Ran across these: http://www.pcworld.com/printable/article/id,188827/printable.html http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/01/ipad-and-publishers.html
It discusses the ebook scramble iPad is causing. This is interesting because I got a Kindle for Christmas, which I like a lot. BUT the Kindle is sorta still in beta, at least for my usage. Also for the rest of the family:
- WiFi: It doesn't have it, and I live in a cell-dead zone. Amazon will let me get the book via wifi, but to my computer and then to the kindle. And its sorta confusing, you have to click a bunch to get it right.
- Text books: Not so hot, not many titles. And a popular math book I hand out to friends (Math, a very short intro by Gowers) has weird formatting where section headers are vertical!
- Collections: We got what we hoped was a collection of romance novels (blush) but the Kindle book site screwed it up and just sent us just one of them.
- PDFs: The great thing about hooking the kindle to your computer is that it appears as a USB disk, so easy to drop PDFs on it. Bad news is that the aspect ratio is poor unless you paid the $$ for a kindle DX which is basically the price of the iPad. No auto rotate via sensors, but there is a button for landscape.
Basically, the kindle is great for standard trade paperbacks with no pictures. And kindle is subsidizing their ebooks. But nothing with a large format or with color. And their format is not very standard, like iPad's epub format. I wonder what O'Reilly is planning? My bet is that all the tech books will be there pronto, they already release books in pdf before they release paper, and by as much as 0.5 year.
Don't get me wrong: even though the Amazon web site does not manage kindle media well, and the device has some quirks, its still absfab, and the charge lasts for a week! But for some uses it is amateurish. I bet the iPad eventually wins the ebook battle if for no other reason that they leave the pricing and marketing up to the publishers, and use standard formats.
We definitely are not planning on parting with our kindle, but on the other hand, are getting an iPad .. if not the first version, the second which will have a web cam.
-- Owen ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
