【英语科技】iPad的诱人与“恐怖”

Last Saturday, a man in brown from UPS came to my door with an Apple iPad. On Sunday, Twitter brought adoring sighs from people who had also bought one. On Monday, the internet delivered a backlash.

Things move faster these days. We have already been through several news cycles on the pros and cons of what Steve Jobs, Apple's co-founder, calls “a magical and revolutionary product” and the device is not even for sale outside the US yet.

Many companies – from newspapers to book publishers and broadcasting networks – are keen on the iPad because they think it offers a chance to sell a professional product in a controlled setting. They hope for an alternative to giving away content on the internet, hoping forlornly for advertisements (or something) to save them.

Thus, a lot of commentary centres on the issue of whether the iPad can “save publishers”. Since that is a rhetorical question requiring the answer “no”, I will instead address another one – whether it is good for publishers. Having played with my iPad for a while, I think the answer to that one is “yes and no”.

The iPad is a curiously seductive device for something that is, on the face of it, a touchscreen laptop with the keyboard removed. Microsoft has made repeated attempts to introduce “tablet” computers with very limited results. Hewlett-Packard will soon have another go with a Windows 7-based tablet.

Mr Jobs' famed reality distortion field must be working at warp factor 10 because to pick up the iPad is to feel you are entering a different technological world. The sceptics dismiss it as a compromise between an iPod Touch and a MacBook, but they are wrong.

Actually, the iPad feels much more like a cross between a computer and a television, one that you hold in your hands. It manages, more than anything I've seen before, to fill the gap between “sit back” screens and “sit forward” computers and video games consoles.

That is, I think, one reason why it has upset many traditionalists in Silicon Valley, who see it as a counter-revolutionary, not a revolutionary, machine. They fear that it will turn engaged and interactive internet users back into passive couch potatoes.

Cory Doctorow, co-editor of the Boing Boing blog, wrote an eloquent lament for the passing of the open source, fix-it traditions of personal computing and mourned the iPad's “palpable contempt for the consumer”. The device was a throwback to the early days of AOL and its walled garden alternative to the internet, he lamented.

I would say it was more subversive than that. The iPad is (despite lacking a flash drive or a camera) a fairly open device, which gives its users a choice between internet browsing and devoting time to games and media applications sold by developers and publishers. They are not being forced to spend their time and money in ways that Mr Doctorow disdains.

Yet they are likely to do so because it is simpler and more entertaining. That is why the iPad helps publishers: it restores a comparative advantage that the computer-based internet took away. It is much easier on an iPad to navigate the full depth of content in some publications, and to appreciate the best photos and videos.

One of the difficulties publishers face on the internet is that it is laborious to navigate websites much beyond their home pages, which has encouraged many consumers to consume snippets of material from many sources, rather than engaging deeply with one publication. I found it far easier, for example, to navigate the digital Wall Street Journal on the iPad than on a laptop.

That is the good news for publishers, but there is a catch. While I think the iPad is good for them as a category, I'm not so sure it is good for those that now exist – certainly not all of them.

The problem for publishers is that the iPad is a demanding medium because it is not sufficient to publish text, or indeed photos or videos, on their own. Media apps work best on the iPad when they combine depth of information with a lot of visual material in innovative ways; that is what makes them shine.

The Time magazine app will, for $4.99 a week, give you the text of the magazine filled out with videos and photo slideshows – there is a nice display of Matisse paintings in this week's edition. I found it pleasant to scan but I am not sure it is deep enough to pay $20 a month, and it has already been harshly criticised for being too similar to the magazine's print version.

Danny O'Brien, a technology writer, identified this on his blog Oblomovka as a revisiting of the old CD-Rom problem. The medium allows publishers to go to town with words and pictures – indeed, it demands it – but that is expensive and hard to make profitable.

That favours publishers with the resources to create multimedia content and a bank of information to be remixed and repurposed. Both Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters, which have other ways to earn a dime, have launched free apps with lots of such material.

Rising costs and flat (at best) revenues in a fragmented industry generally lead to consolidation and that is where the iPad, and successive generations of information/entertainment tablets will take publishers. There is a high barrier to entry, and many will not clear it on their own.

The iPad is an alluring vision of the digital future for publishers, but a scary one too.

