[...]it’s exactly that part of media consumption, reading, that reveals what’s missing on the iPad: good typography.

Signs that type took a backseat in the iPad’s development were clear back in January when Steve Jobs demoed the device, revealing just four uninspired and uninformed font options in iBooks. Apple also went with full justification without hyphenation, learning nothing from the Kindle’s spacing woes. These decisions were small or unnoticeable to the millions of future iPad buyers watching the announcement. But they stuck out like a sore thumb to typographers, whose job it is to make small, unnoticeable decisions that make text easier and more enjoyable to read. For those of us who hoped that a device meant for reading would be designed for reading, with all the typographic details well-considered and implemented, the announcement was disappointing.

Well worth a read, as Coles goes into minute detail. Outside the scope of my review, but I agree with every word.

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Anyway. Their big push worked—at least with me—and they are now officially On My Radar. The fact that they worked their asses off to be on the iPad on day one helped to increase mindshare, in my opinion, and only makes others *ahem*B&N*ahem* who ostensibly have more resources but are still MIA look foolish by comparison (and how do I know that they worked their asses off? Because they said so. On their blog. Transparency and accessibility, remember?).

So I decided to give them a try, along with iBooks and Kindle, as the three initial ereader apps on my iPad. Here we go.

Kobo’s home screen is similar to iBooks’ home screen, in that it presents you with a bookshelf metaphor as its default view. It also offers you seven different styles for these bookshelves, which, as far as eye candy goes, isn’t a bad deal. I happen to not really dig any of them, so I stick with the default white shelves on a white background, but that’s ok—having the choices there are a nice touch. In addition to bookshelves, Kobo denotes recently-read or in-progress books by dressing them up with a bookmark, which can also be styled—you have a choice of eight styles, from the serious leather bookmark, to a silly monkeychain contraption. Again, not my cup of tea (I’m a militant minimalist), but it’s fine if you’re into that sorta stuff. The top of the home screen has three sections: “I’m Reading” invokes an overlay with whatever books are currently in-progress (which kinda seems superfluous at first, since you already have this information by seeing which of your books are bookmarked, but it makes sense once you anticipate having a couple hundred books on your bookshelf); “My Library” shows you all your books, and the “Store” link takes you to the Kobo store, in-app (more on the store below). In addition to bookshelf view, you can also look at your books in list mode, which organizes them into two columns. Both bookshelf and list view can be sorted by title, author, or recently read. On tapping a book to read, it seems that there is some sort of animation that’s supposed to happen (it looks like the book cover is supposed to grow to fill the screen, then fade out into the book proper), but I’ve yet to be able to invoke it cleanly—either the image of the cover floats off screen, or grows out of proportion, or the animation is jerky and laggy.

Reading interface

The reading interface on Kobo is clean and well-designed. On top, you’ve got the title of the book, and on tapping the center of the screen you get a slide down panel with a link back to the home screen; a link to the TOC; a link to an “overview”, which seems to be a stand-alone screen with a thumbnail of the cover and marketing copy (why I would need all this after I’ve bought a book is beyond me); and a link to your list of bookmarks. Down below, you have the chapter number, and the page count within that chapter—you never get a full page count, which is unfortunate, since I have no way of gauging how far along I am in the entire book. On tapping the center of the screen, you get a slide up panel with a slider for scrubbing within the current chapter (as opposed to through the whole book); type size and font selection popover; in-app brightness slider; a dog-earing button; and a settings button which invokes display settings and page transition options via a popover. The use of slide-up-and-down panels is different from the fade-in-and-out controls on iBooks and Kindle, and makes the app feel a bit claustrophobic when the controls are displayed. Naturally, you get both portrait and landscape view, and in landscape view you get only one column, as with Kindle. This sounds like a bad thing, but it’s not—as I mentioned yesterday, I’d much rather adjust the type size up in order to hit the 65 character per line sweet spot on a one-column landscape view, than adjust the type size down in the case of a two-column view.

Unfortunately, I’m finding Kobo to be quite crashy: it crashed on tapping on an entry in the TOC. Crashed on going back to the home screen. Crashed on the overview screen. Crash crash crash. As a matter of fact, aside from the first iteration of Evernote on iPad (they’ve since updated, and all is right with the world—I motherfucking HEART Evernote, and can’t live without it), this is the crashiest app I’ve run on my iPad. Rather unfortunate.

