The Best eBook App for iPad: iBooks or Amazon Kindle?
As some of you may know, I’ve been a devoted Kindle user for quite a while now. I have a Kindle 2 ereader and I use the Kindle iPhone app quite frequently. Since I heard about Apple’s iPad, I’ve been wondering how Apple’s iBooks would compare with Amazon’s Kindle app for iPad.
This review is split into five pages. The first page covers what iBooks has to offer and the second covers Amazon’s Kindle app. The third page compares the two and the fourth page reveals the winner. The last page contains an image gallery of screenshots found in the review.
Please note that this review only covers the iBooks and Kindle apps for the iPad. This is not a review of the iPad versus the Kindle reader. There are pluses and minuses to either hardware device, and examining them goes beyond the scope of this review.
Also, while I think that other companies such as Barnes and Noble will also offer competitive ebook apps, my money is on Amazon and Apple being the dominant providers of ebooks on the iPad platform. Both companies have the money and resources to compete fiercely and I suspect that consumers will gravitate toward one or two ebook apps for their reading needs on the iPad. So that’s why I put both apps head to head in this review.
That said, let’s take a look at iBooks.
iBooks
The iBooks Interface
When I first saw iBooks in the videos on Apple’s site, I was seriously impressed. It looked like a neat ebook app and I found after trying it that my initial impression wasn’t wrong. iBooks has the look and feel of a typical, slick Apple application. You notice that from the minute you start using it.
When you first start iBooks, you see a bookshelf with a copy of Winnie the Pooh.
All of my books on my iBooks bookshelf, including some samples I downloaded to check out before buying the entire books.
Click the book and it opens up with a neat animation that lets you know that you’re in for a real treat for the eyes. At the top of your screen you’ll see the Library, Table of Contents, Screen Brightness, Font and Search icons. Apple has smartly made it very easy to adjust screen brightness right from within iBooks.
You can easily adjust screen brightness from within the iBooks apps.
You can easily adjust font size or choose different fonts. Font selections include:
Baskerville
Cochin
Palatino
Times New Roman
Verdana
Clicking the Library icon takes you back to the bookshelf view, where you can see all of your books. From the bookshelf you can also click the Store icon (more on that later) or you can change how you view your books. The default view is of books on a bookshelf. But, at some point, you may wish to change to a more traditional list. Just click one of the buttons in the upper right corner to change the view. You can also click the Edit button to delete a book.
If you change the view to the list, note that at the bottom of the page you can have your books listed in the following way:
Bookshelf
Titles
Authors
Categories
Clicking the Table of Contents icon takes you to a page where you can view the table of contents and your bookmarks. If you click it again, you’ll be taken back to where you were before. Or you can simply click the Resume bookmark in the upper right corner.
Click the Table of Contents icon to view your book's TOC.
The search icon lets you type in a word and will list where the word appears in each chapter. You can click on a result and you’ll be taken to that page of the book. If you click the search icon again, you’ll see the results listed again and you can make another choice to hop to a different part of the book. The search results menu also has two additional buttons at the bottom: Search Google and Search Wikipedia. Clicking either of them will open Safari and take you to search results in Google or Wikipedia.
While reading text, you can tap a word to bring up a popup menu with three choices: Dictionary, Bookmark or Search. Choosing Dictionary will get you a definition in a pop-up menu. Choosing Bookmark will bookmark that word and turn it orange, and choosing Search will open the search menu. If you tap the bookmarked word again you can unbookmark it or change the highlight to yellow, green, blue, pink or purple.
If you want to make the controls at the top and bottom of the screen disappear, just tap anywhere on the screen once. To bring them back, tap again.
Navigation & Landscape Mode
You turn the page by tapping the screen or you can grab the page and slowly turn it, just like you would with a real book. The page turning animation is great and helps give you the impression you are reading a print book. You can also navigate by sliding the bar at the bottom of your screen forward or backward. There’s also an indicator in the bottom right corner that tells you how many pages you have left to go in a chapter.
Landscape mode is even cooler than the default portrait view. Your book splits into two pages, one on the left and one on the right. It’s as close to reading a print book as you’ll probably get on an electronic device. Personally, I enjoyed the two-page view more than the single page view. It just felt more like reading a print book to me than the single page view.
The iBooks Store
If you click the Store icon when looking at your bookshelf, the bookshelf turns around like a secret passage and the iBooks store appear. This is a very neat animation and, while it’s not necessary, it’s indicative of the level of detail that Apple has applied to the iBooks app. They clearly wanted people to have a great experience and it shows in little details like the store loading animation.
