"I think the iPad redefines everything. Let me start from personal and then go general. I’m turning 50 in a few weeks’ time, and when I started doing the reading for this book, I went: Oh my God, I have lost my ability to read comics. Why am I no longer enjoying this? I’m not in the comics, this is terrible, these are weird, and having a really bad experience. And it was about four days in on that that I thought, Hang on, and went down to the drugstore and bought the cheapest pair of giant magnifying reading glasses and brought them home and started reading them like this and going, oh actually it’s not the comics. It’s the fact that my eyesight is no longer comfortable with tiny lettering and word balloons. And that simply fascinated me. And fascinated me because I realized that technology is normally driven by the young, and leaves the old and my generation on the sidelines going, “We don’t know what we think about this.” Except the Kindle and Kindle technology, which is absolutely being discovered by my age and up from people who are going, “You mean I don’t have to buy large-print books? I can just set the font wherever I like? This is great.” And all these people you expect to be going, “I do not want this modern newfangled thing,” are going, “I have a house full of books I can’t read anymore. This thing is magic."

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The Vulture Transcript: Neil Gaiman on Comics, Twilight, Twitter Etiquette, Killing Batman, and Sharing Porn With His Son — Vulture

This interview with Neil Gaiman is amazing if you like his stories and his comics and his movies, but it was this section that really stood out to me in terms of really defining the iPad/Kindle phenomenon. The truth is, this might be the first paradigm shift in computing that I’ve seen driven by the elderly. In most seismic shifts it is the young that are the early adopters because they have less invested in the status quo, and fewer preconceptions about the way the world works.

My parents got an iPad before I did. All of their friends did the same. The leap forward is that it breaks down the barriers to entry for content so well. Gaiman’s quote about being able to slice and dice content to fit your needs is really what the strength of these devices is. And that’s why I think Amazon’s Kindle is the first real viable competitor to the iPad.

First, even after the iPad debuted and before Amazon dropped their prices, the Kindle was still selling briskly. Second, now that they’ve got the Kindle Fire allowing applications, and Amazon has provided a quality check on what goes into their version of the Android store, the Kindle’s lower price means you’re not giving up too much in terms of quality to get a tablet that is not Apple related. Finally, Amazon’s content (movies, music, books, store for physical items) means you now have a compelling ecosystem for your Kindle Fire to play in.

The other big wildcard that may be a game changer in Amazon’s favor is if the Kindle/Android platform can play better with Windows 8 than the iPad. If you say Windows 8 reduces a lot of the desktop clutter and headache that Windows users report on a daily basis, and the Kindle Fire becomes a better Windows to tablet experience than the iPad, then you can envision a scenario where Microsoft actually starts reclaiming some of the ground it ceded to Apple over the last decade.