Kindle for iPad

Apple's own iBooks (Free, ) has been the much heralded iPad ($699 direct, ) e-reading app, but Amazon's competing e-book platform also has a free app: Kindle for iPad. It offers distinct advantages, such as having ten times more titles than iBooks, and a number of features not available in iBooks. On the downside, its books are even more proprietary than Apple's, which can at least come in the open EPUB standard.
Kindle for iPad: Getting and reading e-books

Kindle has no built-in store like iBooks, so I had to launch the web browser and shop Kindle titles on Amazon.com. iBooks lets you quickly switch between the store and the reader, something that's not possible with the Kindle setup. Kindle's bookstore offers a finer level of subject categorization than iBooks. History, for example, has 14 subcategories, such as Africa, Ancient, and Military. iBooks has one general "History" category.

More importantly, the Kindle store offers approximately ten times as many titles as iBooks. Apple only claims "tens of thousands of books" in comparison with Kindle's 450,000 and Barnes & Noble's 1 million eBooks for its Nook ($259 direct, ) e-reader (and its software readers for PC, Mac, iPhone, iPod touch, and soon, iPad too). New Kindle books and New York Times bestsellers, but you can also find popular books in the $5.99 to $12.99 price range—on par with prices for iBooks and Nook. None of the iPad book readers offer magazine and newspaper subscriptions yet, but standalone Kindle and Nook devices boast this feature.

Unlike iBooks, Kindle for iPad doesn't support the open EPUB e-book format so I could not download titles from Google Books. In Kindle for iPad's defense, its bookstore does offer a ton of free public domain titles. Neither iBooks nor Kindle can do what the Barnes & Noble nook can, which is to let you borrow books from your public library's website. Still, you can associate an Amazon account with up to six devices running Kindle software, so others can read your e-books on their hardware.

Kindle for iPad has a big advantage over iBooks in that you can read any book you buy on any platform that runs a Kindle app—your Mac, PC, iPhone, or of course a Kindle reader. This comes courtesy of Kindle's wireless Whispersync system, which you can use to sync books (and bookmarks) to all other devices running Kindle software. Subscriptions to newspapers cannot be shared on multiple devices. I expect Apple will make iBooks apps for other platforms at some point, but for now the iPad is your only choice.

Kindle for iPad: Reading e-books
Kindle for iPad suffers some of the same drawbacks inherent to using the iPad as an eBook reader: the difficulty of reading outdoors due to glare, the eyestrain potential from the backlit LED screen, and the size and heft that makes holding it in some positions difficult. However, Kindle for iPad takes steps that iBooks doesn't to alleviate eyestrain by letting users change the display to a black background with white text (which some may find easier to bear).

The app can duplicate iBook's beautiful page-turn animation, though this is off by default and lacks the little detail of showing the last page's ink bleeding through. In addition to the reverse text view just noted, I could change the background to an off-white hue for a more book-like look and, as in iBooks, you can choose from any of the devices fonts, adjust text size to your taste, and adjust the backlight brightness.

Another feature not available in iBooks is the ability to hide the status bar at the top of the iPad's screen telling you about your wireless signals and battery life: I really appreciate how this allows an immersive, distraction-free book-reading experience. A simple finger tap redisplays the status, along with the menu options for bookmarking, chapter, and font settings.

But iBooks has a couple of tricks of its own that Kindle for iPad can't match—color images are probably the biggest, particularly necessary for things like textbooks or children's books. Another critical feature absent from Kindle for iPad is iBook's built in dictionary, which is noteworthy because it's a feature of the physical Kindle e-reader. Apple has done a good job with these helpful tools, and I'm hoping the only reason they're missing in the Kindle software is the newness of the app.

Kindle for iPad: Verdict
If you can't find the book you're looking for, no e-reader doodad is going to help you. With about ten times as many books available, Kindle for iPad has a real selection advantage over iBooks, but Barnes & Noble even doubles that, and adds support for borrowing public library books. In addition to the larger book selection, Kindle for iPad offers a couple of advantages over iBooks, particularly its reverse text view and ability to hide the iPad status bar. If you had to decide right now on an e-reader for your iPad (and don't require color images or a built-in dictionary), I'd recommend the Kindle for iPad for its much larger selection and reading niceties.