The iPad eBook Reader: Some First Reactions

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 …