“The iPad appears to be Steve Jobs’s attempt to roll back the multi-decade trend toward more open computing platforms. Jobs’s vision of the future is one that revolves around a series of proprietary “stores”—for music, movies, books, and so forth—controlled by Apple. And rather than running the applications of our choice, he wants to limit users to running Apple-approved software from the Apple “app store.”
Timothy B. Lee (via pegobry). I think this is true and therefore worrisome. It also comes a little late in the game: how many people who are now locked in to the Amazon world are going to wave goodbye to all that in order to get locked in to the Apple world — especially book people? The Books app on the iPad looks pretty cool — though the UI is either licensed or stolen from Delicious Library — but I doubt that Apple will ever offer more than a relative handful of titles. Jobs doesn’t believe in reading enough to make such an investment.
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