Customization

Kobo gives you options for page transitions, as I mention above. You can either choose a page flip, which shrinks the current page leftwards to reveal the following page underneath; a page fade, which simply dissolves the current page and reveals the following one; or page curl, which gives you the same page curling effect seen on iBooks and Kindle, but with a bottom-up rather than right-left motion. None of these transitions are particularly smooth: the page flip feels utterly unnatural as it distorts the text on a horizontal axis, the page fade is perfectly serviceable but can be disorienting, and the page curl just feels wrong, since the bottom-up motion gives the impression that you’re flipping through a top-bound notepad rather than flipping through the pages of a side-bound codex. You can also choose no transition, which just cuts from one page to the next.

You have a choice of four typefaces on Kobo: two serifs and two sans—Georgia, Baskerville, Trebuchet, and Verdana. Better selection than Kindle, but not as varied as iBooks. Additionally, you have a slider for adjusting type size, which runs from damn-near illegibly small type to bigger than Kindle but not quite as honkin’ big as iBooks. You’ve also got the ability to toggle “Night mode”, which is what Kobo calls the white-text-on-black-background mode, and you can also turn on “Kobo Styling”, which, as far as I can tell, opens up the leading (the space between lines of type) a bit on the page, but doesn’t do much else. While welcome (most books I’ve sampled on Kobo have tight, tight leading), I don’t understand the point behind it—I may very well be missing something here. Chime in in the comments if you know something I don’t.

Dictionary, Notes and Search

Are non-existent. A damned shame. ‘Nuff said.

Store

The in-app store is a good step—you can browse just-released books, NYT bestsellers (fiction and non-fic), and “Today’s Top 50″ books. There’s also a teaser ad for News & Magazine content that’s supposedly coming soon, which I find interesting and worth following up on (if I remember down the line). As with iBooks, lack of discoverability is an issue, since it seems that you can only go deep into the NYT bestseller lists, and browse by category, which seems a bit tedious, and given publisher’s, ah, issues with metadata, is probably not too practical. If you don’t know what you’re looking for, and know to search for it using the search field, you’re going to be flying blind. Additionally, once you decide to buy a book, you’re taken out of the app and into Mobile Safari in order to complete your purchase. Once more, as with the Kindle app, this may be out of Kobo’s hands, but it still gives Apple’s iBooks the leg up.

Conclusion

Kobo is a valiant first effort, but damn, is it buggy and crashy. I’m willing to overlook that for now, since they probably didn’t have a test unit on which to do real-world iPad tests (and they worked their asses off to be on iPad on day one, which counts, B&N, it fucking counts), but they’d better come out with a stable update soon, because neither Kindle nor iBooks (natch) exhibit any buggy behaviour at all, let alone full app crashes. Where Kindle and iBooks complement each other, each making up for the other’s deficiencies to a certain degree, Kobo doesn’t really add anything compelling that I’d feel like I was missing in the other apps. In an agency model world where price is no longer a differentiating factor, ereaders and retailers need to make with the value adds in other ways, and one of the best ways to do that is through a rock-solid or superior user experience. In this respect, Kobo brings nothing new to the party, unfortunately.

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In crafting Kindle for iPad, I’m assuming that the Kindle team took some pointers (or hell, even some code) from their late, lamented acquisition, Stanza (yeah, I know Stanza’s not really dead, it just feels that way sometimes). Kindle is a full featured ereading app which is just as good, in terms of functionality, as iBooks, minus the cheesy print book-like trappings of Apple’s software.

For starters, the home screen is useful: I can view books in icon or list mode, and I can also sort them by author, title, or recently-read. Nifty. There’s also a link to the Amazon bookstore, but more on that below. You also have the option of switching your view between locally downloaded books and your archive of Amazon purchases in the cloud, from which you can download previously bought books. There’s also a nice easter egg in there: depending on the time of day, the sky in the illustration on the home screen background changes from day to dawn/dusk to night. At night, the little reading dude’s face is awash in the glow from the ebook reader he’s holding in his hands, and the stars in the night sky twinkle (and sometimes shoot). Adorable. As far as superfluous eye candy goes, I guess I’d rather have it in the home screen than in the actual reading interface.

