The Solomon Scandals is mostly about yesterday, but e-books do show up briefly in the afterword. We learn about the Scandals as people looked back on them many decades later in the 21st century.

So what’s it like to read Scandals electronically on the just-released iPad—via the Kindle e-store or otherwise? As both a reader and writer, I’m an instant fan even though my loyalties to paper books remain (Scandals is available in either medium).

Within the e-book area, The iPad’s big high-resolution screen will do more justice to my prose than something more cramped or less contrasty; text stands out better from the background than on Kindle-style gizmos. Book seen earlier is the Google Books edition of The Education of Henry Adams as displayed in Apple’s iBooks app, a rival to the Kindle one. Notice the built-in dictionary? I like the other apps, too, such as the iPad app for National Public Radio and the USA Today  app to the right.

Under my noncompete agreement with the North American Publishing Company, buyer of my TeleRead e-book site, I can’t write here about e-books except in, say, a Solomon Scandals context. But for my iPad thoughts in detail, you can read my thoughts via TeleRead itself.

In case Howard Kurtz has somehow run across this: The press did in fact go overboard in iPad coverage, and it isn’t as if the Miracle Product uses revolutionary technology. It just works dramatically better and is much easier for nontechnical to use than earlier tablets. Business reasons exist for the iPad making the covers of both Time and Newsweek. Journalistic reasons? Less clear. Is the iPad more important than Afghanistan or health care?

Of course, I recognize the Catch-22, the same one that Kurtz is up against. By writing about the iPad here, I’m just complicating matters. Mea culpa.