Megatheriums for Breakfast

In March, I finished my piece about Apple’s iPad with this prediction:

I am predicting that the iPad will have a slow start, but then become a roaring success.

Seems I got it wrong. It’s a roaring success from the very start:

April 14 (Bloomberg) — Apple Inc. delayed by a month the international debut of its iPad tablet computer after shipping more than 500,000 of the devices in a week and underestimating how quickly they would sell in the U.S.

Less than a week after Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs said the company was building iPads “as fast as we can,” Apple said in a statement that demand is “far higher” than it predicted. Apple lacks supply for several weeks and made a “difficult decision” to delay global sales until end of May.

He will watch from dawn to gloom
…Nor heed, nor see, what things they be;
But from these create he can
Forms more real than living man…

– Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Prometheus Unbound”

‘Mask II’ by Ron Mueck

Today we went to an exhibition of the work of Australian-born hyper-realist sculptor Ron Mueck at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne.

I’ve been a huge fan of Mueck’s work since my wife and I stumbled across his work “Ghost” in the Tate in 2000. This striking sculpture is so real that it could be taken for a real human being, frozen in time, if it were not that it was one and a half times normal size. It’s an image of an adolescent girl in a bathing costume, shrinking away from scrutiny – “Leave me alone!” you can almost hear her cry. Yet the audience cannot tear their eyes from her.

If Mueck were merely an incredibly talented model-maker, these works would be fascinating, but that’s all. Yet the realism of his sculpture, combined with huge variations of scale which he often employs, is often shocking; and each of his works is emotionally engaging, sometimes deeply so. There’s no doubt that these are true works of art.

Anyway, we visited the exhibition today and saw more of Mueck’s works “in the flesh” than I have ever managed before.

Here are some inadequate photos to illustrate what we saw. (Taken with my iPhone and enhanced with PhotoAcute software).

'In Bed' by Ron Mueck

'Woman with sticks' by Ron Mueck

'Wild Man' by Ron Mueck

Some 45 years ago (gosh, I’m getting old!) I was a mad keen comic reader.

I used to have a pile of comic books over half a meter high, comprising a lot of DC comics (Superman, Batman, etc), and, towards my later comic-reading years, an increasing proportion of Marvel titles such as Spiderman, Iron Man, X-Men, etc. Today, that pile would probably be worth thousands, but alas I had to leave them all behind in England when we emigrated to Australia, when I was 13.

I’ve enjoyed the Marvel-based movies I’ve seen (well, Spiderman 1 and 2, at least, Spiderman 3 was execrable), and the Batman movies starring Christian Bale. But that has been my only comic-based interest in recent decades.

But. Marvel has just released a comic book reading app for the iPad and iPhone. And it rocks!

The images reproduced here (for purposes of this review only, thus ‘fair use’) are actual screen grabs from my iPhone.

I’m looking forward to seeing the Marvel app on the iPad, but even the iPhone version is almost enough to suck me back into reading comics. What holds me back, though, (apart from lack of reading time) is the high per-issue cost Marvel are trying for. AUD $2.49 seems a lot to pay for a digital version of a comic book.

Seems that Marvel are repeating the mistake of the book publishing industry, thinking that they can get away with charging almost as much (in some cases more) than the hard-copy versions of their titles. Unsurprisingly enough, I don’t think this is a recipe for long-term survival.

Just a quick comment, really.

I haven’t yet been able to get my hands on an Apple iPad (here are the reasons why I want one), but I have been surprised at comments from people I respect (like John Gruber of Daring Fireball) who say that they find the iPad a bit too heavy to hold while reading an e-book for extended periods.

Now, as I say, I haven’t handled one yet, and maybe it’s a bit too slick and slippy to hold. But come on, one and a half pounds isn’t heavy for a book. I went to my library and weighed a few hardback books.

Here’s the result:

I haven’t had any trouble at all reading the above physical books, though admittedly “Jonathan Strange” can start to get a little uncomfortable after a while. But it is twice the weight of an iPad.

It was good to find a book which weighs exactly the same as the iPad – allowed me to get a good feel for the heft of the device. “The War of the Roses” is lightweight for a hardback, perfectly comfortable to hold and read for hours at a time.