There are a few things the Apple iPad isn’t good at—making phone calls, for example, and taking pictures. But then there are some things it is excellent for, like browsing the Internet, going through news feeds, doing the social networking thing, playing games (especially board games), watching movies and reading books.
The iPad has already been talked about to death and every single aspect of it discussed to the last detail but, if you’ll indulge me for a bit, I’d like to talk about how the two most prominent book-reading apps on the iPad fare against each other.
One of my fellow writers at Macworld, Lex Friedman, hosts an excellent Tumblr-powered blog and he recently wrote on this very topic. In his comparison, the Kindle app came out on top. I’d read it before having purchased my iPad and was eager to try out both apps and validate his judgement. When I did so, he “challenged me to a duel”. Well, here you go then, Friedman.
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve read one full book in iBooks and a couple of sample chapters in Kindle. In my limited testing, I found iBooks to be a better application overall than Kindle. Let’s start with the cons of Kindle.
Although I love the wallpaper of Kindle, with the Newton-esque kid sitting against a tree silhouetted against a background that dynamically changes according to the actual time of the day, its presentation of books is positively ugly compared to iBooks’s wooden shelves and neatly bound hardcovers arranged in perfect order.
There is no fancy page-turn animation The page-turn animation isn’t enabled by default in the Kindle and you get from one page to the next simply by sliding the current one to the left. How very utilitarian and ordinary! Even when you enable the animation, it does not feel realistic at all. iBooks, on the other hand, does a neat animation that actually makes you feel like you’re turning a real page. It’s no substitute for the real thing—and I would like them to make it even more realistic, if possible—but it’s certainly the closest thing to it that I’ve seen.
Kindle also does not give you the option to look words up in a dictionary from within the app or search for text within the book. These are major issues for me. I do not use these features very often but I sometimes do and they’re one of the main reasons I was so excited about switching to digital reading. What’s more, it even takes away the cut/copy/paste menu that the operating system provides by default.
It does, however, give you options for highlighting text within books and adding notes to it, something iBooks doesn’t do. I personally do not have any need for these features but I can see how they might be useful with textbooks and the like. In any case, they aren’t features I miss in iBooks.
For some reason, Kindle also does not have a built-in bookstore to purchase books from. It has been speculated that this may be due to Apple’s restrictions but, given that Marvel and several other media publishers offer built-in stores within their respective apps, I highly doubt that. I would offer a theory of my own as to why they do not do it but I honestly have no idea. I don’t buy a lot of books (and never will until they either start pricing them with international markets in mind or start bundling audiobooks with the purchase of every e-book) but it just seems like a major omission to me.
Lastly, there seems to be no easy way to add your own books to Kindle. I’m not a big fan of iBooks’s wired-to-iTunes-only syncing but at least it’s as easy as dragging any e-book in the ePub format into the iTunes window and syncing the iPad. Even the sync itself is several times faster than it is with the iPhone. With the Kindle, and please correct me if I am wrong, I think you’re just stuck with the Kindle Store (though I’ll admit to not having thoroughly looked into this matter).
One of the excellent features of Kindle that Lex points out is that it allows you to have the text displayed as white on black. Coupled with the built-in brightness control, this gives you an immense range, from fully bright to ridiculously dim. If it otherwise had feature parity with iBooks, this would have acted as the tipping point for me to vote in favour of Kindle.
(Depending on the brightness and contrast of your screen, you may or may not be able to read the text in the picture above. That, ladies and gentlemen, is the Kindle app on the iPad at its dimmest setting.)
The first complaint Lex has against iBooks is one that is not actually a complaint at all. He says that he has already acquired a vast collection of books in his Kindle library over the past year and he’d rather just add to it than start all over again with iBooks, thank you very much. That’s perfectly understandable but, of course, I have no such mental barrier to overcome, so it is a moot point for me.
Along with its very neatly integrated search and dictionary lookup features, iBooks also gives you the option to look up words and phrases on Google or Wikipedia. The problem is that they kick you out of the app instead of bringing up a WebView within iBooks itself. To the best of my knowledge, Apple never uses in-app modal WebViews, so it’s not surprising to me that they aren’t using it here. I agree with Lex though: if you use those features with any amount of regularity, it will probably get on your nerves.
His last and most major complaint against iBooks is (a) the lack of the white-on-black viewing mode, as mentioned above; and (b) iBooks’s inability to remember its brightness settings between relaunches and even when you lock the screen and unlock it again. On the first point, I completely agree; it would be great to have that option in iBooks.
The second point, however, is not entirely true. While it does have a bug where it resets the brightness to its original setting when you lock the screen and unlock it again, it does not do so between launches. I can only assume that the problem existed in the previous version of the app and that it has now been fixed, but it sure doesn’t happen anymore.
On a related note, Lex mentions that the iPad’s brightness control does not properly adjust the contrast when you turn it down, citing Kindle and Instapaper as examples of apps that handle this better. While I understand his complaint, it does not seem to me that the latter apps are doing it differently. Since Apple does not give developers access to the brightness control API, I know that what they are doing is technically dissimilar to iBooks’s approach but the results look to be exactly the same to my untrained eye.
Even with the features that iBooks lacks (primarily the white-on-black layout) and the bugs it has, I find it to be decisively better than Kindle, simply because it is so much more polished. I want to give up my real books and use iBooks because it is so amazingly well designed. I know the charm of these superfluous effects is usually short-lived but I have been using it for over two weeks and haven’t tired of it yet.
(iBooks on the iPad displaying a book in landscape mode at its dimmest setting.)
Of note is also the fact that iBooks can show you a single or double page spread based on the orientation you’re holding it in (or rather, it’s locked in), something Kindle does not do.
That said, there are several features Apple needs to add on a priority basis to make it more useful, mostly in the area of book management. It bugs me no end that there are absolutely no automatic sorting options in the bookshelf mode. I’d have expected an Apple app to have a level of finesse that goes above and beyond your expectations, and some swanky page-turn animations and a nice grain design for the wooden shelf are not it.
Why aren’t the books sorted by genres and authors and the shelves labeled accordingly, like you find in bookstores and libraries? Why is there no way to add a detailed description and other metadata information for books within the iTunes interface and why don’t these details show up in iBooks? Why, oh why, does iTunes ask for song, artist and album info for every goddamn thing you add to it, whether it be a book or a movie or a song?
I can already see how much of a nuisance managing the library will become once it swells to a hundred books or more. Hopefully, Apple will have released an update that adds some of the features I’ve mentioned above by the time I hit that milestone.
All said and done, I’d like to conclude that, despite its missing features and that nasty bug, I prefer iBooks over Kindle, if due to nothing else then just the amount of polish it shows. If reading books with iBooks’s white background strains your eyes though, go give Kindle a look and maybe its white-on-black mode will be more to your liking.
-Aayush
Aayush Arya is a student from India and regular contributor for 
