Top 10 Reasons Why iPad Marks Kindle’s Death

Caveat: If you missed it, yesterday’s post was 10 Rea­sons iPad Will Not Kill Kin­dle. So take every­thing here with appro­pri­ate grains of salt.

10.) Books with graph­ics. Many books con­tain pho­tos, graph­ics and dia­grams that the Kin­dle does not han­dle well, if at all. When peo­ple real­ize that the iPad will do this flaw­less­ly, they’ll head in that direc­tion. Exam­ple: while read­ing the new Carv­er biog­ra­phy on my Kin­dle, an expe­ri­ence that I loved, I had to miss out on all of the pic­tures col­lect­ed from Carver’s life. Once you take into account news­pa­pers and mag­a­zines, there’s even more weight on iPad’s side.

9.) Cost: Seri­ous­ly, Ama­zon real­ly over­stepped their bound­aries when they set Kindle’s price at around $300, as they did. If they had made it $100 or less, they would have prob­a­bly have sold 4 or 5 times the num­ber of devices, hook­ing more read­ers to their book­store and their device. Look at Gillette as an exam­ple: which costs more—the razor or the razor blades?

8.) “I love my Kin­dle!” – less than two mil­lion peo­ple have bought the Ama­zon prod­uct. By com­par­i­son, over forty mil­lion iPhones and iPod Touch­es have been sold. No one knows how many folks will rush out to buy an iPad, but if pre­vi­ous iPhone sales and the buzz around the iPad are any indi­ca­tion, this is going to be anoth­er big win for Apple.

7.) iPad is a Kin­dle: just use that free Kin­dle app on your iPad and you’ve got the whole Kin­dle store wide open to you. You can even take your whole Kin­dle library right over to Apple’s iPad with the Kin­dle App.

6.) Cost, again: with iPad com­ing in at a low $499 for a device that’s much bet­ter made and fea­tures much more capa­bil­i­ty than the Kin­dle, with at least four times the mem­o­ry… well, you get the pic­ture. Oh jeez… I just found out the Kin­dle DX goes for $489. Oh, Mr. Bezos… what are you think­ing?

5.) Capa­bil­i­ty. Peo­ple don’t want a ded­i­cat­ed read­ing device: if you can car­ry around a device the size of your e‑reader, but also use it to check email, surf the web, watch TV and movies, lis­ten to music, use office-type apps, etc. then that’s going to win in today’s econ­o­my.

4.) Book pric­ing. It looks like Apple, the dia­bol­i­cal pricers of all songs at $.99, might wind up being the pub­lish­ers’ dar­ling in the e‑book mar­ket by pric­ing their titles high­er than Ama­zon has been. So far it looks like ibooks will be clos­er to the $14.99 price point that pub­lish­ers like. Right now, as evinced by this past weekend’s squab­ble between Ama­zon and Macmil­lan, pub­lish­ers appear to be fed up with Amazon’s pric­ing strat­e­gy. Apple may just become pub­lish­ers’ white knight.

3.) More like a book. With Apple iPad’s intu­itive touch inter­face, and the abil­i­ty to turn pages much more like you would with a real, paper­back book, it seems like the iPad wins the war in repli­cat­ing read­ers’ expe­ri­ence with tra­di­tion­al books. At least in the short term, this appears to be a valu­able com­mod­i­ty. Seri­ous­ly, did any­one think Ama­zon would design a piece of hard­ware as beau­ti­ful, func­tion­al and inno­v­a­tive as Apple would? As “that oth­er Wash­ing­ton State com­pa­ny” already found out, com­pet­ing with Apple in design cat­e­gories is a bitch.

2.) The Future Is Now. Sim­ply put, the iPad is sex­i­er. Users of a new device will pre­fer to look like the lab guy from Avatar with a mov­ing dis­play he can walk around with, or Tom Cruise from Minor­i­ty Report touch­ing pro­grams with his fin­gers and mov­ing images around, than they would like to look like that geeky librar­i­an you see on the train in the morn­ing who’s just read­ing. With the touch inter­face and video/book/images hand­held screen, we can look like the sci­en­tists from the movies, and we can do it now. This will cat­a­pult Apple’s iPad way past the Kin­dle.

And Rea­son Num­ber 1?

Our laps have grown small­er. Sure, we can car­ry around tra­di­tion­al lap­tops and use them in mul­ti­ple places, but for ease of use, porta­bil­i­ty, inter­face, bat­tery life and capa­bil­i­ty, we’ve reached a point in tech­nol­o­gy where we’re ready to aban­don the ded­i­cat­ed key­board. As users have shown by their affin­i­ty for the iPhone, it is time for the next step. And with iPhone’s lim­it­ed size and lack of soft­ware for word pro­cess­ing and doc­u­ment cre­ation, iPad is the answer. Soon we’ll want a device that we can car­ry around more eas­i­ly than a lap­top, hold in our hands or prop up on our desks, laps, wher­ev­er; a device that can show pic­tures, videos and pre­sen­ta­tions with a min­i­mum of set up.

When you pit all of this against a clunky (sor­ry Mr. Bezos—and yes, I should state that I real­ly do like my Kin­dle) ded­i­cat­ed read­er device that does not have an intu­itive inter­face, iPad is the clear win­ner-to-be.

[The opin­ions expressed above are not nec­es­sar­i­ly those of Open Cul­ture or the author.]

Seth Har­wood cre­at­ed a large online fol­low­ing for his fic­tion by seri­al­iz­ing his nov­els as free audio pod­casts. His first nov­el, Jack Wakes Up, came out in May from Three Rivers Press (Ran­dom House). He believes the iPad will enable him to fur­ther devel­op seri­al­iza­tion options for his writ­ing in text form, but would nev­er let that bias the opin­ions expressed in top ten lists.