Reading interface

Kindle also does the page-curling effect for turning a page, like iBooks (albeit not as elegantly). However, Kindle dispenses with iBooks’ hokey imitation print book aesthetic, and devotes the entire screen to words on the page, which is a good thing. You also only get one page/column in landscape mode, which I prefer, since I can make type size larger in order to hit that typographic sweet spot of around 65 characters per line, as opposed to having to make the type smaller to achieve the same sweet spot in iBooks. The running head info is pretty straightforward and expected: on top, a button to take you back to the home screen, the title of the book, and an attractive bookmark icon, which resembles a highly stylized book ribbon. Along the bottom, you have a scrubber for navigating the book quickly; an arrow button which takes you to the last place you were in the book (in case you overdo it with the scrubber); a button which invokes a popover menu which lists the title page, the TOC, and a link to go to a specific location in the book by typing it in; a button which calls up the type size, brightness and reading styles, and a button which syncs the current place in the book with the cloud, to determine the last place read. Additionally, there is an indicator below the scrubber bar that lets you know what your location is in the book, along with a percentage of how far along you are. The percentage is good to have, since this location business is nigh-uninterpretable. I mean, why cant they just say something human-parse able, like, say “page x of y”, like iBooks does? Instead, l get “Location 2874-2879″, whatever the hell that means. Again, thank goodness for that percentage count. Another great feature is the ability to sync reading places with other Amazon-connected devices: iPhones, computers, and the Kindle hardware device. I can only hope that, if Apple ever releases a version of iBooks for the iPhone, it will also boast this very handy functionality (UPDATE, 08 Apr 1:57PM EST: Apple just announced iBooks for iPhone during their iPhone OS 4 presentation, and it will indeed offer inter-device syncing. Yay!).

Customization

Kindle’s page stylings are slightly more complete than iBooks, in some respects. For starters, it gives you three options for page display: black text on white background, a sepia-styled brown text on cream background, and the reversed white text on black background favored by people who prefer it in order to avoid eye strain. Good on Kindle for providing these options. They also include an in-app screen brightness slider. However, type sizes are limited to five choices, from legal-text small to not quite that big (especially when compared to iBooks’ largest type size, which I referred to yesterday a ‘honkin’ huge’, and I meant it). This is somewhat surprising, since one of the hardware Kindle device’s main attractions is the ability to make type really really large, which is helpful to people hard of sight. Additionally, Kindle doesn’t offer any font selections. You’re stuck with Amazon’s choice of typeface.

Highlighting and Notes

While Kindle doesn’t include dictionary or search functionality (boo), it does allow for making in-line notes on a book, which is very useful. Coupled with the ability to email documents to your device/app via Amazon’s cloud, I can see this actually being useful for editors or other people who work with text (although it’s still far, far from being any kind of robust document annotation tool, let alone actual editing). Selecting a word or passage invokes a Highlight/Note popover, from which you can type a note which shows up as a graphical superscript. There doesn’t seem to be a way to display all your notes as a list, like you can display bookmarked text in iBooks.

Store

There’s a link to the Amazon bookstore on the home screen, of course, but that simply takes you out of the app, into the Mobile Safari browser, and the regular Amazon online store. It’s cumbersome and tedious, and other than for one test purchase, I haven’t bothered buying any more books from Amazon on the iPad, especially since purchasing via iBooks is so damn simple. It’s unfortunate that Amazon’s legendary ease of purchase doesn’t translate to the iPad. I suspect that there’s some good reasons for this—I’ve heard apocryphal reports that Apple disallowed in-app purchasing for other ereader apps, and even if they haven’t, I could see how hooking an app’s in-app purchasing into Amazon’s catalogue and accounts would be challenging. That said, Amazon still has a substantial advantage: the size of its catalogue. If I can’t find something in iBooks, I’ll probably hit Amazon instead. And of course, since there isn’t a way to access the iBooks store from outside the iPad, if I’m on my computer, and I want to buy a book, Amazon is still the best game in town.

Another big drawback is, of course, Amazon’s obstinate refusal to support the ePub format. While I can load any non-DRMed ePub ebooks into iBooks, I’m stuck with Amazon’s proprietary .azw format (or, flying spaghetti monster forbid, a Topaz format book) on Kindle. While things aren’t too dire on the consumer friendliness front regarding the various flavours of book DRM on the iPad, it’s still frustrating and annoying that Amazon is trying to play that old proprietary format game that’s worked out so well for other companies (Sony, I’m looking at you, you minidisc, memory stick, .lit, atrac loving idiots).

