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.

I’m drafting this on Pages on the iPad. I’ll port this to my blog using a cut and paste into the dashboard, then will touch it up and add links using the dashboard on a PC.

We took a trip last week. I intentionally did not bring my laptop as I wanted to use the iPad as a prime device and didn’t want to have the option of falling back on a PC. Lack of multi-tasking is still obvious, which after this coming week and the iOS4 upgrade should not be an issue. App developers can also fix this by opening up the app with the same view in the same location where it was ended. It amazes me that some apps still don’t do this.

Lack of Flash is still an issue. I also was traveling with my Android phone which supports basic flash and on a few instances grabbed the Android and opened up the URL that was not available on then iPad. Over time, if Apple has it’s druthers, flash video may be phased out on mainstream websites (and replaced with YouTube?), but other sites that rely on flash will require a flash supporting device. I missed my yahoo chess!

(the irony of this with Apple and Google going at each other like cats and dogs makes me chuckle)

Using outdoors is also difficult. My wife and I went to a park to do some reading. I had downloaded a few e-books (using e Kindle app as we like to share books). She pulled out her Kindle and I pulled out the iPad. The very first thing I noticed is that I couldn’t see jack. The iPad in portrait mode can not be viewed while wearing polarized sunglasses (opposite from the iPhone which is fine in portrait but unusable in landscape). Just for a comparison, my Android is visible in both portrait and landscape. Even in landscape mode it is difficult, so I ditched the sunglasses, but still found myself squinting to view even on maximum brightness. After an hour I had a headache from squinting and the overall brightness outside as I was not wearing my sunglasses.

The battery life is phenomenal. I only charged when it was convenient. Even now I’m working on a charge from the hotel over 24 hours ago after using moderately yesterday surfing the web in the airport and reading e-books on the plane.

Pages is great. I can actually edit, format, and move around in a full size document. I can read (and edit) Pages documents and Word documents with ease. I have used Numbers as well and for a tablet it is a very functional spreadsheet app. Starting from scratch to create a useable spreadsheet is a slow process, but opening up one from e-mail and making quick edits works quite well. I had a pretty through loan calculator that I had created with Numbers on my Mac which was quite easy to use on the iPad to change values and observe results.

So I’m still happy with my purchase. I’m loving the iPad.

Next post … Later this week … My Android vs. iPhone experiences.

I’ve had a crate of used paperback and hardback books in the basement for months. When friends come over, we offer them any book in the crate that they want free of charge just to get it off our hands. We don’t have a local used bookstore so we were going to toss them if we couldn’t pass them on. We are trying to be environmentally friendly and were loathe to put the stuff in the trash so we have identified ways to recycle them (our local recycle pickup will accept paperback books and the local YMCA will take old text books and hardback books). However, even that just seemed wasteful.

I was browsing Lifehacker Top 10s recently and came across the top 10 internet freebies and links to two popular book swapping services; PaperBackSwap.com and BookMooch.com. I’ve used them for a week or so now and here’s my review.

First off, you do have to pay postage to send your books out. If you are mailing from the US to the US you can use the USPS Media Mail rate, so a typical paperback book will cost $2.23 to mail (a book under 6oz (a small paperback) can be sent using USPS First Class for $1.68). So if you’re tight on cash the trash bin or recycle bin may be the best answer. However, in my opinion, the book selection on both sites is excellent so I will be able to get books for free when we land at our new residence.

Both sites work on a credit basis. Basically, you get a credit for each book you send and deducted a credit for each book you receive. Additionally, both sites give you a few credits for just posting your books so you can get started getting used books in the mail even before someone requests one of your books.

Of the two, PaperBackSwap.com has a much slicker interface that is easy to navigate, easy to post books, and a better social networking features. For shipping books there is a very nice feature that generates a PDF to either wrap the book with or tape to other packaging. For a small fee the PDF can include delivery confirmation and/or even include postage. In exchange for the fee you get “credited” for the book immediatly upon shipping and don’t have to wait for the receiver to use the site to “accept” the book for you to get credited. As far as I’ve been able to tell, the site is for inside the US only.

