I'm just gonna jump on the bandwagon here and post about the iPad launch because that's what everybody's doing on the Internet today.

Plus, I'm a magazine editor, and magazine editors and publishers everywhere are asking themselves, Is this the technology that will save our butts?

Not to mention there may be applications for kayaking too.


Pundits have been heralding Apple's new product as a magic bullet for the beleaguered print media industry. I don't think it's that simple. One product won't save us. But e-readers are a trend to watch. It's very expensive to produce a magazine on paper; a lot cheaper to produce it in pixels and to share it with millions of readers online. Take Adventure Kayak's free digital back issues as an example.

Of course it's not enough just to make online magazines look better. Ours already look amazing - you get to see the magazine exactly as it appears in print (check it out, did I mention it's free?). The key is for us editors and publishers to figure out how to make money off of you, the reader. Put another way, from The New York Times:

Almost all media companies have run aground in the Internet Age as they gave away their print and video content on the Web and watched paying customers drift away as a result.

Tell us about it. We just decided to unlock the door to all our digital content!

Just making the medium look slicker on a more portable device won't solve this loss of paid subscribers. That will require readers to recognize that you have to pay for good content and subscribe to support the magazines you like.

I recently met a writer at a dinner party who has pledged to do just this, to stop downloading free music and reading free articles online, opting to subscribe and pay for everything he reads - just because "it's the right thing to do." He was taking a moral stand.

That's one option (please make all cheques payable to "Rapid Media Inc."). But can we count on enough people to take a moral stand, giving money to the publications they respect as if they were tithing at church?

Fat chance, I say.

The hope is that the iPad will deliver print in a new and better way, such as combining text and video and brilliant layout, that's so good people will want to pay for it again. But so far it looks to me like what the iPad delivers is just the Web in a different form, and the Web is what got us into this mess in the first place. If you don't pay for Web content now, why would you want to start paying for it on an iPad, when you can use your iPad to read the same online material for free that you're reading now on your computer? Clearly I'm not tech expert, but I don't sense that the world has changed.

That's the not so good news. On upside, maybe this iPad thingy will be handy for kayaking. When I paddled for 80 days down the coast of BC, a quarter of my rear hatch was filled with books. I kid you not - I planned to do some serious reading. At each resupply point I'd mailed myself a fresh batch for the library.

If the iPad is as great for reading books as Apple claims, and easy enough to recharge with a portable solar panel, then the expedition library just got a whole lot lighter.