Conclusion

In general, the Kindle for iPad app is a very good ereader, a definite and dramatic improvement over the previous Kindle on iPhone app, and oddly complementary to Apple’s iBooks—they seem to pick up each others’ slack rather neatly, and would probably make a killer ereader app if combined into some sort of a Franken-app. As it stands, the serious iPad bookworm is probably well served to have both these apps installed, instead of choosing one over the other (good thing they’re both free). Tomorrow, I’ll be covering the Kobo app, and we’ll find out if serious iPad bookworms need to add yet another reading app to their iPad.

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I can only assume that this is more catering to the “your mom” demographic, providing environments that are comfortable and familiar in order to ease the leap from a physical to digital lifestyle. I understand that, and can respect the idea. But while this approach looks beautiful in Calendar, it falls absolutely flat on its face in Contacts (especially in portrait view), and is somewhere in between on iBooks, where the entire reading interface looks like either a single page in portrait view, or a double-page spread in landscape view, complete with receding edges of subsequent pages, a simulated gutter, and just the hint of a cover lying flat behind the stacked pages. While I’m willing to make an allowance for designing the iBooks app for “your mom”, I generally find ereaders that try to mimic physical books kinda silly. iBooks is not a print book, nor should it look like one. Constraining the reading experience to the limitations of a different packaging form eliminates the ability to be truly innovative with presentation, and the trappings of the aesthetic treatment end up becoming an unwelcome distraction while reading, at least for me.

The home screen is dressed up like a fancy bookcase, as I said, and the options for sorting and customization are slim. In bookshelf mode, sorting only happens manually, through a mechanism similar to how you sort and organize apps on your iPad/iPhone’s home screens (tap the Edit button to move covers around on the shelves, as well as delete books). There is an option for viewing books in list mode, where you can search for a book, as well as sort titles by the order you’ve set in the bookshelf, by author, by title, or by category (this last, provided your books have clean and proper metadata. Which they probably won’t, sadly, because publishers as a whole have yet to realize that they need to take good care of their metadata). Other than the “Sample” and “New” badges, there’s also no indication of the status of a book: is it in-progress? Have I finished it? Have I not started it? This is information I could use on the home screen.

Reading interface

As I mentioned, iBooks displays text as a single, right-hand page in portrait mode, and as a double page spread complete with a gutter in landscape mode. I don’t particularly care for this approach, although I can live with it, I suppose. That being said, once you get beyond the distractions of the “look pa, I’m a real book” interface, the running heads of the iBooks interface are probably my favourite of the three apps I’ve been playing with. When you first come into a book, all of the in-reader elements appear. On top: a link to your library, a link to the book’s TOC and list of bookmarks, an in-app screen brightness slider, a button for choosing a typeface and changing the size of type, and a search function. At the foot of the page, you have a handy slider for scrubbing through chapters, as well as a thoughtful “x pages left in this chapter” message. As someone who constantly has to tell himself “I’ll just get to the end of this chapter and I’ll go to sleep”, this last is very welcome. While reading, you can tap on the middle of the screen, everything disappears and you simply have the title of the book on top, and a page count on bottom. The page count is clever, as well: it tells you that you’re on, say, page 14 of 1472. But if you enlarge the type size, it will also refresh the page count, telling you that you’re now on page 15 of 1602. Handy, useful, and smart.

Much has been made about iBooks’ page-flipping effects, but again, while they’re expertly executed, with a meticulous eye for detail (you can actually see the real text of a page, faded and in reverse, through a curled page), I find this kind of eye candy hokey, distracting, and have little use for it.

On Covers and illustrations

I was in a meeting with Tor Books art director Irene Gallo today, and she took a look at the cover art for some of the books on my iPad. She was blown away by how beautiful the covers looked on the bright, high-quality screen— “This looks better than print!” she exclaimed. It’s a shame that image display in iBooks is so static and limited to the live type area of iBooks; covers and interior illustrations are screaming to be pinched and zoomed, and seen full-bleed on the screen. Hopefully this will happen in future versions of iBooks.

Customization

Font customization is robust on iBooks; you can switch between five fonts (four serif, one sans: Baskerville, Cochin, Palatino, Times New Roman, and Verdana—nothing fancy, but solid, workhorse typefaces which offer a good selection of options for a good reading experience), and you can increase type size substantially, along a ten-step scale from honkin’ huge to legal-text small.

Style customization, however, is unfortunately non-existent. In a move that’s characteristic of Apple (“you’ll look at things how we tell you to look at them, ’cause we know what you need better than you do”), there’s no alternative to the black-text-on-white-background style that iBooks offers, which is a shame, since I would have expected at the very least a reverse, white-text-on-black-background view, which is kind of standard on most good ereaders out there, and helps some people deal with the eye strain associated with reading on a backlit screen.

