Back in May 2009, before I took the dive to purchase a Kindle 2, I first tried to see how well I might adapt to digital reading. I purchased a few books with the Kindle app for iPhone and read them.

My opinion was mixed: I liked that my current book was always in my pocket on the iPhone, I liked that it was easy to read one-handed in bed, and I liked that I was undeniably reading more books than I had when I stuck to the tree-killing kind. I didn’t love reading on the iPhone’s backlit screen, but I assumed the Kindle’s e-ink screen would resolve that issue, so I finally bought one with confidence. Less than a year later, of course, Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad.

I wondered then whether the iPad could truly compete as an e-book reader, and became cautiously optimistic about its chances when further details were released. Now, after more than a month with the device, I’m confident in declaring that it makes a very compelling e-reader—although it does exhibit a few obvious and not-so-obvious weaknesses.

The hardware

The most immediately apparent knock against the iPad as a device for reading is its weight. Now, 1.5 pounds (or 1.6 for the 3G-enabled version) doesn’t sound like much. But given that the iPad’s almost all screen, you’re forced to hold it by the edges, and that pound and a half can start to put a lot of strain on your fingertips.

The Kindle, on the other hand, weighs just 10.2 ounces: I can comfortably hold it with one hand for hours. I can hold the iPad with one hand—usually with my thumb on the lower side edge, and my pinky on the bottom, with the middle three fingers providing its back support—but my hands definitely start to “feel it” much more than they do with the Kindle. Generally, for extended reading time, I’ll prop the iPad up somehow—whether on my folded-over leg, a tabletop, or the side of my pillow.

Pillow time, of course, is one area where the iPad (quite literally) shines. The Kindle’s e-ink display, like the paper books it replicates, requires a book light for bedtime reading. The iPad’s backlit display means never needing to own another book light again. But one of e-ink’s key selling points is precisely its lack of a bright, backlit display. Indeed, I feared the eye-fatigue ramifications of reading on the iPad before mine arrived.

While I wish the iPad’s display packed a few more pixels per inch (it boasts 132 ppi, compared to the iPhone’s 163 ppi), I find that—just as the Kindle does—the device really fades away after a few pages. Most notably, I’m not experiencing the eye-fatigue I expected, and which I actually felt when I read those first e-books on my iPhone. I now believe that was more the fault of the tinier text on the iPhone’s smaller screen, rather than its backlighting.

One weakness that’s not initially apparent is the iPad’s infamous proclivity for attracting fingerprints. Those smudges, which I normally don’t even notice unless the iPad is asleep, become more apparent (and annoying) when they consistently overlap the lines of text you’re reading in a digital book. Luckily, a quick wipe with any nearby fabric resolves that issue pretty quickly.

The software

Once you’ve found a comfortable position to hold the iPad, and you’ve confirmed that the screen isn’t bothersome to your eyes during extended reading jags, it’s time to curl up with your e-book.

Given the iPad’s access to the App Store, it’s nice that users aren’t limited to just Apple’s own iBooks app for reading. There are a handful of other options, but iBooks and Amazon’s Kindle app are probably the two most prominent. Since my iPad arrived, I’ve read ten books between the two apps.

I found the book-reading experience within iBooks decent, but not exceptional. iBooks does some things far better than the Kindle app—but it also includes some simply egregious flaws.

While both iBooks and the Kindle app let you turn pages quickly by tapping on the edge of the screen, each also also offers a virtual page-turning animation. Though I tend to leave the Kindle app’s preference for that animation turned off, I find the iBooks page turn smooth and natural—though it’s entirely superfluous, I enjoy the visual effect. With paper books, I tend to curl my finger under the next page and I end up recreating that gesture in iBooks; since the page curls precisely where you “grab” it, the effect is pretty slick. In both apps, you can also turn back a page from anywhere on the screen just by swiping to the right, which is a nice touch.

