The iPad eBook Reader: Some First Reactions

in Amazon Kindle, Apple, e-books, iPad | April 4th, 2010

Yes­ter­day morn­ing, I head­ed to the Palo Alto Apple Store, spent an hour wait­ing in line, then final­ly gained entrance to the store. And who entered along­side me? Steve Jobs! An aus­pi­cious begin­ning. I left with a 32 gig iPad, took it home, and start­ed play­ing par­tic­u­lar­ly with the eBook read­er. Here are my very ear­ly impres­sions:

15 months ago, I bought a Kin­dle and returned it. I just could­n’t read with it at night (a non-starter for me), and fig­ured that Apple would even­tu­al­ly get it right. Well, they large­ly have. The iPad ini­tial­ly feels a lit­tle heavy. But, it’s actu­al­ly no heav­ier than your aver­age hard­back book. Plus it’s fair­ly easy to hold. Score one for the iPad.

Then, when you fire up the eBook read­er, you instant­ly like what you see. The fonts are crisp, and the images are in col­or, which means that you can read chil­dren’s books, comics and oth­er graph­ic inten­sive texts. Plus, you can change the size and kind of the font. You can adjust the bright­ness of the screen. And, in some cas­es, you can even alter the back­ground col­or of the screen. (Most of this you can’t do with the Kin­dle.) All of this con­tributes to a read­er-friend­ly screen that’s easy on the eyes. And, yes, I can read with this device at night. (Read­ers make oth­er good obser­va­tions in the com­ments below.)

How about buy­ing books for the iPad? Well, it’s pret­ty easy. Both Apple and Ama­zon sell books for the device, with prices gen­er­al­ly rang­ing between $9.99 and $12.99. Rather notably, they also offer access to a siz­able col­lec­tion of free books in the pub­lic domain. (You can get more free­bies here, too.) Over­all, Ama­zon has a much larg­er inven­to­ry, and their books tend to be cheap­er. But oth­er­wise these are pret­ty sim­i­lar ser­vices. And, because Apple now has a far supe­ri­or device, you have to won­der whether this is the begin­ning of a big shift in the book mar­ket. In five years, Ama­zon might not be quite the behe­moth it is today — some­thing that’s prob­a­bly let­ting Steve Jobs sleep eas­i­er than Jeff Bezos at night.

A final point worth men­tion­ing here: Nei­ther com­pa­ny will let you have true own­er­ship over the books you buy. Both ven­dors lock down their books, dic­tate the oper­at­ing envi­ron­ments in which you can read them, and con­trol the user inter­faces that shape the read­ing expe­ri­ence. (PC World has more on that here.) You don’t have much ulti­mate con­trol over the under­ly­ing file. So the upshot is that you had bet­ter like the iPad (or Kin­dle) read­ing expe­ri­ence before decid­ing to amass a large and cost­ly library.

Now for a few ran­dom obser­va­tions:

1) The  video gen­er­al­ly looks great (unless, of course, it’s pro­duced in Flash). I was real­ly impressed with the qual­i­ty of YouTube videos, and Net­flix movies (free app here) stream over the iPad rather bril­liant­ly.

2) On the down­side, I found typ­ing on the iPad to be rather dif­fi­cult — even more so than typ­ing on an iPhone. The device is large enough that it’s hard to stretch your fin­gers to reach var­i­ous keys. Maybe I will get a hang of it. But, for now, it’s unwieldy.

3) The New York Times and Wall Street Jour­nal have devel­oped new apps for the iPad, and they deliv­er a pleas­ant read­ing expe­ri­ence, to be sure. But I don’t see this sud­den­ly mak­ing con­sumers any more (or less) will­ing to pay. The con­cept of the iPad sav­ing the news­pa­per indus­try seems fair­ly over­played, I’m sor­ry to say.

