As a special treat I bring you Knightwise from The Knightcast hosted over at knightwise.com as I challenge his assertions that the Sony eReader is a much better device than that dreaded Apple iPad.
Listen to the Podcast Once (44 min)
As a special treat I bring you Knightwise from The Knightcast hosted over at knightwise.com as I challenge his assertions that the Sony eReader is a much better device than that dreaded Apple iPad.
Listen to the Podcast Once (44 min)
My wife reads lots and lots and lots and lots (I think you get the picture) of paperbooks. She occasionally swaps a cracking book with a friend who may also do the same back. THEFT I hear some people shout, no, the book has been bought by the first person. Now the author who may not have been known to the second reader is now known and that person may go looking for that author and he will increases his sales, so that initial sale could lead to more sales of that Author’s book. Can my wife do this with iBooks either on the iPad or Kindle etc?
Libraries! Can libraries easily lend out electronic books, please don’t discard the importance of Libraries.
Also she reads in bed laying on her side holding the book between her thumb and index finger, can you do this with the iPad or Kindle?
If, when we are on holiday in a remote part of the country without power what happens if we loose power on the iPad or Kindle can we still read?
A lot of book manufacturers use wood from sustainable forests, how many sustainable forests are used in the making of an iPad or Kindle.
There are always other views and I think that there is still a place for the “real” books ;-).
Oh before anyone has a go at me because this was a smackdown between the Sony and iPad devices, I felt that knightwise had a bit of a go at books and I got carried away with my response
🙂
eInk technology might be technically superior, but i would say the iPad/iPod Touch/iPhone screens are good enough. I am a major reader and read dozens of books on my iPod Touch and now a couple on my iPad. Never experienced any eyestrain and I sit and read for long periods. iBooks with its facing pages in landscape mode is really an excellent reading experience.
The best thing though with the iPad is catalog. Can you read Kindle books on Sony Reader – no. Read Barnes & Noble books on Sony Reader – no. Apple has not prevented other booksellers from providing their own apps. How that came about is a wonder – but it is great that I can read my non-DRM ebooks and my DRMed ones also. Though I wish the book publishing industry would learn the lesson of the music industry in regards to DRM.
The question of why people don’t read books on their computer is a good one. I have never been able to finish a book just reading it on a monitor. A hand held device though gives you a much more book like experience in that the text is closer to your eyes and you are able to concentrate on the area of the text without distraction.
There is still a place for paper books, though I have come to prefer ebooks simply because my bookshelves are groaning in pain from the overload.
Hopefully I deleted the right dup Gaz! My understanding, and I haven’t proven this to myself yet, is that in the US the libraries use ePub format, and the iPad supports ePub. This means yes, you can check out library books on the iPad. Jeff makes a good point – basically the iPad appears to support the superset of all books – Kindle, iBooks, ePub (not sure what the Nook uses but if B&N makes an app for the iPad it’s sure to get accepted).
Now as far as swapping books I’m totally with you on that. i get the majority of my books from friends and if I like the author I will seek out more books by the same author. To my knowledge the Nook is the only eBook reader that allows you to loan books to friends – basically you can do it for two weeks, only once, and the book is unavailable to you when it’s in their Nook. This is a major bummer, books are SO social, hence all of the book clubs! Maybe I just answered my own Q – maybe I need to join a book club?
I was an early-adopter of the Kindle. Got it to read the Wall Street Journal on the go. However, I also subscribed to the Kindle feed of AP Business News, and found almost every big story in the WSJ was on AP Business News. A lot less a month.
Yes, the Kindle browser would pull down the AP Business News feed for free, but the formatted version seemed with the $1.99 a month.
Dropped the WSJ when it went to $14.99 a month. Then I bought the Nokia N900 and began reading the AP feed on my phone. Pretty soon I was just leaving the Kindle at home.
Here’s the deal, circa 2010. eBooks work. The ability to download instantly is neat. “Free” books from the Gutenberg catalog are fine, but not usually what I want for recreational reading.
So I’ve gone back to the public library, with a rare trip to a nearby used book store. The public library always has new content, which goes back and doesn’t clutter the house when I’m finished (a big advantage of eBooks!). The used book store has lots of thrillers, chillers, and bodice rippers. Trade ’em back in, give ’em away, drop in the paper recycle. Cheap chic!