each video. Scher’s animations are amazing. I’m not sure if “vooks” are the future of books—but there’s no question that the iPad gives authors and publishers much more room to experiment than the Kindle. (That’s one of the arguments I make in an essay published in the May/June issue of Technology Review.)
What it really comes down to is this: If you’re already thinking about spending $259 just to read e-books, why not spend an additional $240 so that you can watch movies, listen to music, read comic books, play games, surf the Web, manage your e-mail, edit documents, browse maps, play a synthesizer, create digital paintings, search for recipes, make Skype calls, and, of course, keep up with your friends on Twitter and Facebook?
Okay, I promised I’d say something about the Kindle’s advantages over the iPad. It’s a shorter list.
1. Weight and handling. The iPad weighs a pound and a half; the Kindle weighs one-third as much. Try using an iPad for a while and then go back to a Kindle: the Amazon device feels amazingly light and airy. If you like to hold your reading device in one hand while you read, the Kindle is for you. The iPad, by contrast, requires a perch, such as your chest or lap or an airline tray table.
2. Battery life. The iPad’s batteries last a surprisingly long time, at least compared to MacBooks or iPhones. I’ve gone three days without having to plug mine in. But the Kindle still wins out here. If you turn off the wireless card on your Kindle, it can go for weeks on a single charge. (That said, if you just want something to read on a cross-country plane flight, the iPad’s batteries are more than sufficient.)
3. Periodicals. You can subscribe to hundreds of magazines and newspapers on the Kindle. New issues are delivered wirelessly and automatically (assuming you haven’t turned off the wireless to save battery power). In a major disappointment, the Kindle iPad and iPhone apps can only retrieve your archived books, not your periodicals—so all my copies of the New Yorker and the Atlantic are stranded on my Kindle. And there’s no such thing as an iBooks magazine or newspaper: Apple is leaving it to the individual publishers to create their own iPad apps. So far there isn’t much of a selection, and the price per issue is far higher than what you’d pay for a Kindle version.
4. The “hard core reader” issue. In a TechFlash article back in January, Scott Jacobson, a former Amazon executive, gave five reasons why the iPad is not a Kindle killer. Jacobson’s Reason No. 1 was that the Kindle already works perfectly well for serious readers who just want to immerse themselves in a good book—in other words, people who are more interested in Jane Austen’s Emma than in Alicia Silverstone in “Clueless.” “There is a segment of the market…that will prefer a less-expensive device that does one thing really well…And that segment will continue to choose Kindle,” Jacobson wrote. I think this is a good point—and as I think I’ve made clear, I’m not about to throw out my Kindle. I just don’t think this segment is large enough to support a booming hardware business.
Interestingly, Jacobson’s reason No. 5 was “Amazon can’t afford to lose.” That may be a true sentiment—but it’s not exactly a concrete defense of the Kindle. If Amazon really wants to stay in the hardware game, it’s going to have to come up with something stunning. But what’s the point of trying to beat Steve Jobs at his own game?
My own guess is that Bezos & Co. see digital books, not the hardware they appear on, as the real prize. At some point a few years ago they decided they had to build a kick-ass e-book reading device simply to demonstrate that there was a market for books delivered electronically. They’ve now proven that point—Jobs admitted as much in his speech introducing the iPad, when he said “Amazon’s done a great job of pioneering this functionality with the Kindle. We’re going to stand on their shoulders and go a little further.”
The cool thing about the iPad, which Amazon seems to have recognized already by building its own iPad app, is that it’s a great platform for Kindle books. And now that Amazon has jump-started the e-book market, it may be that it can afford to lose, at least on the hardware front, as long as it can still sell e-books to owners of iPads and other gadgets. In fact, maybe Amazon should be happy to let Apple—which has been doing this a lot longer, after all—handle the hardcore engineering that goes into making hardware magical.
For a full list of my columns, check out the World Wide Wade Archive. You can also subscribe to the column via RSS or e-mail, and you can download Pixel Nation, an e-book version of the first 80 columns, as a free PDF file or a $4.99 Kindle edition.
