Steve Jobs announced yesterday during his keynote presentation at WWDC 2010 that the new iPhone 4 will be able to run the free iBooks app currently for use only on the iPad. Syncing your place and highlights in books will be enabled between your Apple devices, making the iBooks application more like the Amazon Kindle.
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When I first bought the iPad, iBooks was one of the first apps that I chose to download. This is significant only because I had up to that point been completely opposed to the e-reader movement. I consider myself a traditionalist when it comes to my reading, preferring the texture of the pages, the ability to dog-ear my spot in a book, the self-satisfied feeling I get when looking at a particularly large tome after I have finished reading it. Each of these were aspects of the reading experience that I was loathe to give up.
However, the times, they are a changing. I purchased and listened to my first audiobook ever on iTunes for my iPod Touch last fall and fell in love with the amusing intonations of David Sedaris reading aloud his book Me Talk Pretty One Day as I went about my daily run. Audiobooks have become somewhat of a staple for me now. It seemed equally important to try out my first e-book experience on another Apple device. I was not disappointed, and now wonder about life before my iBooks app.
In an effort to be fair, I decided to download and try out the free Amazon Kindle app on my iPad as well. Even my obvious devotion to all products Apple aside, I have to say that I found iBooks to be a much better e-reading experience. Apple went all out in trying to make the e-book experience as close to real life as possible. Your books are downloaded from the iBooks store to your iBooks bookshelf. When you open a book to read it, the design of the e-book page looks like a page in a real book.
The Amazon Kindle e-reader is definitely less flashy and smooth looking. You have to log into your Amazon.com account to purchase and download your books, which just doesn't seem as seamless as the iBooks store. When you select a book, it downloads to the homepage of the Kindle app. The appearance of the book once opened is simply a full screen of text, much like a pdf would appear.
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Though I have come to really enjoy using my iBooks reader, I will say that neither the iBooks nor Kindle readers could ever rival the experience of reading a real paper book, but I do enjoy the ability to download new books whenever I want to, without having to go to the library or the bookstore. There's a definite convenience factor to the e-books. The books are not cheap, however, so I primarily stick with reading the free classics that are available on iBooks (there are also free classics available on Kindle). There are frustrations, like the inability to easily flip to any page, but those are also the differences that will continue to keep real books my first choice for reading.
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