Although some find iBooks’s font options too limited, I like the selection offered—particularly Palatino. Amazon’s Kindle app doesn’t let you customize anything but font-size; the publisher chooses the font itself. Another iBooks perk is its in-app ability to look up words with a built-in dictionary; the Kindle itself offers that feature (albeit with clumsier cursor navigation), but oddly the Kindle app for the iPad does not.

However, there are places where the Kindle app really outshines iBooks. The Kindle app gets nighttime reading right, with brightness controls that cater to reading in dark rooms: You can toggle between black text on a white background, dark text on a sepia background, or white text on a black background. By day, I go the sepia route, and my nighttime reading is exclusively white-on-black. The Kindle app also offers a brightness slider; I drag the brightness way down at night. That way, there’s no bright background or bright text burning my retinas in the dark.

iBooks doesn’t handle night reading nearly as well. While the app offers a brightness slider, there’s no option to change the text or background colors. Drag that slider to its darkest setting, and indeed the background approaches black—but the text remains unchanged. That is, iBooks expects you to read very, very dark on text on a very, very dark background.

That makes no sense.

When you make the background dark, you need contrast with the text. The print needn’t be neon sign bright (in fact, it shouldn’t be), but it should stand out against the background, in user-configurable ways. To wit, it should behave exactly like the Kindle app already does.

You may be familiar with the configurable shortcut to invert the iPad’s colors with a triple-tap of the Home button, but it doesn’t work well in iBooks. It leaves either the text or the background too bright, no matter how you adjust the slider.

To make matters worse, iBooks seems to have a glitch where it doesn’t remember your brightness settings if you put the iPad to sleep and wake it up again. If I need to take a quick break to escort my three-year-old to the bathroom, I put the iPad to sleep. I wake it up, and iBooks immediately blasts my eyes with its brightest white background again.

Both apps offer a better reading experience in portrait mode. iBooks tries harder than the Kindle app in landscape, offering facing pages of text, but the columns are a bit too narrow for my taste. The Kindle app, on the other hand, stretches the text out into a single, way-too-wide column in landscape mode.

If you want to offer an uncluttered reading experience on the iPad, landscape mode is apparently a tough nut to crack. Other reading-centric apps, like the superb Instapaper Pro (for queuing Web-based articles in more reading-friendly formats), suffer similarly in landscape mode. Apps like PDF-reader GoodReader avoid the landscape issue by keeping the reading area narrower even when more real estate could conceivably be devoted to the text. (And, of course, apps like Mail and NetNewsWire solve the issue with their two-column interfaces in landscape mode, which force the reading pane to a narrower width.)

Conclusion

The iPad works very, very well as a reading device. It’s a little heavy, but the screen is really lovely, and shows crisp, eminently readable text. The most important feature of any reading device, whether it’s a book, a Kindle, or the iPad, is whether it disappears when you’re engrossed in the text, letting you focus entirely on the words. The iPad certainly succeeds at that.

Perhaps the device’s biggest weakness as a reading device is that it does so many other things: it’s hard to resist the lure of temptation that your e-mail—and the baseball game, and Netflix movies, and Flight Control HD, and Twitter—are all just a couple taps away. But in that case, to paraphrase the great playwright, the fault lies not in our devices, but in ourselves.

Resource:
http://www.macworld.com/article/150955/2010/05/ipad_reader.html

The Kindle starts at $259 and is designed mainly for reading text on a gray-and-black screen. The iPad starts at $499, but with the higher price comes more functions: a color touch screen for downloading books from Apple’s new iBookstore, surfing the Web, playing videos and games and more.

It will take time to determine whether the iPad causes a tremor in the e-reader market, a high-magnitude quake or something in between. But in the meantime people who read electronic books or are considering buying a reading device will find their choices getting more complicated.

