The iPad: A Hidden Bonus

Apple have two wildly successful online stores. One is their music store, which now serves movies and TV shows as well, and the second is their App store, where people download applications for their devices. Approximately 4 billion Apps have been downloaded from the store, which has been running for less than two years. That stat tells its own story.

It is, of course, easy to participate in both these ecosystems without paying a single penny, which is what I have done - Apple serves a lot of free audio and video in the form of podcasts and the much vaunted iTunes U. And it's worth looking into these - the ease with which one can get video from TED, listen to episodes of Radiolab, and get lectures from the world's best universities on just about any subject, for free, makes one wonder why such a system has only recently come about. And the App store is teeming with tons of free Apps, but whether many of these have any utility is worth questioning.

With the release of the iPad came a third online store - the iBookstore. And the initial figures suggest it will be a success as well. Within 2 months, it has captured 22% of the market, and that number can only get higher. The figure of 22% requires some explanation - it is not 22% of the whole market. Apple have partnered with 5 out of the 6 major US book publishing houses, and from ebook sales of their catalogue, the iBookstore accounts for 22%. As more publishing houses get on the iBookstore, and more iPads get sold, that number will definitely rise, and become more representative.

But, as with the other two stores, there is a way of getting value without spending a penny, thanks to Project Gutenberg. They have digitised a very substantial amount of all the out-of-copyright and free books, with the result being that pretty much all of the great classics are free to download and read. Imagine that. Shakespeare, Cervantes, de Montaigne, Descartes, Thoreau, Emerson, Dickens, Austen, Kafka, Pope, Wordsworth, Marx, Hegel, Nietzsche, Aristotle, Wilde, Bronte (x2), Dumas, etc. etc. All available for free. All held in a device smaller than a sheet of A4, that I can take with me wherever I go. Wow. (In the interest of objectivity, I should point out that Amazon's Kindle, as well as other ebook readers will be able to access the free catalogue as well)

Apple's iBooks App is not included with the iPad, but is available as a free download the first time you connect to the App store. And it comes free with Winnie the Pooh, which is a classic in its own right. But the very next book I downloaded? My absolute favourite - Thoreau's Walden. Followed by a mish-mash of stuff I have always wanted to read, that I tried to read when I was younger and gave up, and that I have read and loved. Check it out:


It's a trivial thing to some, and there is no doubt that other people will buy the iPad for other reasons, but this alone would justify the purchase price for a bookworm like me.