4) Is this a must-have device? Or just nice-to-have? Right now, I’m inclined toward the lat­ter (and so is Slate). Aside from the eBook read­er, your home com­put­er or smart phone can accom­plish most of what the iPad can. How­ev­er, the iPad will rapid­ly dif­fer­en­ti­ate itself. It will become a nice low-cost, portable com­put­er — one that lets you store data in the cloud, and pro­vides access to a large vol­ume of cheap or free soft­ware (at least more than your aver­age con­sumer nor­mal­ly gets). Give it a year. Wait for the flood of apps to come. Wait for inno­v­a­tive soft­ware devel­op­ers to extract the poten­tial of this machine, and wait for Apple to make the iPad lighter, cheap­er, and even faster. Right now, it’s not a game chang­er. But it will be down the line.

Are you a new iPad own­er? Have any thoughts in gen­er­al? Or par­tic­u­lar­ly about the eBook read­er? Add them to the com­ments below, or send them our way. We look for­ward to hear­ing what you have to say …

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Amazon Releases Kindle App for the iPad & Mac OS X

in Amazon Kindle, e-books | March 21st, 2010

A quick fyi: Ama­zon has released an app that will let you read Kin­dle texts on your Mac (final­ly!) and the upcom­ing iPad. If you’re look­ing for free Kin­dle texts, we’ve pro­duced a long list here, includ­ing many great clas­sics. You can find Kin­dle apps (all free) for oth­er devices below.

Thanks Wes for the info…

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Kindle Experiment Falls Flat at Princeton

in Amazon Kindle, e-books, Education | February 23rd, 2010

Last fall, Prince­ton launched a small exper­i­ment, replac­ing tra­di­tion­al text­books with the Kin­dle DX, Ama­zon’s large e‑book read­er. Almost from the begin­ning, the 50 stu­dents par­tic­i­pat­ing in the pilot pro­gram expressed dis­sat­is­fac­tion with the devices. Yes­ter­day, a uni­ver­si­ty report offered some more defin­i­tive find­ings. On the upside, stu­dents using the Kin­dle DX end­ed up using far less paper. (Paper con­sump­tion was gen­er­al­ly reduced by 54%.) On the down­side, stu­dents com­plained that the Kin­dle was fun­da­men­tal­ly “ill-suit­ed for class read­ings.” As one stu­dent put it:

I expect­ed it to be a real­ly use­ful tool that would enhance my expe­ri­ence, but it has hin­dered my stud­ies in a lot of dif­fer­ent ways… I wasn’t able to absorb the mate­r­i­al as well as if I had hard copies of the read­ings, and I had to deal with a lot of tech­ni­cal incon­ve­niences just from the design of the Kin­dle.

For more, give the Dai­ly Prince­ton­ian a read.

via @jryoung

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British Library to Offer 65,000 Free eBooks

in Amazon Kindle, Books, e-books | February 7th, 2010

From the TIMES ONLINE:

More than 65,000 19th-cen­tu­ry works of fic­tion from the British Library’s col­lec­tion are to be made avail­able for free down­loads by the pub­lic from this spring.

Own­ers of the Ama­zon Kin­dle, an ebook read­er device, will be able to view well known works by writ­ers such as Charles Dick­ens, Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy, as well as works by thou­sands of less famous authors.

You can read the rest about this Microsoft fund­ed ini­tia­tive here. In the mean­time, we’ve made it rel­a­tive­ly easy to down­load major clas­sics to your Kin­dle, iPhone, smart­phone or com­put­er. See our col­lec­tion of Free eBooks (and Audio Books).

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Top 10 Reasons Why iPad Marks Kindle’s Death

in Amazon Kindle, Apple, Books, e-books, Web/Tech | February 3rd, 2010

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. (more…)

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10 Reasons iPad Will Not Kill Kindle

in Amazon Kindle, Apple, Books, e-books | February 2nd, 2010

Caveat: before half of you get your shorts in a bunch, tomor­row’s post will be: Top 10 Rea­sons Why iPad Means Kin­dle Is Dead. With that said, have at it!

10.) Tak­ing read­ing from a sim­ple print­ed page to an e‑book envi­ron­ment such as the Kin­dle is a great step for­ward. Its ease of use, porta­bil­i­ty and stor­age are ide­al for read­ers. No more inno­va­tions need­ed!

