One of the things I keep hearing about is enhancing e-books with multimedia. I admit a bias: That word sends me looking for a link to somewhere else. ‘Multimedia’ evokes every website that wastes my time and slows Firefox to a crawl with bad Flash animation. It has a whiff of marketers who want to make everything more like TV, the better to sell me stuff.

People who read for pleasure generally want to ‘get lost in the pages,’ as Halpern puts it. The last thing we want is distractions that pull us out of the story, fiction or nonfiction. Certainly I would not pay more to get an e-book larded up with video clips of the author typing away, or whatever. And good multimedia costs money to produce.

Of course there are exceptions. Graphic novels obviously depend as much on the images as the words, perhaps more. The same for some kinds of nonfiction pleasure reading, say books about art.

And I can think of a few other possibilities. A hundred years ago even adult fiction often had a few illustrations, beautifully done sketches. If e-book economics allows a return of that charming custom, not many readers will complain.

As always, content is king. And content isn’t just information, it is information we actually want, such as words to get lost in, with perhaps an graceful sketch now and then. But don’t expect us to pay for needless clutter.

It is smaller than I had thought. Seeing and holding it you realize that it is really not a mini laptop, as I had mentally pictured, but a true hold-in-your-hands device.

And I found myself pondering a whole different set of questions – not about operating systems, or closed gardens versus the open Internet, but about carrying it around and how to keep fingerprint smudges off the screen.

The iPod is not the future of personal computers, or the end of personal computers. It, and its prospective competitors, are a way to hold the Internet in your hand that is less fumble-fingered and squint-making than a smartphone screen. Nothing more, nothing less.

Says Shafer, no matter how we get online we end up on the Internet. And once there we’ll surf it; we won’t be kept on the reservation of apps that only take us to one website.

Not so coincidentally, Ryan Kim reported at SFGate last week that HP’s tablet device, due out this fall and also called Slate, will be a computer running Windows 7.

In the Apple-verse of the iPad nothing could be more un- sexy, but like my good old QWERTY keyboard there is a lot to be said for a familiar interface, one  I already know how to use.

Mobile access is different, yes; more spur of the moment, fewer extended sessions. Much of the time we just want handy access to a few services – mail and messages, driving directions or bus connections.

Businesses love the idea of a simplified, app-ified online experience, a virtual mall where they get to choose your menu of choices. And sometimes this is convenient.

But we have seen this video before. The multi-use personal computer and the full Internet will always win against specialized devices and restricted access, whenever they are in the game at all.

Meanwhile, by way of a spoiler space, Michael Copeland of Fortune says that ‘the iPod changes everything.’ Yeah, that is what everyone is saying, but Copeland gives it a new twist and a new term.

One more thing he sees the iPad as driving is the ‘app-ification’ of software – away from traditional do-everything packages (think Microsoft Office) to small apps for specific purposes.  Says Copeland, we ’snack’ on apps now, using them and discarding them casually.

(Doesn’t that sound like how people use traditional print newspapers? Today’s news, tomorrow’s swatted fly. No wonder the newspaper business has hope for tablet devices!)

And now, spoiler time. Is the iPad just a big iPhone? No. The iPhone is just a small iPad (that makes phone calls).

Ziing!

You can follow the link to read about ‘groundbreaking’ data plan options, and various nifty features. But one item jumps out, made a subtitle so you won’t miss it.

‘Reading is fundamental,’ says Moren, and with that the light of comprehension dawns. Everyone wondered what exactly the iPad really is. Now we know.

The iPad is, at bottom, e-reader, just packaged in with music, a way to go quickly online, and video if you decide you just want eye/brain candy. It’s a compleat e-reader.

The cult of Apple can get annoying, but Steve Jobs is really, really sharp.

Rachel Mets of Associated Press declares that the iPad is more than just a bigger iPod Touch. Meanwhile Ryan Kim of the San Francisco Chronicle says, ‘You mean it’s a big iPod Touch? Basically.’ Which, Kim adds, is just fine.

As noted previously in this blog, there is a long back story to the iPad, an industry fascination with devices – call them slates, tablets, or now presumably pads – that are bigger than a smartphone but smaller than a laptop. Michael Malone of ABC News calls it a Holy Grail quest, even speculating that this size corresponds to a deep rooted human impulse going back to the first data processing technology, the Sumerian clay tablet.

Opinions on the iPad may be all over the map, but digging a bit under the surface reveals a pretty consistent underlying topography. Love it or hate it, the reviewers identify much the same strengths and weaknesses. The differences in opinion come from how they weigh them.

The iPad is not ‘a computer.’ It runs a version of the iPhone operating system, and like the iPhone it completely hides the file structure from the user. If you like simply using a functionality with a minimum of fuss that is a plus; if you like knowing where your content is, and being able to move it, this hidden-ness will be a minus.

Likewise, all reviewers seem to agree that Apple has not solved the keyboard problem. If you only expect to use it to send the occasional instant message or tweet, this won’t be an issue, but if you want to write paragraphs, this is probably not the device for you.

Put another way, based on the early reviews the iPad is a good device for consuming online media while on the go – reading the news or an e-book, surfing the Web, watching video, and the like. But for interacting with online content – playing with it, mashing it up, creating it – the iPad’s limitations are more serious, perhaps fatally so.

In short, if you wish your iPhone had a bigger screen, the iPad may be what you are looking for. If you wish your laptop were lighter and easier to carry, it probably is not.