Dictionary, Bookmarking and Search

Double-tapping on a word brings up the Copy/Dictionary/Bookmark/Search popover menu. iBooks has a great built-in dictionary, although there’s no way to edit that dictionary, in order to add words to it. As a science fiction and fantasy reader (genres with a penchant for strange or made-up words), I come across odd words all the time. It would be nice to add them to the dictionary, if only for later personal reference.

Bookmarking works as expected, again going with a physical (albeit mixed) analogue: mimicking a highlighter (you can change the colours of the highlighter). Apart from the bookmarking/highlighting feature, however, iBooks offers absolutely no other annotation tools.

Search is powerful and fast, as is the case everywhere else on the iPad, and the search results popover display offers handy links to “Search Google” and “Search Wikipedia” (I think I may have to re-read Neal Stephenson’s Barroque Cycle on iBooks, just for the Wikipedia integration).

Store

You can buy books directly from within iBooks by flipping your bookshelf—secret passageway style—over to the iBookstore, the new section of the iTunes store and the focus of all the recent agency model drama in the publishing industry. The initial selection is slim, and the bookstore suffers from the same lack of easy discoverability/browseability that plagues the rest of the iTunes stores—a situation that is not helped by the absolutely craptacular state of book metadata coming from publishers. Have I mentioned that publishers really need to step up their metadata game? No, really. Seriously, publishers. You’re shooting yourselves—and your authors—in the foot by not making sure all your books are properly tagged.

But if you know what you’re looking for, buying is dangerously easy, as in the rest of the iTunes store (oh, so that’s where my paycheck went. Curse you, Steve Jobs). Since iBooks is the only one of the three reader apps that employs in-app buying (both Kindle and Kobo require a trip to Mobile Safari for prosecuting the entire sale and the final step in the transaction, respectively), it enjoys the same ease-of-use and simplicity that, say, the Amazon bookstore enjoys on the Kindle device. Home field advantage, I suppose. This is no small thing, though: ease of purchase will probably keep me using iBooks as a primary ereader app on the iPad, especially if I’m buying a book on the go, on the device. If a book is on iBooks and on Amazon, I’m going to buy it on iBooks (yes, regardless of price discrepancies, which, under the agency model, shouldn’t exist anyway), because as long as I’m on the iPad, it’s the easiest way to do so. I’ve always said that Amazon’s killer app is its ease of purchase; well, on the iPad, Apple is beating Amazon at its own game.

Another very important factor which will make iBooks my main reading app is the fact that iBooks not only uses ePub as its default format, but treats ePub files in much the same way that iTunes treated MP3s before Apple strong-armed the music industry into getting rid of DRM: Any ePub files you download from iBookstore will be infested with DRM, sure, but you can also add DRM-free ePubs from elsewhere to iBooks via iTunes. And if you think that Apple isn’t gearing up to strong arm publishers in the same way they did the record labels, I’ve got a bridge I’d like to sell you. That day can’t come soon enough, in my opinion (I predict no later than the end of 2011/early 2012).

Conclusion

iBooks is a perfectly good ereading app, despite its affectation towards mimicking the physical book. The integration with the iBookstore makes it a killer, especially once the selection on the store becomes more robust. One drawback is that there’s no iBooks app for the iPhone, so I can’t read on my smaller device, as I can on Kindle for iPad and iPhone, let alone sync my place in a book across devices. Maybe this is a temporary situation—I certainly hope so! Tomorrow, I take on the Kindle app for iPad. In the meantime, chime in below.

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So I’ve got it, I’ve been playing with it, and by all accounts, it’s amazing. All that and a bag o chips, if you will. And I most certainly will, thanks very much. It’s a fantastic media consumption device, and ebooks are no exception. But before we get to ebooks, I want to share some overall thoughts about the device in general, since the iPad isn’t really an ebook reading device as much as it is a general purpose appliance that happens to also be an ebook reader, much like a laptop is a general purpose device that happens to also be an ebook readar. Only with the iPad, its form makes it ideal for that particular application. More on this later, but first, the general impressions.

