Tired of your iPad's innovations? Use it as a typewriter.

Taking the absurdity of propping up your iPad against your laptop one step further, a man named Jack Zylkin has invented the USBTypewriter. Ingeniously harnessing the iPad’s 21^st-century lightness, thinness, and word processing abilities to do some seriously early-20^th-century work, the invention allows you to use your $600 Apple device just like you would a half-cent piece of paper. You type on an old-fashioned manual and the device “reads” your keystrokes and renders them via a USB port on your iPad (or other electronic device). And it’ll cost you only $400, iPad not included. After the jump, check out a video of how it works.

You’d have to be either really rich or really technophobic to use this costly skeuomorph, but who am I to judge? I regularly use my BlackBerry as a paperweight. Plus, typewriters do have a certain clacking charm. Just ask Michael Winslow.