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 …
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.
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.
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).
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…)
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.
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…)
Get the best cultural and educational resources on the web curated for you in a daily email. We never spam. Unsubscribe at any time.
FOLLOW ON SOCIAL MEDIA
About Us
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
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.
