The Ipad is winning fans from every corner of the media. I was amused the other day when The International Herald Tribune described media magnate Rupert Murdoch as a «print romantic» and seemed surprised that he is planning to launch an Ipad newspaper called The Daily. But anyone with the slightest knowledge of media history knows that Murdoch is a revolutionary. In the 1980s, he caused riots in London when he dismantled the old Victorian printing presses under Fleet Street – making hundreds of workers redundant in the process – and installed his newspapers in clean, modern, electronic production facilities in the docklands. So for me it's entirely logical that Murdoch is now thinking of dispensing with print entirely and producing an Ipad paper. If Murdoch is romantic about anything, it's not print – it's journalism, particularly the kind people are willing to pay for.
But it's true that tablet devices have a knack of converting technophobes. I think it's because they are closer than the Web to the traditional reading experience, so people of my parents' age feel more comfortable with them. The great New York writer and humorist Fran Lebowitz commented recently: «I write with a pen on a legal pad. I'm going to wait, because at the point when the Ipad really works it's going to be a pad of paper.» She was joking, but she has a point.
