the iPad is the holy grail for tech reading

The iPad came out a couple of weeks ago. Instead of repeating how great it is along with reviewing it's current shortcomings I'm just going to talk about how it successfully fulfills exactly the use case I was hoping it might.

If you're in any kind of tech these days (software development, engineering, biotech) or any rapidly evolving field it's gotten to the point where most likely almost anything you pick up in print supposedly on the cutting edge is already quite dated by the time it makes it to print - especially true of books (unfortunately). This has been the case for about five to seven years but more relevant is the fact that this trend is only accelerating. In fact it's becoming much harder to even find a decent book dedicated to topic you'd like to kick back with in a coffee shop for a couple of hours. You can still find several at Amazon and O'Reilly, but they are drying up at your local bookstores.

The iPad finally solves this in a way no other device does.

The perfect trifecta for tech reading are the iPad apps: Read It Later , News Rack and Safari.

Read It Later is actually the best of these. As you're going about your day and see any article on the web you want to read in more depth but not while chained to your desk/chair and not while you should be working just click on the integrated "Read It Later" link or icon in your browser of choice and it's instantly added to your reading queue. When you flip on your iPad not only does your reading list instantly appear but the app will optionally download all the content for reading even if you're offline (which many iPad users will be a lot of the time). It's simple and fantastic. Truly this is reading evolved.

News Rack is an excellent RSS reader well designed for the iPad. You can swipe through a large number of articles quickly. It integrates/syncs perfectly with Google Reader. Additionally it has "Read It Later" integration allowing you to seamlessly add articles you see in RSS directly to your 'reading list' for later if you don't want to pause for a particularly long article while scanning a few dozen blogs and articles.

Safari a pretty great mobile browser reading articles. And with this too you can mark articles for your "Read It Later" list. It does have a lot of shortcomings: lack of a good book mark manager, no tabs, and I won't even mention the F____ word.

The iPad allows you to clearly separate out your 'focused reading' time from 'should be working' time. I don't think the value of this can be overstated. You can still read stuff only found on the web (which is pretty much everything when it comes to tech reading) but without getting IM'ed, Tweeted or emailed someone just tagged your prom photos, etc.

Using the iPad this way is actually making me more productive as I spend a lot less time surfing while I should be working. I still spend a bit, but for the most part I just mark with RIL the articles of interest and now I know I actually will get to them.  And that is a first.