I wrote the entire submission, query and pages, on my iPad, as a sort of experiment. I was looking to find out whether the iPad would be reasonable as my primary computer. Ever since I got it, I’ve been using it almost exclusively. It’s wonderful for all types of reading, and, even with its wireless keyboard, it’s about ten times easier to cart around than my laptop.

But it order to become my primary computer, it would have to be good for writing on. Which, I guess, it’s not.

First of all, i have to say that if you plan on doing any sort of writing on the iPad, you really need to have a wireless keyboard. Otherwise, it’s sort of a nonstarter. But even with this equipment in hand, I found a number of small problems with Pages, Apple’s word processor for the iPad. Such as:

Only one window at a time

This is sort of necessitated by the iPad’s form factor, but it’s still annoying to have to switch to the desktop every time you want to look something up.

No CTRL-B, CTRL-I, CTRL-E

Etcetera. Not a major factor, just a bit of an annoyance.

Poor bulleted lists

You can make a bulleted list, but there’s no obvious way to indent sub-topics.

Very aggressive auto-correct

For example, when I was typing the above section, the iPad insisted that I really meant “billeted lists.” It also just added a period after that quotation mark. And it always reformats “its” to “it’s.” This sort of aggressive auto correct is kind of nice when you’re using the touch keypad (because you tend to make plenty of miskeys), but it becomes more than a little annoying when you’re actually using the wireless keyboard.

All of these things are irritating, but I would probably find a way to be ok with them if it weren’t for the following deal breakers:

No word count or obvious page count

Yes, you can scroll down to the bottom of your doc and see what page you’re on, but that’s not quite what I want. I want a visible control that tells me how long my work is.

No searching within a document

By the time you have a three hundred page document, you need to be able to search for specific passages.

No comments

Comments are a big part of the way I work. I use them not just for editing, but also for keeping track of what time it is within the world of my story, and whether a minor character’s eyes are blue or brown. This is the biggest deal breaker of all.

So, there you have it. I still am head over heels for my iPad, but it’s better at consuming media than it really is at producing it. The laptop will remain my primary computer. I just won’t love it quite as much as I did before it’s younger, sleeker cousin came to play.

I have to say, I wasn’t prepared to love it as much as I do. It is, in a word, elegant. In eight words, it is like a computer that just works. No load times. No viruses. No maintenance. No confusion. And while it doesn’t do everything I want a computer to do, it does about 90%, all while being extremely portable.

Yeah, yeah, I know. The technology set is still sticking to their story that the iPad is nothing special. To me, this is like the academic and literary authors who said the Da Vinci Code was nothing special. They’re entitled to their opinion, but they aren’t really the target market.

To me, the target market is grandmas and students and people who don’t have the good fortune to be married to computer programmers. I’ve often wondered how such maritally disadvantaged people get by. Now I know: they can just buy an iPad.

But where the iPad really rocked me is by convincing me, in less than a day, of the coming e-book revolution. When I was a kid, the idea of a world without paper books would have been anathema to me. But now I’m ready to say it: The king is dead. Long live the king.

I’ve been reading plenty of online discussions defending the longevity of physical books. People love the feel of books, the smell of books, the look of books on a shelf. They love lending books, giving books as gifts, and taking them into the bathtub. They like giving them to their children without worrying about replacement costs.

Those are all excellent arguments, and I don’t disagree with any of them. But they don’t exactly counter the arguments that people like searching their books, and annotating their books, and traveling with books but without bulk. People like buying books, and starting to read them, all without leaving bed.

The two forms just offer different features, and I’m starting to think that the e-books have the better set. They’ll expand their capabilities, too; it won’t be long before we get gift codes and cheapie e-readers for kids.

And the most powerful argument of my youth, that people don’t enjoy reading on screens, has been overset. Not just by the new form factors of the Kindle and iPad, but also by the Web itself. Over the last ten years we have all gotten sort of used to doing a lot of our pleasure reading on screens.

It can’t be said that I’m ready for the revolution, exactly. I’m experiencing a bit of collection bifurcation anxiety at the moment. But ready or not, it’s happening. It might take ten years, or even twenty. But the war, as far as I’m concerned, is over.