By now, the iPad has landed, and with it, a potential revolution, or at least a big step in evolution between the battle between analog information vs. digital.
What do I mean by this? Analog information is information residing on paper. To be stored in ink and read by eyes. Digital information is information stored in binary, read only by software and displayed on a screen.
Analog information is permanent. Once it is stored on paper, it is in existence until the paper is destroyed. Digital is impermanent. It is stored on an impermanent medium that is easily written and rewritten, and it's only "written" as long as there is a reader to decode the binary.
Because digital information is encoded and decoded by software and because it is stored in impermanent medium, it is difficult to "own" this information. A paper book, you can own. You buy it, you sit it on your shelf and it never moves. Digital information, by contrast, is easy to copy and easy to lock up for the same reasons. It is easy to copy because what you are copying are simply representations of two characters. Analog is harder to copy because you must copy a physical set of symbols.
The consequence of this is analog information is bought and sold, whereas digital information is only rented. To own digital information, it must be copied repeatedly; maintained and updated as the storage mediums and interpreting software changes. And whereas you can charge a rent on information, by encrypting the information and making the encoding software proprietary, you cannot charge for ownership of the information. Once you allow the digital information to be owned by someone other than yourself, it is owned by anyone who wants it.
I contend that the difference between these two types of information is fundamental. Words and paper will never be replaced by bits and computers because you cannot maintain ownership of bits and you cannot store bits.
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