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iPad vs. Kindle? Get the Best of Both Worlds
By Dave Peterson | April 4, 2010
A lot of the attention directed to the iPad has been about eReading and how it would fare in that market against the Kindle, nook, and Sony readers that already have advantages of market share and name-brand stores.
A major tent-pole in Apple’s plans for the iPad is the iBooks software and store. It’s available as a free download from iTunes (it doesn’t ship with the device). iBooks comes with one free book, “Winnie-the-Pooh”. This freebie includes the original’s classic illustrations in color, which shows off the advantages of a color screen for an eReader. Up until now Kindles, nooks and Sonys have been a pretty monochromatic experience. iBooks gives a large single-page view in portrait orientation, or a two-page view that looks like an open book if it’s turned to landscape. The animated page turns are nice, but not really necessary. iBooks also incorporates page numbers, which are calculated depending on type size and screen orientation, and gives a more book-like experience.
Left to right, Amazon Kindle, iPhone, iPad, Kindle DX.
I’ve heard people express concerns about having large investments in Kindle libraries and whether they would lose all that if they moved to the iPad, and its native reader and store. The good news is the iPad is a great convergence device and that extends to eBooks. You won’t be reading your Kindle books through iBooks (incompatible file formats), but you can definitely read them in style on the iPad’s Kindle app. Amazon did a very nice large-screen redesign to the iPhone app, and you won’t have to buy anything again. If you’ve already got the Kindle for iPhone app, the iPad version will download as a free update.
The one place Kindle has a big advantage over iBooks (and any other eReader out there) is Whispersync. The ability to move seamlessly between devices while reading the same book is a great convenience. In fact, I called it my favorite technology of 2009 in a previous post, so the absence of a syncing system could definitely effect future decisions on whose eBooks I buy.
As of this writing, the Barnes and Noble eReader app had not been updated for the larger screen of the iPad. On some apps, that’s not so bad, and the 2x upscaling can be done without a usability problem. Unfortunately, for an eReader, the upscaling is deadly, producing text that’s nearly unreadable for any length of time. It can be run at its native size, but then you might as well be viewing it on an iPhone or Touch.
Given all this, my eReading strategy will be to continue to buy books from Amazon (with a much wider selection and generally lower prices), and reserve iBooks purchases for graphically intensive books that have been given a good treatment in the Apple-published versions. I’ll do most of my reading on the iPad, with the iPhone Kindle app available for when I’m somewhere without the larger device. It means splitting my library between two apps, but they’ll be on the same device, so that seems pretty manageable.
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April 4th, 2010 at 6:02 pm
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