ebooks, Kindles, and the iPad

During my research for our epub course, I purchased a kindle. I wanted to see the difference between epub books on this compared to my iPad. Having played around with it for a week or so now (admittedly not very long) I thought I would jot down my thoughts on ebooks, Kindles, and the iPad.

First off, let me clarify some things – I had already purchased an iPad last christmas. I read a lot – a lot of printed books, and a lot of ebooks, usually in pdf, but now more and more in epub or kindle format. As a dedicated reader, I was interested to see how I would feel reading ebooks on the two devices, and compare them to reading a printed book.

I love reading, and in my job as a senior trainer I have to read a lot for work as well – having a digital device carry my books (of whatever format) is very useful – I can carry thousands of books around with me.

I used to own a 17″ latpop – I would carry loads of pdfs around with me, but of course a large laptop is quite cumbersome. Now I do not travel around so much, I find I do not need a laptop – I travel between work and home and that is about it. So I am looking to replace the space in my digital life that the laptop used to occupy with something lighter – hence the iPad or Kindle (I have an iPhone, which I used to read my books, but the screen is really too small – I soon stopped using it for reading when I got my iPad, except for news items and twitter feeds when I am on the train or walking).

Since I bought the iPad first and then a Kindle I found myself spoilt – by that I mean the iPad is a touchscreen device. I can swipe and zoom, scroll and move around with my fingers – no keypad necessary. The first thing I noticed when I started using the Kindle was it was not a touchscreen – I had been spoilt by the iPad.

The Kindle uses a keyboard and buttons – and they are quite small for my fingers. The Kindle screen is lovely – but only greyscale. It is beautiful to read but the lack of colour is another negative for me. The Kindle screen is also smaller than the iPad screen, 6″ diagonal compared to 9.7″ diagonal.

Also, a fair number of Kindle books are DRM’d, another negative for me. I want to be able to move the ebooks around, to whatever digital device I use at the time (or all of them) and I would also like to give my copies away to someone else when I am finished with them.

So here is my summary…

…for technical reading I definitely prefer the iPad. It has a bigger screen size, is colour, and is a touch screen, and therefore I prefer pdfs which give me, all-in-all, a richer reading experience. I can also copy from a pdf (usually), which is very useful for copying source code to play around with and test.

For personal pleasure I prefer a printed book. I can take it with me, give it to anyone, and it feels nicer in my hand – and is a joy to look at (depending on the the cover etc). I do like to collect books, and looking at my 3000+ collection on my wall gives me a great sense of pleasure as I go through my collection – something I do not get from my digital collection at the moment (Kindle or iPad).

Some of the Kindle books are DRM’d which I hate – it means that I am tied in to a particular device and to amazon, something that does not happen with printed books. I do not mind password protection – but the problem with that is it also locks you out of making changes to the text (highlighting, bookmarks, etc) – a factor with pdfs though, not epub books.

Since I have an iPad therefore, I can see myself not bothering with the Kindle much – all the epub formats can be read on the iPad, so having two devices is unnecessary.

Here is a mindmap summary of my thoughts…