9.) The enjoy­ment of read­ing has always tak­en place with­in a reader’s mind. This is both why read­ing is great and why the words on the page don’t need to be in flashy col­ors or fea­ture fan­cy graph­ics.

8.)  Added cost of iPad and $30/month fee for 3G from AT&T (the real­is­tic cost) make Kin­dle a bet­ter deal. Enough said.

7.) Every­one hates AT&T, their 3G ser­vice is spot­ty at best, and NO ONE who’s buy­ing a 3G iPad will use less than 250MB a month, so the $14.95 price point for 3G is use­less!

6.) Glare/e‑ink. You can always read dur­ing the day­time with your Kin­dle. Take it to the beach, read in broad day­light. e‑ink is sim­ply eas­i­er on read­ers’ eyes than back-lit pix­els.

5.) There’s no need for a device that fits between lap­top and smart phone. Both are extreme­ly portable and serve dif­fer­ent pur­pos­es. If I want to curl up in bed with a movie or the web, I can use my lap­top for that already. If I want to curl up in bed and read, I can use my Kin­dle!

4.) Apps! That’s right: The new open­ing up of Amazon’s Kin­dle for­mat to app devel­op­ers will mean a lot more ver­sa­til­i­ty on the device. Once a few folks come along and devel­op email clients or web browsers for the Kin­dle, Kin­dle will become even more use­ful as a poten­tial smart phone substitute—the niche that iPad seems intent on fill­ing.

3.) The new price-shar­ing announce­ment (70% publisher/30% Ama­zon) for Ama­zon’s Dig­i­tal Text Plat­form (DTP) makes Kin­dle more attrac­tive once again to all the pow­ers that be in pub­lish­ing. If they can get this pesky text-to-speech bat­tle cleared up, things will be even bet­ter.

2.) Big pub­lish­ing is cur­rent­ly doing so much of their sales through Ama­zon, that they might be afraid to car­ry busi­ness over to Apple. Sure, they will sell books there, but keep in mind that Apple might have to keep prices in the iBook store high­er than at Ama­zon.

1.) “I love my Kin­dle!” –Seri­ous­ly, a lot of read­ers are devot­ed to these devices, includ­ing me. I’ve found a nice cov­er that makes the Kin­dle easy to hold. I real­ly like the ease of buying/storing books on it. And I just want a plain, sim­ple device to use for read­ing.

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

Up next (tomor­row): Top 10 Rea­sons Why iPad Means Kin­dle is Dead

Seth Har­wood is a vora­cious read­er, sub­ver­sive pub­lish­ing maven and crime nov­el­ist. His next book Young Junius will be avail­able from Tyrus Books this fall. He’s sure to have some crazy pro­mo­tions going at his site this spring as well.

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The iPad and Information’s Third Age

in Amazon Kindle, Apple, Books, e-books | January 28th, 2010

Today we have a guest post by William Rankin, direc­tor of edu­ca­tion­al inno­va­tion, asso­ciate pro­fes­sor of medieval lit­er­a­ture, and Apple Dis­tin­guished Edu­ca­tor, Abi­lene Chris­t­ian Uni­ver­si­ty. ACU was the first uni­ver­si­ty in the world to announce a com­pre­hen­sive one-to-one ini­tia­tive based on iPhones and iPod touch­es designed to explore the impact of mobil­i­ty in edu­ca­tion. For the past year, they have been con­sid­er­ing the future of the text­book. Rankin, who made a brief appear­ance on NBC Night­ly News last night, does a great job here of putting the new Apple iPad in his­tor­i­cal con­text and sug­gest­ing why it may solve the great infor­ma­tion­al prob­lems of our age.

