People often think about Gotland as an isolated island. They look at the sea as a broad border of water. And somehow they want it to be like that. They want to keep their inner pictures of Gotland as an remote place filled with nostalgic dreams. A place for escape, freedom and peace.

But Gotland has always been a place for meetings as well. People from the countries around the Baltic Sea have met on Gotland and exchanged goods and ideas. Today we have visitors from all over the world like USA, Japan or Zambia. I see the surrounding water as a contact area.

Every place need exchange of ideas with people outside the local groups in order to get energy and knowledge for development. I believe Gotland has a much better position than small municipalities in the swedish inner mainland. Our geographical location makes it easy for others to see us. Every year we welcome a lot of tourists, students, artists, moviemakers, politicians, journalists etc which gives us a lot of creative input. I really like that.

Can we do more to use Gotland as a meeting point? Yes we can! I think we should have much more exchange with the countries around the Baltic Sea. They are like our sisters and brothers. We share so much in history. I dream of the day when we have ferries and planes going from Gotland to all these countries.

By some annoying reason Apple have not yet launched iPad in Sweden. So, we are waiting and waiting. Last week me and Roine got inspired and decided that we will explore how we can work with producing ebooks, magazines and other stuff for iPad.

Roine has been participating at a seminar about iPad and came home very energized. We can do this. We love to create great reading experiences and iPad gives high quality – it will be worth the effort. When the quality of ebooks reaches a certain level of quality, people will feel comfortable reading ebooks.

I have talked to a friend who has been using iPad for quite a while now, and he says he prefers ebooks from paperbooks if he’s got the choice. That is good news!

Imaging beeing able to store hundreds of books on your iPad. Imaging that there always will be enough books to sell, you don’t have to guess how many books you will sell and then take the risk to print them. You will take a risk with ebooks as well, the production time and it’s cost – but that cost comes with paperbooks as well. And THEN you have to pay the printing…

Anyway. People seems to be really interested. We have mentioned our intentions on Facebook and our blogs. And people take contact and want to talk about iPad or make a comment. My feeling is that people are really eager to get iPads into their lifes. It’s so amazing. Let’s see what we make up from our intentions…