The iBooks store is slick and directly integrated into the iBooks app.
Once the store loads, you’ll see Library and Categories icons in the top left and a search box in the top right. Click the Library button to go back to your library or click Categories to browse the iBooks store via category. The search box obviously lets you search for a particular title.
If you find a book that you’re interested in, click it and a menu will popup that will give you more information about the book. The menu contains the book’s price, customer ratings & reviews, description and other useful information. Click the price button to buy the book and another animation will occur that switches the view back to your bookshelf, with your new book appearing on your bookshelf even as the book’s content is downloaded to your iPad.
Click a book in the store and a menu loads with more information and reviews of the book.
If you aren’t sure about a book, you can opt to have a sample downloaded to your bookshelf. You’ll see the word “Sample” on the book when it appears on your bookshelf. Once the sample has finished downloading, you can start reading to see if you want to buy the book. At the end of the sample, you can opt to click the price button to buy it or, click the Buy icon in the upper left corner (near the Library and Table of Contents icons) at any time while reading the sample book.
The iBooks store is genuinely fun to use and downloading samples can quickly become addictive. Beware though, it may end up costing you some serious money as you could end up buying way more books then you expected. But, hey, you can never have too many books, right?
Now click to the next page and we’ll see what Amazon’s Kindle has to offer.
(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
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Great review, Jim. I have a similar one coming out on makeuseof.com in a few weeks. I really like both the Amazon and iBooks apps. Of course, Amazon beats Apple because of it’s wider selections. But I wish the Kindle for the iPad had the search feature that iBooks has. Also wish that both apps had a embedded notebook, instead of having notes mixed in with bookmarks. I annotate a lot when I read, and the long list of bookmarks and notes in both apps are not that useful in the end.
Hi Bakari,
Thanks, glad you liked it.
I suspect that the Kindle app will get a lot of improvements soon. They know that Apple is a fierce competitor and that they will keep improving iBooks relentlessly. So Amazon has no choice but to match Apple feature for feature and improve the Kindle app’s polish too.
BTW, did you hear that Apple will have a version of iBooks out soon for the iPhone? I’m looking forward to seeing it. It looks like it will sync last pages too:
“iBooks for the iPhone and iPod touch
Apple is also making a version of iBooks that will work on iPhone and iPod touch. It’s essentially a miniature version of iBooks for iPad, replete with the bookshelf and access to the iBookstore. You’ll be able to access the same library of books from any of your iDevices, and bookmarks and last pages will wireless sync between them.”
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/04/apple-announces-multitasking-and-more-for-iphone-os-40.ars
Hi Jim – Good review
I do not have my iPad yet (I ordered the 3G version) so I can only comment on the iPhone version of the kindle app, but it is a universal app (works on both the iPhone and iPad), so I would guess it works the same. Although if not, maybe you can reply. The iPhone app certainly does do annotations, just select a word and it offers the option to highlight it or type a note.
In fact the ability to do annotations and sync between platforms offers a compelling advantage to the kindle app I would think. It is much easier to update a software app on the app store than to build out the infrastructure for keeping what may be millions of users notes and bookmarks, as wells library settings, all online. I expect that Amazon will improve the buying experience on the iPad and the reading experience eye candy as well (not a very big programming job). That being said, Apple certainly could match the syncing capability and through integration of the iBook store and the app store to provide more seamless “App Books” (like the current The Elements or the various magazines) Apple could do things that Amazon can’t. (Think integration of iTunes U with Textbooks, for instance, or a book on music theory with a piano keyboard)
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Nice comparison review; any chance that you’ll update it when iBooks is released for iOS4? Then it’ll have the same features as “Whispersync” and be able to take notes.
That pretty much leaves amount of content as Amazon’s only edge, right? It’s a critical difference, though, as can be seen from iTunes movie and TV offerings.
One thing you didn’t comment on in that regard was price differences for books on each app- what’s your experience?
Hi Nathan,
I’ll probably do a review of iBooks for iPhone though I don’t think I’ll write a comparative review with the Amazon’s iphone app. I have been buying books mostly from Amazon, mostly because they have a significantly larger selection of books (and because iBooks isn’t on the iPhone…yet…and I like to read at the gym).
Apple is missing one critical feature though. Amazon lets you change the background to black and the text to off-white. I’ve found that this works wonderfully for night reading. As far as I know, Apple has not announced any plans to customize the background.
I really, really do NOT like black text on white background for night reading. It’s icky.