It’s ironic, because Steve Jobs was once cynical about the future of books, noting that the average kid’s attention span had dwindled so much that the new generation had all but abandoned the Great American Novel. Now, a few years later, his iPad may very well lead the renaissance of long-form reading. Analysts expect total worldwide iPad sales, including U.S. numbers, to reach anywhere between 5 and 8 million units by the end of 2010. The iPad’s Global Debut is doing very well. Yesterday, Wired sold 24,000 copies of its iPad-formatted magazine in just the first 24 hours. At $5 a copy for a half-gigabyte download, Wired owner Conde Nast netted $83,832 in one day after Apple collected its royalties. Not bad, considering there were no postage and printing costs. If the iPad had come out two years earlier, McGraw Hill would not have had to sell BusinessWeek to Bloomberg for a paltry $5 million.

I remember when the famous print page designer Roger Black (check out his very cool blog at rogerblack.com) first unveiled his redesign of Red Herring magazine in the late 90s—I was in love. It was like walking into an Apple store; it just made me feel good inside. I can go on and on about print page design, one of my favorite spectator sports, but the bottom line to the success of any media brand is pulling together all aspects of content and design and creating a personality. Specifically, a personality that your targeted readers see as a reflection of their idealized self.

It’s human nature for people to want to be part of something bigger than they are—smart producers tap into this basic human instinct. I remember being ecstatic at a New York Times Magazine cover shot of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos laying on his couch in his Seattle flat with a copy of Red Herring on the floor next to him. That was the goal, to inspire people to showcase a copy of Red Herring on their coffee table as a way of making a statement about who they were, or at least, how they wanted to be perceived. Red Herring was daring, ambitious, smart, and risk-taking—and so am I!

The same InDesign CS5 that’s used to produce the print layouts on the iPad finally lets print publishers offer electronic readers the kind of handsome, easy-to-read designs that they have proven and tested over the last couple of hundred of years. As a result, we can bet readers who barely consumed, on average, no more than 600 words in the clunky, first-generation web design format, will read New Yorker length magazine articles and entire books. While reading from an electronic screen may never be as comfortable and enjoyable as the printed page, the ability to carry around dozens of books and magazines in a single tablet is a highly attractive advantage.

Let me roll all this up in the form of a prediction: The average person that has a device like the iPad, that displays book and magazine pages the way they are designed to look, will end up reading more books and longer magazine articles.