BookMooch.com does not have fees anywhere on the site (with the exceptions of donations). They support the site on a volunteer basis and pay for bandwidth and servers with donations and funds from Amazon.com if a user buys a book (new) from Amazon if it is not available from another user. The operator even seems averse to commercializing the site. The interface is a bit clunky and browsing books is done more with searches and tables of text. Many users of BookMooch are outside of the US and you choose if you can honor their request or not depending on how much it will cost to ship a book to a foreign location. However, if you do agree to ship internationally, you get additional credits.

I had my books listed on PaperBackSwap for a week or so before I also posted my books on BookMooch where I immediatly received requests for books which I had not on the other site, including several international requests (I may have been cheating by listing my books on both sites). If someone requests a book from one site, I immediatly remove it from the other site. Only in one case did I have a request for the same book on both sites overnight.

Using both the sites, I’ve been able to get rid of about two dozen books in a little over a week which also gives me several credits which I will use to get books in the future.

Here’s a list of the books I am giving away on BookMooch (I can’t find a method of lisitng my inventory on PaperBackSwap but it’s the same books).

Bookstore

Over the past few years I’ve been buying a lot of my books online at amazon.com or even on eBay. I’ve also been going to the public library here in Blacksburg which as public libraries go is a pretty decent library. However, when shopping online or even at the library, I tend to pick up books that are challenging reads, and many of them take me a long time to get through. If I bought them, that’s not a problem, however I’ve racked up a few late fees at the library (no more than what it would have cost me to purchase the book outright). I’ve also tended to pick up books that spend a long time on my bedside table as I have been known to start reading something else and at times have had as many as four or five books ongoing at once. An example of these are (all of which I’ve started and will eventually finish):

• The Baroque Cycle by Neal Steaphenfon of which I’m about half way through The System of the World
• Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon
• The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman
• April 1865 by Jay Winik

I recently started reading some quick fun easy-to-read science fiction and fantasy books which I’ve found are fast reads. Maybe it’s the “summer reading,” or maybe I just happened upon them as someone leant me one of them. Thinking about my other recent reads in my quest for reading, I’ve bitten off some bigger bites than I should have with some of those above (even thought I do enjoy them, I just can’t seem to read them quickly and find my self dozing off for naps or only getting through a few pages before falling asleep at night).

To illustrate my point, I ripped through The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman and just as fast ripped through Eldest by Christopher Paolini and found myself eager to turn pages and really enjoying the science fiction/fantasy genera, which was always something I enjoyed but seem to have moved away from more recently.

After finishing Eldest I went to my bookshelf and nothing (even those that I had already started) really looked like something I really wanted to pick up. I looked around online, but it just wasn’t doing it for me so this morning I went to the bookstore. I found myself in the science fiction/fantasy section having a ball. It was very reminiscent to when I used to go to the bookstore when i was 16 or so and coming home with a stack of books. In fact, I purchased five books mostly from that same section of the store.

• Twilight by Stephenie Meyer
• Assassin’s Apprentice by Robin Hobb
• Dragons of Autumn Twilight by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman
• Shadowmarch by Tad Williams
• The Summoner by Gail Z. Martin

I guess the point of this blog is that there is something very gratifying that happens to me at bookstores which I just can’t seem to get from the online stores and amazingly even at the library. I did notice while looking around online after coming home from the bookstore that Barnes & Noble has broken from Amazon and their new online bookstore tries very hard to duplicate that “bookstore feeling.” Only time will tell if BN can finally make some progress against Amazon, but I feel that the next time I’m in the market for books or don’t know what I should read next, I’ll go to an actual bookstore rather than browse around online as I just had more fun, bought more books, and am psyched about reading.

With that said…….