Is Twitter just mental frotting? (Aka iPad e-Reading)

Article by Paul Carr on the iPad as a reading device:

The iPad is emphatically not a serious readers’ device: the only people who would genuinely consider it a Kindle killer are those for whom the idea of reading for pleasure died years ago; if it was ever alive. The people who will spout bullshit like “I read on screen all day” when what they really mean is “I read the first three paragraphs of the New York Times article I saw linked on Twitter before retweeting it; and then I repeat that process for the next eight hours while pretending to work.” That’s reading in the way that rubbing against women on the subway is sex.

I think the dynamics are wrong - if anything Twitter, with all those minds constantly rubbing along against each other, is more like mental frotting than an iPad is. Anyway, it hopefully gives me a salacious linkbait eadline

But back to his main point, that the demographic that buys e-Readers is the same as that which will but ipads, and why have the single function when you can have it all?. His other point is that the reading experience of an iPad is far less pleasant than a dedicated eReader so that if the ipad wins out vs eReaders, then reading real, long form books will disappear as a pursuit.

I think he's a tad off beam as he is describing a perturbation in the market and extrapolating it to be the norm. I think two things will happen:

(i) The need to read long form media will remain for some considerable time - for business and pleasure

(ii) iPad and similar screens will continue to improve, to e-Reader standards

I'd predict that people will continue to use paper for quite a while yet, that e-Readers will keep a market segment for those that ave to do a lot of reading on the move, and that over time eBooks will increase as a market.