The New Sleekness

The Kindle on iPad app is an impressive improvement over the previous Kindle app for iPhone (Amazon seems to have updated the Kindle on iPhone app to match features with their iPad version. Good on them). Amazon has a lot riding on the strategy of being everywhere—considering that it’s inevitable that compared to devices like the iPad, and the slew of tablets coming out this year (like the JooJoo and the HP Slate), the Kindle device can’t help but look and feel antiquated by comparison. While I’m sure that deep within the bowels of some Amazon skunkworks or another, there is a full colour, touchscreen Kindle waiting to be unleashed upon the world, Amazon can’t wait for that device to be ready, while the iPad and its cohorts leach Jeff Bezos’ customers away.

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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