The iPad is now in its third year, and it’s difficult to overstate the impact its had on computing, especially portable computing. I know it’s certainly changed the way I interact with the richness of the web, for example, and has made it vastly easier to have a ridiculous amount of information just a few taps away — and on a big screen. I love that.

Because I am a giant literature nerd, though, one of the most exciting developments on the iPad was, at least for me, this edition of The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot’s masterwork. Dense with allusion and reference, it’s a poem that’s launched a thousand dissertations and annotations. And the folks at TouchPress realized they could bundle the text with reams of backing information, readings, annotations, and reference material in a single beautiful package on the iPad.

(Older Heathen will remember that there were attempts at this sort of rich publishing model in the initial CD-ROM boom, but the iPad gives us a much richer experience.)

I hoped that the warm reception (and immediate financial success) of The Waste Land app would mean we’d see similar treatments of important works — and especially important works that were logistically hard to carry around. The two that I’d most love to see are Ulysses and Infinite Jest, which also happen to be two of my favorite novels. In either case I’d gleefully pay for a work again just to have a bundled experience of the quality delivered with The Waste Land.

And yet: Nothing. And I’m not the only one who’s noticed, either. Won’t someone make this happen?