American Airlines Dumps 35 lbs of Paper By Deploying iPads

“Our Electronic Flight Bag program has a significant positive environmental and cost-savings impact,” said David Campbell, American’s Vice President – Safety and Operations Performance. “In fact, removing the kitbag from all of our planes saves a minimum of 400,000 gallons and $1.2 million of fuel annually based on current fuel prices. Additionally, each of the more than 8,000 iPads we have deployed to date replaces more than 3,000 pages of paper previously carried by every active pilot and instructor. Altogether, 24 million pages of paper documents have been eliminated.”

via American Airlines Completes Electronic Flight Bag Implementation :: American Airlines Newsroom.

American is replacing nearly 35 lbs of loose leaf binders with a single iPad as it rolled out the Electronic Flight Bag (EFB). The press release notes the program is fully underway and the paper is gone. That means no more paper updates and loose leaf filing chores for flight crews. The FAA-approved EFB uses a specially designed app from a division of Boeing Digital Aviation to manage all of the information and is kept up-to-date electronically.

As we see more and more iPads being used in various professions, it should only be a matter of time until law schools start handing incoming law students an iPad loaded with all of the material they need for their law school education. Or maybe not.

 

And I thought that onerous task was only endured by librarians and their minionsPowered by Hackadelic Sliding Notes 1.6.5

Analysts Sound Death Knell For Dedicated E-Readers, So Multi-Purpose Tablets Win

Selburn said that 2011 appears to have been the peak of the e-reader market, when IHS said that 23.2 million e-readers shipped, compared to 14.9 million shipped for all of 2012. By 2016, Selburn said that just 7.1million e-readers will ship, equal to a loss of more than 66% since 2011.

via Last chapter for e-readers? – Computerworld.

This shouldn’t really surprise anyone. Single use tech devices have a more limited audience especially when they must compete against more feature rich multi-purpose devices. Why have just a reader when for just a few dollars more you can get all the features of the reader plus all the features of a tablet. You can read the latest best seller AND check your email, update Facebook, chat with friends and so on. Of course e-readers aren’t going away, but they won’t be dominating the market for hand held devices either.

Time For Law Schools To Embrace the iPad?

 The biggest take-away is that the iPad has become a “game-changer” in part because already perhaps as many as half of all appellate judges nationwide are at least sometimes reading briefs on an iPad and because it seems likely that soon all judges will read most briefs on screens.

– Law School Innovation, The importance of appreciating (and teaching) iPad realities for lawyers and law students

Indeed it would seem that the use of the iPad in the legal profession is increasing. If law schools are truly interested in preparing students for law practice it would certainly make sense to help them learn to use the tools they will encounter in practice.

 

 

Kindle Gets Audio/Video… On the iPad and iPhone

Amazon just introduced a audio and video to the Kindle, but the only way to experience the new Kindle multimedia books is on an iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch. A baker’s dozen of titles already come in multimedia editions, including Rick Steves’ travel guides, Best of the Beatles For Acoustic Guitar, and Bird Songs: 250 North American Birds In Song.

via TechCrunch – Amazon Introduces A Video/Audio Kindle . . . But Only On The iPad And iPhone.

Interesting development., but a couple of things are worth noting here. First the entire collection of multimedia editions numbers just 13 indicating this may be a test as much as anything else. Second, while it seems odd that they would sell ebooks that have features that aren’t usable on the Kindle, think of it as simply expanding their market by offering more ebooks to a wider market by including other features.

Think of it this way, a Kindle now costs $189. For your money you get what is considered the industry standard in readers. A great device for reading fiction and non-fiction works that are primarily text. It is a device that is aimed at casual reading and it works very well for that.

Of course text is hardly the only content type that can be used effectively in ebooks. By their very nature ebooks can be multimedia works incorporating color graphics, images, audio, and video. Amazon knows this and they also now that selling those works requires a platform that is different than the Kindle. No problem, the Kindle software turns your iPad or iPhone into a Kindle and it will handle multimedia quite well. So, Amazon offers audio and video enhanced ebooks for the Kindle on the iPad/iPhone. If you want ebooks with those features get your self the more expensive iPad[1], starting at $499, and buy those books Amazon.

I think this move is really designed to enhance the Kindle app and make it more appealing than Apple’s own iBooks. No need to have 2 separate accounts for your ebooks, just use the Kindle for all your ebook needs. Of course I would expect that we will see the multimedia features of the Kindle app turn up on the Windows and Mac versions of the software. And at some point Amazon will introduce a color Kindle of some kind.

[1] Yes, you can get the features on the Kindle iPhone, I suspect that you will find it more satisfying on the iPad.

Another good use for the iPad: one-to-one presentations

Anyway, that’s a unique thing the iPad can do, one-on-one presentations. And it’s a business application too. If you’re in a tech role at a corporation that has a sales function, get busy. You’re going to be using a lot of tablet computers, whether they’re from Apple, HP, Google or whoever. One person telling a story to another person, that’s going to be a big use of tablets.

iPad as a one-to-one presenter. Scripting News.

The iPad is great for “Let me show you something…” interactions. Of course it would be even better if the browser wasn’t crippled. The next tablet that comes along with a full OS, an easy to use interface, and an app store is probably going to be more appealing to business and education. Until then, this will do.

Dave Winer Wonders If We Should Trust the iPad

The problem is this — if Facebook goes away — and it could, so does everything everyone created with it. Facebook investors and developers like Joe (who I respect enormously) probably aren’t worrying about this, because necessarily everything they do is tied up in the success of Facebook. Now if Joe can show me, in his architecture based on the iPad, where all my work is mirrored in a service I pay for, like Amazon S3, in a simple format I and others can write software against, then I can relax and look forward to the future he, Brent and Miguel want to create. But if my work is tied up in their success, then the price is too high. I’ll take the lower fidelity but open playing field of the netbook, and keep my own data on my own hard drives, and back it up as I see fit. And continue to exercise my First Amendment rights.

via Scripting News.

Dave really wants to keep control over his data, and that is a Good Idea. His fear is that the iPad is just an extension of the Apple Silo that lulls us into storing our in proprietary spaces were it exists at the mercy of large corporations. In a nutshell Dave wants to be able to use HTTP to get data on and off the iPad. That capability provides us with the ability to easily move our data around. And we need that sort of portability for our data.