Kindle on the iPad
I bought my first Kindle book. I bought it on my computer, and when I started up the Kindle app on the iPad, it magically appeared. While the UI of the Kindle app is not as nice as iBooks, it's not at all bad. I hear the Barnes & Noble one is horrible. From what I can tell, because the Kindle books are created principally for use with their monochrome device, none of the images aside from the book covers have any color. For most books, this isn't really a drawback, but it could be for some. There are two major pros to the Kindle app that has me convinced that I will not exclusively be reading iBooks:
- The sheer number of books available for Kindle that aren't (yet) available in the iBookstore.
- Kindle has apps for desktop computers (Mac, PC) that lets you read the books you bought and keeps track of what page you're on between devices! That's very cool...and not at all good for my productivity at work.
I wouldn't be surprised if Apple released a desktop iBook reader pretty soon. At the moment, I don't even think you can get to the iBookstore from iTunes, only from the iBook app on the iPad.