ONE OTHER PUBLISHING RANT

First, a note to gentle readers: I have realized that I can blog quite easily using my iPad. Hence a few more posts recently, written in the late evenings. I've had the iPad for just over a year now (yes, I bought it the first day they were sold), and find it immensely useful as a reader for PDF documents as well as for doing email and teaching presentations. Over the past few months, though, I have been using it more for writing. Yes, writing. I find Pages to be very functional. So lately I've been taking notes on the iPad, typing assignments, writing poems, and now even blogging.

Tonight's brief rant about publishing is connected to the note. Earlier this week, Jesse Jackson, Jr. said that iPads were resulting in a loss of jobs in the United States. I don't even know where to begin with analyzing the lunacy of this statement. Now don't get me wrong. I'm an admirer of Jackson. His fathers Presidential campaign is one of the first political campaigns I worked on. (At my tender age then, many of my more senior political colleagues told me that a black man would never be President of the United States. Much has changed since then. Including how we read and write.) so it pains me to say this, but Jackson couldn't be more incorrect. There are many reasons that publishing is suffering as an industry, certainly the growth of ereaders is a part of the economic problems plaguing the publishing industry, but they are only a part, and in the final analysis will probably only be a small part. Moreover, loss of jobs in the United States is also a multifactorial phenomenon. Sorry, Representative Jackson, blaming iPads for our current economic woes, while it may have garnered you a brief headline, simply demonstrates your lack of complexity in thinking about how we read, write, think, and work in today's world.