Why the iPad is good for the Kindle, Nook and Sony Reader
As I do not have a data plan on my iPhone, I had to make sure to arrive at my school (and its Wifi network) by 10:00am on Wednesday morning. I listened to… most of the Newton II iPad announcement. I then had to walk through the court yard to the lecture hall and lost my connection, leaving me to catch updates yesterday.
There are two ways to look at this; an expensive net book with fewer features, or a relatively inexpensive e-book reader. As someone in a school that is starting to implement e-book readers, I first looked at it as such.
Much like was done with the iPod and mp3 players, iTunes and downloadable songs,the iPad is going to make e-books even more popular and mainstream than the Amazon Kindle ever did. It may not have the same Whispernet, but the iPad has iTunes, and eighty-three-bajillion users, and although not as automatic as Whispernet may be, it has all of those users to make the ePub format, and that is where my title starts to make sense;
It may not be as simple and syncable as the iPod is with iTunes, but if these ePub books remain DRM free, they will be readable by these other devices. As with the recent Haiti catasrophe, donating through iTunes has shown the power of iTunes – the general fact that, as was said in Wednesdays keynote, iTunes has millions of users’ credit card information. That gives the iBook application a definite head start above the competition.
Unlike the Kindle, unlike the Nook and unlike the Sony Reader (from what I can tell), users will not need a device to read the books. Buying an e-book reader is a definite commitment, with iBook, users and try a few books and then decide they want one. I would assume, as I never had one, the movie/ television market on iTunes helped prove the idea of an Apple TV. As much as a relative failure as it is often seen as, it is still the best selling set top box.
Along with an explosively larger marketplace, it gives similarly priced and sized readers (Kindle DX at $489, $10 less than the 16GB iPad). Be it what you want or not, the iPod does monstrously more than the DX does. Amazon can do nothing but re-consider their pricing plan.
Tags: apple, ipad, kindle, school
