The iPad arrived to mixed reports last week.  This device will be many things to many people, however, I predict that this device will pave the way for a revival in old school publishing formats and could save many traditional publishers from imminent death.

The internet has forced new viewing and advertising formats and habits on the publishing industry, which in truth we are still learning and evolving.  For some, like Net Communities, this has created exceptional growth opportunities, however many other traditional and historic publishers have been devastated by the migration from off to online.

Here enters Steve Jobs, a knight in shining armour to present us with his mythical iPad (watch the keynote), which I believe will push the envelope in online publishing once more.

Publisher now have the opportunity to merge both old and new media formats and business models, simply because this new mid-market product is the perfectly sized ((243mm x 190mm) and the screen size (199mm x 149mm, 9.7-inch diagonal)) by being a pretty much the same size as compact size magazine and it is going to be super easy to use.  How do I know this? Well I’m an avid iPhone user and as Steve said in his Keynote, there are millions of us out there who already know how to use this new product.  I’d buy my Dad an iPad tomorrow and get him to throw his netbook away, it will definitely save me valuable support calls.

The iPad will slip into a small sized laptop bag easily, it will turn on immediately (dream on Google Chrome OS, which aspires to turn on as quickly as a TV when it launches in November this year) and it has a bright and colourful display which will finally lend itself to displaying print styled magazine formats on an electronic device in ways that your laptop, desktop or Amazon Kindle never could.  This means pleasing and easy to read magazine and newspaper styled content for millions of iPad owners and there are going to be millions of them.

This weekend, I was dreaming of sitting down to Sunday breakfast, swiping through The Sunday Times, saving information from the Travel section to view later and sending stories to mates via Twitter and Facebook.  Right now, even though I’m a super gadget freak, I would just not do this with the tools available to me today.

It doesn’t matter whether this new lifestyle habit of viewing newspapers and magazines on an electronic device will allow publishers to start charging again for their content, or if it introduce old style double page spread ads in electronic format so that we can charge more for larger ad formats, what matters is the new habit many of us will adopt: Grab your iPad, flick it on, poke your magazine icon, swipe and read.

The Keynote already demonstrated the New York Times first stab at an iPhone App, which is nice, but there is much more to come.  Just check out what the guys at www.brandwidth.co.uk have done for IKEA and the Guinness Book of World Records.

To top all this there's also the green effect: One could argue that with Apple’s impressive environmentally friendly / recyclable technical specification will be complemented by the immense reduction in wasted paper – a double whammy!

And for all those people who say, “Why is the iPad 4:3, not 16:9?”, well perhaps you are missing the point, perhaps this device is more likely to be used for reading that watching films.

So, once I’ve read my copy of the Metro on the way to work, will I leave my iPad on the train for somebody else to read when you’re finished – Hell NO!  Perhaps physical pass on readership is likely to die, but it will more likely be dwarfed by the amplification all publishers can gain from the likes of Twitter, Facebook and Digg.

Personally, I can’t wait to pick up my very own iPad, I shall call her Maggie!

INTERESTING NOTES VIDEOS:

For more on the iPad, read our plethora of iPad articles on ITProPortal.com and THINQ.co.uk

If you are looking for a great iphone / ipad developer, then I highly recommend our friends at ustwo.co.uk