the HTML Beta pro­gram for Safari) I still prefer to read in PDF’s because I can make notes and obser­va­tions in the doc­u­ments, but I don’t always have Internet access.¹

These PDFs are not copy pro­tec­ted (as such) although they do have my name splashed To be able to read PDF’s, that I have pur­chased, on a port­able device means that I should be able to have more time to review and dis­cover more inform­a­tion. In par­tic­u­lar, I still haven’t read all of the present­a­tions from Cisco Live in Barcelona last year (2009).

OmniGraffle

After hear­ing that OmniGraffle is under­way for the iPad, I real­ise that sit­ting in meet­ings and dood­ling out a rough dia­gram of a solu­tion is enorm­ously valu­able. Somehow I think that using the touch inter­face to draw a net­work dia­gram will change the way I react with the draw­ing diagrams.

OmniFocus

I have been using OmniFocus on my iPhone but it’s not very use­ful. I find it mildly uncom­fort­able to use and expect that the lar­ger screen of the iPad will give me a bet­ter GTD res­ult. Of course, the auto­matic syncing to my desktop is also great.

Email, Web and iCal

I use my iPhone con­stantly for this and almost never for voice calls. I expect to almost replace the iPhone with the iPad because of the lar­ger screen and bet­ter bat­tery life.

And the cal­en­dar­ing on the iPhone is work­able but tough to use.

Tethering

In the UK, there are teth­er­ing plans avail­able where £10 gets 3GB of band­width per month. I’m think­ing that for light Internet use, this sounds about right.

Conclusion

I don’t expect to use the iPad for my media. The DRM for e-​​books isn’t fin­ished yet and until the DRM allows me to move my books from Laptop to iPad to ‘other device’ I’m reluct­ant to par­ti­cip­ate. I’ll be think­ing of those people with Amazon Kindle’s that can not trans­fer their con­tent to another device. Spending another five hun­dred pounds on text­books I already own … that would make me mad.

I’m basic­ally expect­ing the iPad to replace the pen and paper that I carry to meet­ing to make notes and sketches which I later trans­fer to my desktop. This way, I get instant data entry and rep­lic­a­tion with less work plus access to my PDF lib­rary from Safari for read­ing, and HTML when neces­sary (for new books or non-​​core content).

So I won’t be queueing up to get an iPad, but I will order one when they show up on the store. I expect to have it handy in the same way that my paper note­pad is.

Footnotes

1. on MAC OSX you can, not so sure what’s hap­pen­ing on Windows these days. [back]

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