4月3日，身穿褐色制服的联合包裹(UPS)快递员把一台苹果(Apple) iPad送到我家。4月4日，我在Twitter上看到其他iPad买家发出的赞叹之辞。4月5日，风向突然逆转，人们在互联网上对iPad大加批评。

如今这个世界节奏真快。新闻媒体已针对iPad的优缺点展开了好几轮评论，而这款被苹果联合创始人史蒂夫?乔布斯(Steve Jobs)称为“神奇而具有革命性的产品”甚至尚未在美国之外上市销售。

从报纸、图书出版商到广播电视网，许多公司都对iPad极其热衷，因为它们认为iPad提供了一个机会，让它们能够在受控平台上销售专业产品。它们希望以此来取代在互联网上提供免费内容、同时可怜巴巴地指望广告（或别的东西）来拯救自己的方式。

因此，许多评论都集中在一个问题上——iPad能否“拯救出版商”？由于这一修辞设问明摆着要人回答“不能”，因此我想转而求解另一个问题——iPad能否让出版商从中受益？在摆弄了一会儿手中的iPad后，我认为这个问题的答案是“既能又不能”。

从外观上看，iPad不过是一台不带键盘的触摸屏笔记本电脑，它能够如此吸引眼球让人诧异。微软(Microsoft)曾多次尝试推出“平板”电脑，但成果极其有限。惠普(HP)不久将进行新的尝试，推出基于Windows 7的平板电脑。

乔布斯那著名的“现实扭曲场”肯定达到了10级的曲速层级，因为只要拿起iPad，你就会觉得自己进入了一个全然不同的技术世界。怀疑人士把iPad贬为iPod Touch和MacBook之间的折衷产品，但他们错了。

实际上，iPad给人的感觉更像是一款介于电脑和电视之间、可手持的跨界产品。它成功填补了“休闲用”电视、“工作用”电脑、以及视频游戏机之间的空白，“填空”效果比我以往见过的任何产品都要好。

我认为，这是iPad让硅谷许多传统主义人士忧心忡忡的原因之一，他们把iPad视为一款反革命性、而非革命性的设备。他们担心，iPad会把积极参与、热衷互动的互联网用户变回被动的“沙发土豆”。

《Boing Boing》博客的联席编辑科里?多克托罗(Cory Doctorow)写了一篇雄辩的文章，哀叹个人电脑领域的开源、自助传统走到了尽头，并为“消费者受到iPad显而易见的蔑视”而痛心。他沉痛写道，iPad是向早期的美国在线(AOL)时代的倒退，是在用“带有围墙的花园”取代互联网。

我想说的是，iPad要比上面描述的更具颠覆性。它是一款相当开放的设备（尽管未配备USB接口或摄像头），用户既可以选择上网冲浪，也可以把时间花在软件开发商和出版商出售的游戏和媒体应用上。没有人强迫他们以多克托罗鄙视的方式消耗时间和金钱。

尽管如此，用户仍可能沉迷于iPad，因为它更简单、更富娱乐性。这就是为什么iPad会给出版商带来好处：它让出版商重新确立了一项曾被基于电脑的互联网夺走的比较优势。在iPad上浏览某些应用中完整深度的内容，或是欣赏最高品质的照片和视频，要容易得多。

在互联网上，出版商面临的困难之一是，浏览它们首页之外更有深度的网页需要费番功夫，这鼓励许多消费者阅读众多来源的信息片段，而不是深入阅读某一出版物。举例来说，我发现，在iPad上浏览数字版的华尔街日报(Wall Street Journal)就比在笔记本电脑上浏览要容易得多。

这对出版商来说是个好消息，但这里面也暗藏着一个问题。尽管我认为iPad会给整个出版行业带来好处，但我不太肯定它对现有的这些出版商有利——它们肯定不会全部从中受益。

出版商面临的问题是，iPad是一种要求很高的媒介，因为在上面只发布文字、甚至只发布照片或视频都是不够的。在iPad上，媒体应用只有以新颖的方式把有深度的信息和大量视觉素材结合在一起，才能展现出最佳效果，才能让自己超群出众。

《时代》杂志(Time)数字版的订阅费用为每周4.99美元，你不仅可以看到文字，还可以看到穿插在各处的视频和幻灯图集。在上周那期杂志里，马蒂斯(Matisse)的绘画作品得到了精彩的展示。我觉得该数字版看起来赏心悦目，但我不敢肯定它的深度足以让我每月为此掏出20美元。而且，该数字版已经受到了无情的批评，因为它与该杂志的印刷版过于雷同。

技术作家丹尼?奥布莱恩(Danny O'Brien)在自己的博客《Oblomovka》中，把这一问题视为早先CD-ROM问题的再现。这种媒介让出版商能够尽情添加文字和图片——事实上，这也是必要之举——但成本高昂，很难盈利。

这种媒介对拥有海量资源的出版商有利，它们能够创建多媒体内容，重新搭配及利用海量信息。拥有其它盈利渠道的彭博(Bloomberg)和汤森路透(Thomson Reuters)，均已推出富含此类素材的免费应用。

对一个分散化的行业来说，如果成本不断上升，而营收最多只能持平，那么该行业通常会走向整合。iPad以及后续几代兼顾信息和娱乐功能的平板电脑，正是要把出版行业带上这条路。进入壁垒很高，许多出版商凭一己之力将无法逾越这道壁垒。

对出版商来说，iPad是一个代表着数字化未来的诱人愿景，但另一方面，这个愿景也很恐怖。

译者/汪洋