Thaddeus.net Blog

I hate books.

Let my clarify a little bit. I love to read, but frankly I'm baffled by all the nostalgia about the "feel" of books. I find them heavy, awkward to hold (my big thumbs always get in the way), and don't even get me started on dust jackets. I love the feel of a library with the rows of books and the cozy aura, but when it gets down to what books are made for - reading - I feel like the form factor falls short.

When the Kindle 2 came out to pretty good reviews, I decided that it had to be better than the dead tree format and so I gave it a try. I was sold almost instantly. I love the way it fits in my hands and find it very easy to read and navigate. I often wish that every book I own was on my Kindle, especially every time I have to move boxes and boxes of books from one house to another. Otto is a fan of the Kindle too.

When Apple announced the iPad I figured it would be one of the first devices to bring some real competition to the Kindle. I know the Nook is also real competition, but the LCD vs. e-ink battle is the one that I'm most interested in. Now that I have an iPad and have had a week to play with it and even read a few chapters of a book on it, i figured I would offer my thoughts on the two devices and which one is the winner in the e-reader war.

I briefly mentioned above some of the things that I like about the Kindle. For me, the best things about it are the e-ink display and how easy it is on the eyes and the way it feels in your hand while reading. Page turning is effortless and I love that I can store my whole library on it so that I can read whatever I feel like at any time.

But the Kindle isn't perfect. There are a few things that I don't like about the Kindle and a few things at I actually really hate. My complaints in no particular order:

1. The keyboard is terrible. I pity the person who tries to do any sort of extended typing on it. The buttons are too small, too far apart, and too hard to push. This makes note taking totally impractical on it which seriously limits its practicality for textbooks. By contrast, I'm typing this whole post on the on-screen keyboard on my iPad and it works like a charm.

2. The screen is very readable, but the contrast isn't perfect. It has a slight gray tint to it that can make it seem dim in low light. Also, there is the ever-present problem of refresh time. Reloading the whole screen takes just shy of a second and while that may not seem like a long time, when you're trying to flip through twenty pages of front-matter it feels like an eternity.

3. As a corollary to the screen refresh issues, navigation is a bit of a pain. When I'm reading, i often find myself wanting to look up a word or follow a footnote link. Navigating through the text with the joystick to do that on the Kindle is a slow and painful process.

4. The Kindle sucks for anything other than reading books. The browser and Wikipedia are unusable and the MP3 player seems like someone's senior computer science project. While this isn't necessarily a problem, it means that the Kindle can't be your only device. It's great to have a thousand books on the plane with you, but you still need an iPod, email device, etc. to really get by.

I think this is something that Amazon needs to realize about the Kindle: it is a single-purpose device. If you release the SDK and people start making twitter clients and whatnot for it, then people will start to dislike the Kindle because it's just not well suited for anything but reading e-books. You are just never going to get around the fact that e-ink doesn't work for that stuff (unless they switch to a PixelQi display).

All that being said, I still love my Kindle. I have read more books in the past year than I did in the previous three and I take it with me anytime I'm away from home for any period of time.

My complaints above seem to mostly stem from the Kindle's e-ink display, which is both a blessing and a curse. So, does that mean that the iPad's touchscreen LCD is the right solution? Yes and no. Navigation is far more intuitive on the ipad and you feel like you can get things done quicker and more elegantly. But that comes at a price. I have three main complaints with the iPad as an ebook reader:

1. The iPad is heavy. It weighs as much as a thick book and its center of gravity makes your fingers tired very quickly when holding it upright for reading. You really have to rest it on something to be comfortable for a long period and that's not always the best way to read a book.

2. Touchscreen is problematic for e-books. Its really easy to slip to the edge of the screen and inadvertently change the page, unlike the Kindle's physical page-turning buttons. Also, when reading in bright sunlight the oily smudges that invariably collect on the screen show up very prominently.

3. The Kindle app for the iPad is lacking. iBooks is a much better user experience and critical things like search are notably absent from Amazon's offering. I know that this might not be a fair comparison, but iBooks library is still too minimal and I already have a bunch of Kindle books so that's what I'm using for comparison.

So what's the verdict? For me, the Kindle is still the winner. The iPad shows promise, but it falls behind the Kindle's dedicated e-reader form factor. If you only want to carry one device then the iPad is more than enough, but I'm still going to be bringing my Kindle along too for the foreseeable future. No matter what, competition is a good thing. I like seeing the various manufacturers trying to one-up each other and make the best devices out there. Also as e-readers become more common, more books will be available for digital distribution and then everyone wins.