Or rather, I’ve visualized it in my head, based on some recent items on tech-rumor sites.

As some of you longtime readers know, I’ve long believed the Web page, as we currently know it, is not the ideal showcase for professional journalism (or several other forms of professionally-made content).

News-biz people will tell you how Web ads just don’t attract nearly as much money per reader as print ads.

They’ll also tell you how the Web’s basic structural metaphor (individual pages, infinite links) works against the notion of a journalistic product combining different stories about different topics into one whole.

And I’ll tell you that Web-based typography and layout, despite many clever workarounds, still leave a lot to be desired.

And it’s damn difficult to charge for content on the Web, as you may have heard. Even some commercial porn sites are having trouble.

Meanwhile, two or three big new platforms have emerged with great possibilities for content-based profits:

• Netbooks (Windows and Linux PCs in less-than-laptop sizes) have become such mass-market items that wireless providers are giving them away with new contracts. (This entry is the “or three” of this list, because these devices are still tied to the traditional Web.)
• Dedicated ebook reading devices have finally taken off, in the form of the Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader. New competitors are promised over the next few years. These platforms were designed from the ground up for commercial content, but are so far crippled by graphics and design limitations.
• Then there’s the beloved Apple iPhone, and its limited-feature-set cousin the iPod Touch, with their highly successful App Store.It’s revolutionized the whole consumer software business with its inexpensive, do-one-thing-well applications. It’s revolutionized the digital content business as a single mobile hardware platform for audio, video, games, and texts. (Both Amazon and Barnes & Noble now sell ebooks for the iPhone/iPod Touch platform, as do several smaller vendors.)

In the New Yorker, novelist and print-media historian Nicholson Baker lauds the iPhone/iPod Touch platform as a more satisfying e-reading environment than Kindle or Sony Reader. He likes that the iPhone’s screen offers sharper resolution and full color. He likes its (slightly) greater typographical diversity.

I agree, except for the size of the thing.

Yeah, I’ve got 52-year-old eyeballs and prefer larger-sized type.

But I also want the juxtaposition of word and image you get on a well-designed print page. I want the visual sensation of ordered confusion a good newspaper page can express. I want the “splash” of a good magazine spread. I want the visual sequential narrative of a well-curated photo essay.

Yet I’d like that in a handy, go-anywhere device. Something where you just turn it on and it works; no complex interface to fuss over, no confusing setup and maintenance issues, no frustrations. (Hint: This means I don’t want a Windows tablet.)

What I want is the iPhone/iPod Touch, only in a bigger, splashier, more useful size.

And that’s apparently what we’re going to get, sometime in early to mid-2010, if you believe the current industry rumors.

Some of the rumor articles call the gadget a “Mac tablet,” and claim it would run a stripped down version of Mac OS X.

But that’s not what I want it to be.

I want it to be an iPod Touch with more, not a Mac computer with less. I don’t want something that runs MS Office really slowly; I want something that delivers documents and media really well.

I truly believe such a device, or the second or third versions of it, could be the breakthrough product we need to truly replace print.

I’m no Photoshop whiz or demo designer, so let me verbally display what I’m imagining.

In my vision, individual newspaper and magazine articles would still be available as Web pages for free access. What readers would (quite willingly) pay for, in one-shot buys and subscriptions, is a whole package of carefully-chosen and carefully-designed words and pictures, in on-the-go tablet reader form.

Each “issue” would be a complete, self-contained document, including any embedded audio or video files. No additional downloading would be required. The reader could receive it at home in the morning, then access it on his/her iPod Tablet whenever and wherever, with or without a cell or WiFi connection.

They’d have full use of modern digital typography, not merely Microsoft’s ten “Web-safe” fonts or Flash-based font substitution schticks. PDF-like rendering would overcome HTML’s severe typesetting limitations. Justified columns, smart hyphenation, kerning, footnotes, superscripts and subscripts, indentations, drop caps, charts and graphs—these e-mags would look and read like professionally made works. (Technical manuals and scientific textbooks could go treeless and keep the typographical tricks they need.)

Like Zinio’s electronic editions of magazines, they’d have clickable headlines and table-of-contents listings, zoomable text, and intuitive navigation including animated “page turning.” Unlike them, they’d be designed for on-screen reading from the ground up, not merely digital replications of print layouts.

On the software end, this is all doable. The pieces and programming tools exist. So do the e-commerce platforms, such as Apple’s App Store.

Now, at last, the user-end hardware is almost here.

If my suspicion’s right, near-future historians will see the mid-to-late aughts as a tough but necessary transition period from print to ebooks and emags.

What will far-future historians will have seen ebooks and emags evolve into?

That’s a topic for another day.