You will remember when I called the iPad a beautiful machine, but one which I wasn’t going to purchase because I already had a MacBook and I needed a keyboard? However, even as people were complaining that the iPad wasn’t quite an iPhone and wasn’t quite a full fledged Apple computer, so what was it, people were noting that the iPad’s eBook experience was superior to most anything else on the market. This was a Kindle killer, and it was easy to imagine colleges, universities and high schools switching over from textbooks to iPads to keep student texts more current and easier on their backs.
Well, that’s textbooks. It remains to be seen how well the iPad will supplant all books in general… but what about loose paper that you would normally recycle? And I’m not just talking about newspapers. A Fox TV affiliate in Georgia has purchased six iPads for its local newsroom. Their job is to replace the paper scripts that the newscasters would normally read… and then discard. The Unofficial Apple Weblog has more…
WFXL purchased 6 iPads to replace the paper scripts that their news anchors use. According to News Director and anchorman Terry Graham, the station is expected to save hundreds of thousands of sheets of paper every year. The scripts are composed in their usual manner, but instead of printing the files, they’re now formatted as PDFs and emailed to the iPads.
The 16 GB iPads cost the station $499 each, but should pay for themselves in less than 4 months.
My God: good for the pocketbook, and good for the environment! Why didn’t we think of that before?
Now multiply that among how many local television affiliates are out there, and see the savings in paper, not to mention the increase in Apple’s bottom line.
CBC and CTV? Are you listening?