Can an iPad Turn Me Into a Book Lover?

Yeah, I am now one of those guys. I finally broke down and got an iPad. As a simple explanation: I needed something portable on which to consume and to write, but I dreaded the thought of a laptop. I wanted to buy something I could get excited about using, that wasn’t a pain to setup, that didn’t take several steps to do several things. More than anything, though, I saw potential for the iPad to help me to read more.

And indeed, the iPad has renewed my love for reading (it’s been a long time since I had such a thing, truthfully) and I’m not sure what to think of that. I told my wife that I think it’s cause there’s less of a commitment to withdraw from everything else, which is what holding an actual book in your hand actually is. In other words, I know that anything else I might want to do (tweet, facebook, web, games, etc) are only a click (or swipe or whatever) away when I’m holding an iPad, but when I’m holding a book, I’ve made a choice to neglect those things. It’s probably a positive choice, but it’s one that’s increasingly hard for me to make.

This probably says something very bad about my own way of thinking, but I figure it’s okay to be pretty pragmatic about this sort of thing. In this case, I figure whatever works, works.

It’s an interesting question, though, isn’t it? Is it okay to take technological shortcuts to the kind of fulfillment we’d get from just reading a book? Or am I missing out on the same type of fulfillment altogether?