Kindle Reader – #Kindle, #iPad, #iPodTouch, #Android …
I still prefer paperbacks and I am still an avid user of the Internet’s used bookstores (Bookmooch and Paper Back Swap), and wrote a blog about them a while back. However, I purchased a Kindle for my wife last year and she loves it. We scan her journal articles in using a ScanSnap, run Optical Character Recognition on the resulting PDFs and upload them to her Kindle. She then has a search-able archive of a ton of recent articles on Equine Surgery on her Kindle for easy access and (restaurant, car, plane, bathroom, bed) reading.
Her biggest complaint is that I have purchased a few recent books on her Kindle and have been known to curl up on the couch with *her* Kindle on lazy weekends. I also recently purchased an iPad, which has a Kindle App. I’ve had the Kindle App on my iPhone for a while and since I’m leaving AT&T and going to Verizon, I recently downloaded the Kindle App for Android.
Here are my thoughts:
- e-Ink on the Kindle is far superior to reading on the iPad. It is soft on your eyes and after a full day of reading, you really know whether you are staring at pixles on the iPad or the e-Ink.
- The iPod Touch, iPhone, and Android Apps are great for bathroom reading (at work?) or if you just want to read a page or three and are somewhere where it’s the only thing you have available (vs. the iPad or the Kindle itself).
- The iPad backlight is great. I can read late into the evening and not disturb my wife as the bedside light can be off. This is only possible because the Kindle App allows you to dim the iPad screen and therefore it’s softer on the eyes than reading in the dark with a bright display.
- The Kindle works brilliantly in bright sunlight and even with sunglasses on. The iPad has to be set on maximum brightness and, as I discovered recently, is not visible while wearing polarized sunglasses.
- The iPad is a bit too heavy (1.5 lbs vs. 10.2 oz. for the Kindle) for just reading. After several hours of reading in bed you can tell there is strain on your wrists holding up the iPad. It’s more like reading a heavy hardback vs. a paperback.
- The battery life of the Kindle is several weeks of usage vs. 10 hours or so for the iPad (we only turn on the wireless on the Kindle to download new content and/or to sync our place), with Wireless turned on, the Kindle battery lasts days (vs. weeks).
- Synching between the multiple devices is a great feature. If you read your Kindle book on one reader, as soon as you open up that same book on another of your readers it synchronizes to the last page read (the Wireless network has to be enabled on the Kindle for this to work).
- eBook features on the Kindle are superior to those on the Apps on other devices (but this is probably a short term problem as Amazon is developing their Apps to have all the Kindle features (like highlighting, annotating, searching, etc.).
Now, the iPad also has a ton of other features and many many more capabilities than the Kindle but I just wanted to compare them as a reading device. I still highly recommend a Kindle if reading is what you want to do. I do not think that the iPad nor the apps on the smaller devices is really something you want to read from for hours on end.