The first thing that I reacted to was the device’s heft. At 1.5 pounds, it’s by no means heavy, but it’s certainly not as comfortable to hold in one hand as I expected it to be. I can certainly see small children and the elderly having trouble handling it. And since small children and the elderly fall into what I like to call the “your mom” category of users, which the iPad is ideally suited for, I suspect that the weight will be an issue for some. By all means, if you’re a small child or an elderly person, go try one out at your friendly neighborhood Apple store before you commit. The rest of us will probably develop highly muscular forearms over time. As my colleague Ryan Chapman says: “Having an iPad is like walking around with a newborn: it’s heavier than it looks, everyone wants to touch it, and you feel conspicuous on the subway.” I know I did today.

The initial setup was kind of a drag, as well. You need to connect the iPad to iTunes before you can even start using it, and the initial sync is long and painful. Friendly Apple store staffers are on hand to set it up for you after your initial purchase at the store, and I suspect that this will come in handy for the aforementioned “your mom” demographic. As a self-respecting geek, however, I wouldn’t dream of having any help in setting up a piece of tech (yeah, and instruction manuals are for the weak, too. Nyah.), so I had to sit through the process on my own.

There are some other minor downsides, which others have covered in more detail than I can or should get into here. The Internet is hardly lacking in iPad reviews, after all. Most of the gripes (no multitasking! no USB ports! no camera! not open enough!) I couldn’t care less about—that’s not what this device is about. The iPad is about simplicity, and a humanistic approach to computer-human interaction (Jeff Raskin would be proud, I think). It will change the way we compute, eventually. And, with 300K unit sales in its first day, “eventually” may come sooner than we think.

Initial birthing pains aside, once the iPad is up and running, it flies. I mean this thing is a rocket. Every app springs to life almost instantly. The response of the gorgeous, bright, touchable display is instantaneous, and animations and transitions are fluid and seamless. If there was any doubt before (which there wasn’t), Apple makes the best touch screens in the world, and the iPad is its flagship product in that space. It’s no mere advertising hyperbole when Apple says you can touch the Internet: the iPad has indeed become my favourite web surfing device, and it’s become my primary email, calendaring, and note-taking device (yes, I dig the soft keyboard. I find it quite easy to use).

The battery life, as has been mentioned elsewhere ad nauseam, is impressive. As an example, I left my house yesterday at 8:00 a.m., and my iPad has saw heavy use—from reading on the subway, to taking notes at a meeting, to constant email, to the inevitable show-and-tells to co-workers and passers-by—and it didn’t run out of juice till around 1:30 a.m.

And the apps. By Zeus’ angry beard, the apps. To a New Yorker who misses stargazing, Star Walk is a revelation. The Elements is what your child’s chemistry textbook will look like. The WSJ and NYT apps are my new morning papers (well, the NYT, anyway, since I already am a subscriber. There’s no way I’m giving Murdoch any more of my money. Go stick your overpriced paywall up your ass, Rupes). Comic readers like ComicZeal, the IDW app, and the Marvel app will make me relapse into my long-dormant weekly comic buying habit (hey DC, where the hell are ya?). And Instapaper is bloody brilliant, just indispensable. But more on Instapaper later.

The iPad is also my favorite reading device in general, as you may suspect. Heft issue aside, every other aspect of the iPad is tailor made for consumption: a spacious, bright screen, an industrial design that melts out of your way, and a slim and compact form factor. However, as I mentioned before, the iPad is a completely different animal from uni-tasking ereaders like the Kindle 2, the Sony reader, or the Nook.

The most glaring difference is, of course, its display: instead of a dull eink display, the iPad sports a full colour LCD screen. I’ve never been a big fan of eink (as a colleague of mine says, reading on eink is akin to reading from a wet newspaper), and I read off an LCD display at work, at home and on the go day in and day out, so I have no problem with reading long form works off of a bright, backlit screen. I realize that not everyone is comfortable with this, so your milage may vary. However, I do think it’s unfair to compare a multi-purpose device like the iPad to single purpose ereaders—both from a hardware and software perspective (since refresh rates on eink devices limit what can be done with user interfaces).

Suffice it to say that, heavy, heavy readers aside, if a consumer is looking for a tablet-style device that can read ebooks, the iPad is best-in-class, and I suspect it will stay that way, if the track record of its smaller sibling, the iPhone, in relation to all the other touchscreen smartphones that have come after it is any indication. Dedicated ereading devices will have a niche for the forseeable future, particularly among hard-core readers, people who can’t read on backlit devices, professionals who just need document readers, and other specialty groups. But make no mistake, the Nook, the Sony, and the Kindle (as they exist today) just got got—your average soccer mom is gonna go for the ereader which also surfs the internet (no, the Kindle’s janky browser doesn’t count), plays music, video and podcasts, does contacts, calendars, recipes, notes, maps, rss feeds, games, comics, and whatever else there’s an app for. Game over, done and done.

