OK, so everyone and their uncle has been talking about comics and the iPad, so, yeah, I'm a guy who doesn't own an iPod or an iPhone, but I'll throw in my two cents - after all, that's what the internet is about!
Seriously, just a few quick thoughts of a random nature.
-Now, clearly no sane person would buy an iPad JUST to get comics - even at what is becoming the standard of $1.99 for a single issue (and not to sound like a cranky old man, but that was the price of a paper comic book back in the mid-90s), the point at which having an iPad for comics would exceed the value of buying the single issues is well into the hundreds of comics.
-Hope: That this new format kills the endless crossovers and convultion of Corporate supercomics dead. This puts comics in a very real and direct competition with every other media out there, and tight, taut, self-contained "Bang for your buck" is going to win every time over byzantine useless continuity and nostalgia.
-Speculation: Creators are going to have to fight to maintain rights and continue to receive royalties in this new medium of publication.
-Engineering Trade-Off Analysis: The iPad's advantage? It can carry hundreds of comics in a very portable way. The disadvantage is the initial investment, the need to maintain the iPad (battery, power, etc.) and the loss of ownership of a physical product. And for the record, I don't buy into the "Save the Trees" arguement - when you consider the energy required to maintain a high-tech device like the iPad, you are trading one cost (paper products) for another (power and plastic).
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