iBooks on iPad vs. Kindle for iPad Video

iBooks on iPad vs. Kindle for iPad Video Transcript

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>>Hi, I'm Natali Del Conte with CNET. Today we're going to compare the Kindle iBook reader to the Amazon Kindle app on the iPad. Hopefully this will help you make a better decision as to which reader is best for you and where to build your library. Apple is calling the iPad one of the best eReaders on the market. Of course, the iPad does other things, but we're going to evaluate it as an eReader today. Apple's iBook store is new, so of course the library of titles available is going to be limited. But it works in the ePub format so you can access several free books, but most of them are classics, not really big name Oprah selections. You do get a free copy of Winnie the Pooh with illustrations when you use this app however, that's something. The iBook store is elegant. It has the best looking library and page turning of any other eReader around. You pull the pages across with your finger or you just double tap the edges to get a quick flip. It's kind of a nice touch that when you flip a page, you see the text of that page through the back of the page like a real book, it doesn't really do anything for you, but that's a nice touch. You can also highlight passages and make notes around select passages. Unfortunately you can't bookmark an entire page though, so if there's a chart or graph that you want to refer to, you can't really mark it that way. You can also read books in portrait or landscape mode that gives you two pages at a time. You can quickly search a word, character or phrase in an entire book and Apple is actually using page numbers instead of the odd numerical system that Kindle uses. Some people have been concerned about the screen resolution and glare. It's true, you can't use this in sunlight like you can the Kindle, but you can adjust the brightness and the text size to your liking. Another drawback of the iBook store is that you can't read your books on anything other than your own iPad. Although, later this year, you will be able to read your books on the iPhone if you're running the 4.0 software. For now, though you can't read them in iTunes, you can't read them on your Mac. They pretty much live and die on the iPad. Although you can convert your existing ePub books in iTunes for your iPad. The Kindle app does allow you to access the same books that you own from the Amazon ecosystem and Amazon's library is considerable. They have over 450,000 books for sale. They start at 9.99. You can read these books on your iPad. You can read them on your iPhone, your iPod touch, your Blackberry, your personal computer and of course on your regular Kindle. You can also access all of your notes and bookmarks online at kindle.amazon.com which is handy if you want to track your notations and research. There's no way to do that iBooks or any other eReader for that matter. The Kindle app does have the same page turning features , but it isn't as smooth as it is on the native iBooks app. It also don't mirror text on the back of the page the way we talked about before which is really and anthetic drawback. The page numbers are what really annoy me the most about the Kindle app and reading Kindle books on any device for that matter. You get a progress bar along the bottom, but the numerical system is perplexing. For instance, when I was reading this book, it asked me to refer to a specific page, but there's no way to find that page in the Kindle, much less quote it or site it. In the Kindle app, it's also easy to adjust brightness and text size and you can pinch to view and scroll, but there's no search feature the way the iBook store has. You can also read books in portrait and landscape mode. Although landscape mode only give you one page at a time instead of two like a book in iBooks store. And of course Kindle books are still a closed system. They are not ePub so these books will only ever be acceptable within Amazon's software either on Kindle, iPad or a Smartphone or a desktop program. I've been hoping that Amazon would embrace an open format, but as of this video they have not. Well, it might seem like we are splitting hairs when it comes to these features, these are just a few things to consider when you are going to build your library in one eBook store or another. I do have a pretty large Kindle library now, but I'm leaning towards starting to buy books in iBooks instead because the page numbers just bug me so much on the Kindle. But then again, I do use the web component for keeping tabs on notes, and you can't do that on iBooks, so that may swing the pendulum back. Basically, you just have to decide what is most important for you in terms of features and then chose accordingly. I hope I've helped you along with this decision, if you have more questions you can write into my daily show loaded at cnet.com. I'm Natali Del Conte with CNET. Thank you for watching. ^M00:04:31 [Music]