Within the iPad ecosystem, however, there are a few alternatives for reading books and documents. Here’s where I think some good compare-and-contrast can be useful. Right now, there are three major book reading apps available for the iPad: Apple’s own iBooks, Amazon’s Kindle app for iPad, and the Kobo app, from the outfit formerly known as Shortcovers. Each one of these apps has a store associated with it, where you can buy books that you can only read on that app (hooray for DRM!). In addition to these three, there’s Instapaper, which, while not actually designed for reading books, holds a lot of great lessons for app developers on how to create a pleasurable reading experience.

Over the next few days, I’ll write a bit about each of these apps. I was gonna do it all in one post, but this one kinda got away from me. So first up: stay tuned for tomorrow’s Sleekness Spotlight on iBooks.

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No camera! No additional carriers beyond AT&T! Too big! Too small! Too thin! Too pretty! It’s too proprietary! No Flash! Bah, cry me a river. These people all sound like the same fools who predicted that the iPhone would be a flop (John C. Dvorak, I’m looking at you, you bloody idiot. How is this man still making money from tech punditry?!?!).

But at this point in the game, I think it’s clear that the iPad is an evolutionary, rather than revolutionary device, and that’s a good thing; Apple is building on the success of the iPhone OS, and making a product for the masses. To wit, an anecdote:

A few years ago I got my Mom, who is a relatively young baby boomer (you’re welcome, mother) an iBook (yeah, Apple used to have laptops called ‘iBooks’ back in the day). It was her first modern computer. I say modern, because she’d used a command-line terminal to telnet into my dad’s office network in the eighties, but this was her first GUI. She was very excited and eager to learn how to use a computer , and totally bought my sales pitch about how the Mac was the “computer for the rest of us”: easy to use, easy to learn, etc. I took a day out of my life to sit with her and teach her all about how to use a web browser, how to do email, how to do word processing—all the essentials. Now, my mom may be a lot of things, but stupid is not one of them; she seemed to understand everything I was showing her, and she seemed to get how to navigate around the internet on a very rudimentary level. Two days later, she was on the phone asking me about at least half the things I thought I’d taught her. She just wasn’t getting it, after all; the ‘desktop’ metaphor didn’t resonate with her, and concepts that I take as givens, like basic mousing, file systems, hierarchies, and system settings might as well have been particle physics to her. It was a very, very frustrating experience for both of us.

That was the state of affairs for years, until about eight months ago. All of a sudden, practically overnight, my mom went from a total n00b to an emailing, web-browsing, Facebook-using (!), txt-messaging machine. After a few days of noticing this new behaviour (and the sudden deluge of lame email forwards—did you know that Bill Gates gives out money every time you forward a chain letter? w00t!), I called her and asked: what gives? Did you get a new, faster computer? Did you have someone else teach you? Was I not good enough a mentor (the shame, the shame)?

The answer was simple: she’d just bought an iPhone, and she just got it—no explanations necessary. So to those people who complain that the iPad is just a bigger iPhone, I say: so what if it is? If that’s all the iPad is, then the iPad is for people like my Mom, which is most people out there. And it will sell like fucking hotcakes.

But the iPad is not just an oversized iPhone, actually. Purely by dint of its larger screen size, it allows app developers to stretch their legs and take advantage of the dead-simple user interaction experiences of the iPhone, and leverage them in the service of much more complex functionality. We saw a bit of that with the demos of iWork and Brushes during the Apple keynote. I’m sure once developers have been allowed to play with the iPad SDK, we’ll see a torrent of additional innovation building on iPhone conventions.

There’s a few other people who understand this, and state their cases much better than I do. D.A. Davies does it here. Rob Foster chimes in over here. Ethan Nicholas goes on here. And John Gruber, of course, gets it.

And, I can assure you, I get it, and I’ll be getting an iPad as soon as they make the 3G+WiFi model available (so that I can then get rid of my mobile phone, and rely entirely on Skype for the little actual telephony I do, if Skype releases a version for 3G, which seems likely at this point). And once I have it in my grubby little hands, I’ll be glad to explore every nook and cranny, and report back in excruciating and possibly mind-numbing detail. In the meantime, I will point and laugh at the fools who don’t get it.

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Denial: “Pfft. It’s just an iPhone on steroids. How could you possibly want to read on that thing? No one reads on an iPhone anyway.”

