Tattle-Taylor | Buying an iPad — the $499 e-quation

The other day, as I took a weekend stroll downtown, I found myself pulled almost irresistibly into the Apple store, like a moth drawn to a porch light.

I spent a good twenty minutes drooling over an iPad, with an overeager Apple employee circling me anxiously like a shark who smelled blood. But as my fingers inched ever closer to my wallet, a thought struck me: Why do I need an iPad? As a computer? I mused. I already have a laptop, some depressingly responsible part of me responded. As a more mobile computer device? I have a smart phone, I realized. As I stood there scrounging desperately through my mental recesses for a good reason to blow that much money on something I didn’t technically need, I realized there was a role that a tablet computer could probably serve better than my laptop: an e-reader.

As someone who arguably spends more time with her head in a book than out, it might seem that buying an iPad (or a Nook or a Kindle) to serve as an e-reader could be a perfectly feasible and financially defensible decision.

Or could it? Luckily I slipped my wallet back into my pocket, made my excuses to a disappointed Apple employee and headed home to do some research.

E-books save the individual consumer about seven dollars per purchase, according to The New York Times. Sounds pretty good, until I realized that I won’t have saved enough money to compensate for the cost of the iPad itself until I buy my 72nd book — before taxes, that is.

Many analysts expect that the cost of e-books will soon rise from their average $9.99 price tag to as high as $14.99. Why? It would seem rational to think that the production of e-books has got to be much cheaper for the publishers than the production of traditional print-and-paper books. However, publishers nationwide are crying foul, arguing that print and distribution are actually very small percentages of the cost of production and that consumers cannot fairly expect there to be a significant discount in price for the cost of e-books.

A Wharton MBA class that has begun using iPads in place of printed packages has saved money on printing, according to a Daily Pennsylvanian article published earlier this month.

But David Comroe, Wharton’s Senior Director of Academic Computing, said that buying an e-reader will probably not save the average consumer money. “The first cost for things like this is acquiring intellectual property,” he said. “The creator of that content owns that copyright and you have to get property rights and that typically costs money. The second cost is the delivery of the content. That’s where we save money.”

That’s all very well and good, but when I add the already-high (and rising) e-book prices to the fairly steep cost of the e-reader, I find myself becoming quickly disenchanted.

So maybe an iPad as an e-reader isn’t really financially justifiable for my circumstances. What about the possibility of reducing my ecological footprint as an avid consumer of paper products? Can my iPad help me save the environment?

“My guess would be the e-reader would be pretty eco-friendly,” Environmental Science professor Stan Laskowski. “But it depends on how often you’d use the e-reader.”

So in a way, yes, an iPad might be a good green move. But could there be an even better way to read? Buying my favorite John Grisham book in e-book form is much more environmentally friendly than heading to Barnes & Noble to pick up a 400-page copy composed mostly of dead tree.

But a potentially greener way to get my literature fix would be by heading to a used bookstore and spending a few hours digging through the stacks. Reusing and recycling by far trumps e-books and e-readers, with their fossil fuel-depleting and power-sucking chargers.

So what’s the verdict? I’m going to pass on the iPad — at least until I’ve got a job.

Taylor Hawes is a College sophomore from Philadelphia. Her e-mail address is hawes@theDP.com. Tattle-Taylor appears every other Tuesday.

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