I have way too much personal and professional experience with these devices to believe it. (Possible exception: You might get an average of 30 minutes if you include time reading books and watching movies, but should that really count for other media?)

Re: Murdoch’s grand adventure — what sort of infantry-minded wretch could say (with a straight face) that 100 reporters and editors were too few for a digital brand? My god, folks, there are very few Web operations with that much staff! It would be an incredible luxury.

1. I am very skeptical of the numbers we are getting for session length on the iPad. Really, I don’t spend 30-40 minutes reading any one publication in one sitting on mine and I don’t see fellow iPad-toters around me acting much differently. I might spend that much time total, but it will be over a span of in-and-out visits. Immersive experience? Hardly, when I’m jumping back and forth to my email to tickle someone about something I’ve just read or a thought it has just inspired, assuming I find the publication of any actual simulating value (and who wants to waste his time on ones that aren’t). Hardly, when I break away to add a particularly good piece to my Read It Later list for later re-read and quick recall. My time-on-site for this page, in fact, includes how long it has taken me to write this comment, between interruptions.

Speaking of which, as hopeful as a publisher might be about the iPad’s “Holy Grail” potential, we have to keep in perspective that 600K people (1M by end of year, they say) have purchased the iPad to integrate it into their busy lifestyles, not to change their lifestyles around it. If most of them didn’t have an available block of 30-40 uninterrupted minutes’ reading time in their days before, it is doubtful that having spent $400-$800 on a new device has suddenly opened up their schedules.

All in all, it argues that the way these iPad session times are being measured and reported is suspect.

Now as for high page views, that I can believe, but it is because every time you swipe your finger, you tick the count. And it is so much quicker to swipe through 10 or 12 pages of a downloaded iPad pub than it is to refresh 10 or 12 pages on an online website. But I don’t know that I would count my quick swipes through those pages as serious page views, for any serious audience engagement metric.

2. It may be that the best thing the iPad is doing for publishers is causing them finally to put some serious effort into developing user interaction with their product. I can’t help but wonder, if they did that with the print versions of their products, if their fortunes might not be better in that medium. All the research and statistics show that people are not giving up on print — they are giving up on what is being printed. iPad publications (the successful ones, at least) tailor content and presentation specifically to enhance the user experience. One unfortunately cannot say that about many print publications.

…………..
The word-choice comment concerns the line “…is by definition autistic to the rest of the web.” I’m sure there was no mean intent. But using autistic as an adjective in that context is incorrect and unfortunately ignorant. Incorrect because there is no dictionary I can find (in my admittedly quick search online) that offers a definition of autistic for anything other than in connection to the medical condition. In particular, there is no such general-purpose adjective meaning having “no links to the outside world.” And the reason for that is that no one with much knowledge of autism would ever characterize people who have the disorder as having no links to the outside world. Autism is not catatonia or dementia. Those living with autism range from the severely afflicted (who an unaware person might assume are locked away in their own minds and bodies, but they aren’t) to high-functioning people who possibly sit right next to you in the office, on the train or in the restaurant and you never know unless they choose to share it with you. Some are even considered savants. ‘Nuff said.

Who will leave $200 tablet laying around a restaurant for others to read, or on the seat of a subway, or the coffee table of a doctor’s office? Ubiquity leads to an albeit ill-informed sense among newspaper readers (and often news staff) that if it’s been in the paper, everybody knows.

Yet another platform squeezed between Websites, mobile, print, e-mail and RSS news feeds will do little to solve the crisis that most compromises the authority of print-news producers. “The communications revolution is often more about delivering news than gathering it” Kovach and Rosenthal conclude in The Elements of Journalism.

A carbon copy news operation the product of which is printed on a different color of non-paper that can’t be shared among readers, and that provided no easy venue for reader feedback won’t help the public better understand legislation thousands of pages long, wars waged for vague strategic reasons or the nuance of why one trouble person comes back to work soothed by anti-depressants while another returns to the workplace armed to kill. The future of news operations is more apparent at non-profit and volunteer operations now contributing content to daily publications — ProPublica, WikiLeaks and, on a regional basis, TexasTribune.

News scribes will do well to learn to market their product across multiple platform while concentrating their investment to improve the substance of news, rather than trying to find new ways to bleed more cash out of already overstimulated and distracted news consumers.

And also make fun of its name…

But all these pundits are bloggers and tech writers and have done nothing much to enrich our lives.

But one thing you can say about them is they are very good at bad mouthing Apple…..sad