Anger: “What the hell are these secret ‘big six’ meetings about?! Why isn’t Apple meeting with us?! And now, waitaminute, Amazon has APPS TOO?”

Bargaining: “Ok – we’ll wait for the announcement. We’ll see how many people buy it. Maybe Pogue’s review will help us make a decision.”

Depression: ::Sigh:: “What’s the point of it all? Can’t we just keep doing what we’ve always done? This whole digital thing is confusing.”

Acceptance: “Ok. The announcement came through. Let’s grab one for the company, tinker around with it for a bit and keep an eye on the reviews. Our eBook vendor apps are probably going to be available on the Tablet, so let’s give them a buzz and confirm they’re going to work with Apple on making our books available. There might be some money here…”

Which stage are you on?

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I’m convinced that even the smartest predictions can only peg about half of the RAT. Apple has never been afraid to be bold and go big. We all “knew” that Apple was working on a phone. But like all groundbreaking products, it surprised everybody whose predictions were based on devices, concepts, and technologies that they’d already seen.

Of particular note is his very commonsensical take on publishers’ role in the App store ecosystem:

Apple will not sell periodicals and books through the iTunes Store.

At least not in the way that they sell music and movies, as discrete products. Instead, they’ll stick to the mechanism that the iPhone uses: publishers and distributors can release their own apps and build their own storefronts for their own content.

It saves Apple from innumerable headaches and opens the RAT up to be “the reader of Everything.” It also emphatically continues Apple’s momentum as the publishing platform of choice.

Are you Time-Warner? Great. Release a free “newsstand” app for your group’s publications. Apple’s SDK supports in-app purchases. The user can buy or subscribe to magazines easily; the publisher gets ongoing sales through the biggest store for digital mobile content, and as usual, Apple gets a big cut of every dollar spent on that planet.

Are you an independent publisher? Or maybe even just an author with a collection of short-stories? Great. Hook up with an iPhone developer and hand over a copy of your book in PDF or HTML format. He or she can quickly stick it in an app wrapper and you can release it as an saleable ebook without going through any publishers or distributors. There’s no vetting process; Apple is happy to just take 30 percent of the purchase price.

Once you step back from the “publishing is a special little snowflake” attitude that implies that legacy publishers are somehow immune to how the rest of the media world has been affected by technology, this makes a helluva lot of sense. Go check out the whole article—well worth a read—here (via @gruber, who is also worth listening to as an old-school Apple-watcher).

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First, check out the new blog. I’m launching The New Sleekness with other smart, bookish types to fill a hole in publishing punditry: voices from the boots-on-the-ground folks actually working directly in that sweet spot of publishing and technology. I hope you’ll add us to your RSS Reader.

And second, YES! I have a shiny new job. I’ll be starting as director of business development at AdaptiveBlue on January 18th, working with a product you may already be using: Glue.

Glue provides an entirely new of way of connecting authors and books directly to readers (aka, one of the smartest things we publishing geeks can be doing). You know all that discussion about the need for curation and how authors and publishers must build direct-to-consumer relationships? Glue has enormous implications for both.

Before taking this new gig, I thought a lot about what it meant to leave big-house publishing (or ‘legacy publishing,’ as we’ve taken to calling it around here). Since it’s the only field I’ve ever worked in, it was a particularly hard decision to make. True, the challenges facing the industry now are serious, but it’s clear to me that publishing is chock-full of smart people who are all doing their best to keep things afloat. I love this business, and I have no doubt that it will find its way.

But I’ve realized that at least for the next few years, changes that affect the issues most important to me and to readers—DRM, rights, pricing—are going to be coming from the top down, not the bottom up. As much as I’d like to be able to say I’ve been in a position to impact decisions in these areas, a lot of them, by necessity, are made way outside of my pay grade and without any input from this peanut gallery.

As someone looking to fool around with the way that publishing works, this has been hard for me. One of the things I admire about tech companies is their willingness to try experiments quickly, evaluate the data, and then decide what’s worth pursuing and what should be ditched. Legacy publishers are learning to do this, but for the time being, it can be slow going. AdaptiveBlue offers me an opportunity to find a new way to connect readers and books. And man, does that make me excited.

So, I hope all of you will keep visiting this space to talk about ideas and experiments that are making you excited about the next few years in publishing, or feel free to contact me about them directly. I’ll certainly be putting mine up here. And maybe together we can try some of them out.

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