It may seem strange in the wake of a major tech announce­ment to turn to the past—570 years in the past and beyond — but to con­sid­er the role of eBooks and specif­i­cal­ly of Apple’s new iPad, I think such a diver­sion is nec­es­sary. Plus, as reg­u­lar read­ers of Open Cul­ture know, tech­nol­o­gy is at its best not when it sets us off on some iso­lat­ed yet sparkling dig­i­tal future, but when it con­nects us more ful­ly to our human­i­ty — to our his­to­ry, our inter­re­lat­ed­ness, and our cul­ture. I want to take a moment, there­fore, to look back before I look for­ward, con­sid­er­ing the sim­i­lar­i­ties between Guten­berg’s rev­o­lu­tion and recent devel­op­ments in eBook tech­nolo­gies and offer­ing some basic cri­te­ria we can bor­row from his­to­ry to assess whether these new tech­nolo­gies — includ­ing Apple’s iPad — are ready to pro­pel us into information’s third age.

In the world before Gutenberg’s press — the first age — infor­ma­tion was trans­mit­ted pri­mar­i­ly in a one-to-one fash­ion. If I want­ed to learn some­thing from a per­son, I typ­i­cal­ly had to go to that per­son to learn it. This cre­at­ed an infor­ma­tion cul­ture that was high­ly per­son­al and rela­tion­al, a char­ac­ter­is­tic evi­denced in appren­tice­ships and in the teacher/student rela­tion­ships of the ear­ly uni­ver­si­ties. This rela­tion­al char­ac­ter­is­tic was true even for tex­tu­al infor­ma­tion. The man­u­al tech­nol­o­gy behind the pro­duc­tion and copy­ing of books and the immense asso­ci­at­ed costs meant that it was dif­fi­cult for books to pro­lif­er­ate. To see a book — if I couldn’t afford to have my own copy hand-made, a propo­si­tion requir­ing the expen­di­ture of a lifetime’s worth of wages for the aver­age per­son — meant that I had to go vis­it the library that owned it. Even then, I might not be allowed to see it if I didn’t have a priv­i­leged rela­tion­ship with its own­ers. So while the first age was rich in infor­ma­tion (a truth that has noth­ing to do with my per­son­al bias as a medieval­ist), its pri­ma­ry chal­lenge involved access.

Gutenberg’s rev­o­lu­tion, ush­er­ing in the sec­ond age, solved that prob­lem. Dri­ven by one of the first machines to enable mass-pro­duc­tion, infor­ma­tion could pro­lif­er­ate for the first time. Mul­ti­ple copies of books could be pro­duced quick­ly and rel­a­tive­ly cheap­ly — Gutenberg’s Bible was avail­able at a cost of only three years’ wages for the aver­age clerk — and this meant that books took on a new role in cul­ture. This was the birth of mass media. Libraries explod­ed from hav­ing tens or per­haps a few hun­dred books to hav­ing thou­sands. Or tens of thou­sands. Or mil­lions. And this abun­dance led to three dis­tinct rev­o­lu­tions in cul­ture. Though the uni­ver­si­ty ini­tial­ly fought its intro­duc­tion, the print­ed text­book pro­vid­ed broad access to infor­ma­tion that, for the first time, promised the pos­si­bil­i­ty of uni­ver­sal edu­ca­tion. Wide­spread access to bibles and the­o­log­i­cal texts fueled sig­nif­i­cant trans­for­ma­tions in reli­gion across the West­ern Hemi­sphere. And access to infor­ma­tion, phi­los­o­phy, and news led to the dis­man­tling of old polit­i­cal hier­ar­chies and some of the first exper­i­ments with democ­ra­cy (have you ever stopped to notice how many of the Amer­i­can rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies were involved in print­ing and pub­lish­ing?). (more…)

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First Glimpse of Apple’s New eReader

in Amazon Kindle, Apple | January 27th, 2010

Wel­come the new Kin­dle com­peti­tor. Above, you’ll find some of the first pic­tures show­ing the ebook capa­bil­i­ties of Apple’s new iPad. We should have more thoughts on the iPad com­ing lat­er today. Pic­tures come via gdgt.com, which has been pro­vid­ing excel­lent live cov­er­age of the Apple event.

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