If the Kindle e-reader falls out of favor with people drawn to Apple’s offering, there could be a very thick silver lining for Amazon: It sells e-books that can be read on many kinds of devices, including the iPad and other Apple gadgets. That means the Kindle could fade and Amazon could still occupy a profitable perch in e-books.

However, Apple could find ways to tilt the field in its favor. At least for now, both the Apple iBookstore and the Kindle service will be accessible in much the same way on the iPad — as “application” icons that users can click. Eventually Apple could give its own bookstore and reading program more attention on the iPad.

Apple also could try to curry favor with publishers in a way that matters to consumers, perhaps by securing exclusive titles.

Publishers’ relationships with Amazon have been strained by Amazon’s insistence on charging $9.99 for some popular e-books. Publishers have complained that it is an attempt to get consumers used to unsustainably low prices. Amazon takes a loss on some books at that price, and the publishers fear that if the $9.99 tag sticks, Amazon will force publishers to lower their wholesale prices, cutting into their profits.

The iPad gives publishers an opportunity for a new pricing model. Some e-books will cost up to $14.99 initially, and Apple is insisting that publishers can’t sell books at a lower price through a competitor. The iBookstore is launching with titles from major publishers such as Penguin, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, Hachette Book Group and Macmillan. One big publisher, Random House, has not yet struck a deal with Apple.

Amazon declined to comment on the iPad’s release.

Although Amazon has tried to snag as much of the e-book market as possible since launching the Kindle in 2007, the company has never revealed how many Kindles it has sold. Analysts estimate it has sold 3 million. (Analysts believe Apple could sell that many iPads in the product’s first year). Amazon has offered only sketches of the Kindle’s effect on its business, such as by saying that when books are sold in both hard copy and the Kindle format, it sells 48 Kindle books for every 100 hard copies.

Compared to the Kindle, the iPad would seem to have some disadvantages. The entry-level model is nearly twice the price of the Kindle, yet it can’t download books everywhere. It can do that only where it is connected to the Internet over Wi-Fi. At 1 1/2 pounds, it is more than twice as heavy as a Kindle. And its battery lasts for just 10 hours, compared with up to a week on a Kindle when it has its wireless access on.

However, among the elements in the iPad’s favor is a touch screen that is 9.7 inches diagonally, compared with 6 inches on the Kindle. Ron Skinner, 70, who lives in Las Vegas and bought a Kindle last February, says he has ordered Apple’s product because he thinks it will offer a better reading experience.

Skinner, an Apple investor who reads about three books a week, says the contrast between the text and the background is too low on the Kindle’s “e-ink” screen, and reading on it bothers his eyes. The difference between the Kindle screen and the iPad screen “is like daylight and dark,” Skinner says.

Tim Bajarin, an analyst with Creative Strategies Inc., says the iPad signals the start of a larger shift away from static digital versions of books and magazines. Eventually e-books will be expected to have multimedia dimensions, with video and interactive elements, he says, which calls for something more like Apple’s tablet device than something that is largely dedicated to reading.

The main question then would be whether Amazon wants to try to soup up the Kindle to be more like a tablet, or whether it will remain content to offer something more specialized. Consider that the Kindle also can surf the Web, but it’s not a feature that’s highlighted or encouraged much.

Amazon stock has risen about 11 percent since Apple unveiled the iPad in January, while Apple shares have climbed 13 percent. But it’s possible that investors haven’t seen many risks yet for Amazon because it’s not yet clear how people will see the iPad.

People might not want it as an alternative to the Kindle and a laptop, says James McQuivey, a Forrester analyst. Instead, he says, they might see the iPad mainly as a big iPod, leaving room for other kinds of devices. And the hype surrounding the iPad may help Kindle sales with consumers who want a less expensive digital reading experience.

“The iPad will bring all kinds of consumer benefits that the Kindle can’t even pretend to attempt,” McQuivey says, “but at the same time the Kindle solves a very focused consumer need in a way the iPad can’t do well.”

Resource:
Yahoo News