The Periodic Table of the Elements, ebook for iPad is getting lots of breathless reviews.  It’s a pretty launch title and the iPad itself, like the iPhone before it just seems to have come from the future.

Meh.

I made several award winning consumer CD-ROMs back in the day, before the industry collapsed with he advent of the internet.  But that whole market was largely built on the willingness of people who’d just spent $1500 on a multimedia capable PC being willing to spend another $40 or $60 on a handful of non-game edutainment titles to justify the purchase.  In just a couple years we devolved from Passage to Vietnam, my own A.DAM The Inside Story and Faces of Conflict to selling edutainment titles by the linear foot.

Though I wish I were wrong, digital coffee table books aren’t making a comeback, no matter how pretty the iPad screen is, nor how intuitive the UI other than as a justification by early adopters for buying the device.

It’s nothing more than Apple’s hype machine plus traditional media hoping that the iPad is going to be the savior for paper publishers that iTunes has (almost) been for music.  But people aren’t turning away from newspapers and magazines just because they can get the same stuff for free online. They are doing it because they’re spending less of their free time consuming mass media and more of it collaborating and creating – posting photos to Flickr, messaging on Facebook (or God forbid Farmtowning)  and surfing through youtube videos instead.  All of which you can do all with an iPad while sitting on the couch with Dancing with the Stars on in the background.

I have come around to thinking the iPad is going to be an important device – it’s a great form factor for a lot of horizontal apps (think insurance adjusters, roofing contractors, and census takers) and for casual use where a laptop is just too much (in a book bag or on the couch).

Low subscription price episodic content might work – Apple managed to create the create the first successful microcontent venture in iTunes after all.  But how much of an upcharge can you get for The Daily Show on an iPad when I can get it on my laptop for free?

But maybe I’m wrong.  If anybody thinks ebooks with embedded video and 3d photos is the next big thing, drop me a line – I’ve got the chops and would love to be creating beautiful edutainment titles just as long as you can find enough people willing to hand over $13 a pop to look at them.