Further Thoughts on eReader apps for the iPad

Yesterday, Barnes and Noble released their much-anticipated, long-awaiting B&N eReader app specifically for the iPad. With its arrival, there are now three excellent eReading options, and as a user of all three, I though a follow up to my "My Life in eBooks" post might be due. (I haven't downloaded the Kobo app yet, due to early reports of bugs, so that one isn't addressed but may follow in later report).

I've been reading for the two plus months on the iPad, mostly in iBooks but also in the Kindle for iPad app. But before the iPad I had read a whole novel - Fritz Leiber's Swords & Deviltry - in the B&N iPhone app, which was my favorite of the iPhone reading apps for commercially published books. I say "commercially published" because before the iPad I read all manuscript submissions in Stanza for iPhone.

I've got about twenty ebooks now on each of the three apps, and while the majority of my ebooks were free, I have paid for books from all three. Swords & Deviltry was my only purchase on B&N, The Graveyard Book and Return of the Sword, along with a few low-cost pulps (Doc Savage and Fu Manchu), were my Kindle purchases, and I've purchased six books so far via iBooks, including Neil Gaiman's Fragile Things, The House on Pooh Corner, The Mouse and the Motorcycle, Runaway Ralph, and the Beneath Ceaseless Skies anthology.

But I've been itching for B&N to get onboard iPad and downloaded it first thing yesterday morning. So...

The B&N eReader app does a lot of things very, very well.  With its plain white background on the home page and simple page swiping, it's not as sexy as iBooks, whose virtual bookshelf and realistic page turning emulation are really, really gorgeous. But what B&N lacks in style it more than makes up for in functionality, and its iPad version is far more user friendly than its iPhone app. It now opens its dictionary inside the page of the book, rather than pulling you out of the read as the iPhone version of the app did, allows for note taking and highlighting, has an assortment of font choices and sizes etc... Of course, some version of these tools are pretty much de rigueur now for any eReader. But B&N adds two features that are very, very nice. In addition to customizing the fonts, you can alter the width of the page's margins and you can alter the spacing between lines. Between changing the margins and changing the spacing, you can really, really create a perfectly tailored, comfortable reading experience. And then you can save that as a theme to apply later! This is brilliant, and may be the nicest feature on any of the three major apps. Against this, both iBooks and the Kindle app suddenly look very limited in what they allow.


B&N's eReader also opens up the Table of Contents in a pop-up window, without pulling you out of your place in the book, along with tabs to bring up lists of your highlights and bookmarks. Which is another very nice feature. I also appreciate the fact that they have chosen to go with page numbers, rather than percentages or the perplexing Kindle location system. Yes, page count changes when you change font sizes and spacing, but then, it does the same thing when we raise the point size of a font in printing a physical book. It's still very nice aesthetically and psychologically to use actual page numbers.

I was also delighted to discover, when perusing Bram Stoker's Dracula,  that the end notes were hyperlinked. Clicking on them took me to a list of notes at the end of the chapter, with a convenient "Back" button to return me to my place in the text. Nice.

I did have a few problems with the eReader. It crashed on me twice when I was trying to highlight a chapter title in Swords & Deviltry, I have two copies of the same edition of Dracula displayed in my shelf and can't seem to get it to just show just one, and when you delete a book on your shelf, it still shows the cover with a "Download" label across it. To actually get rid of my complimentary copy of Little Women -- (no disrespect to Louisa May Alcott) -- I had to go to B&N.com in the Safari browser and remove it permanently from My Library. This is a minor inconvenience but it will probably have the effect of preventing me from sampling as many titles as I otherwise would. I haven't tried the LendMe feature yet, but it is obviously a plus. I did make notes and highlights in a book and was disappointed to see that they didn't carry across to my iPhone edition.

Overall, it's a very good app, with a lot to recommend it, and a few key features that score higher than its competitors. And, of course, I'm sure it will only get better as updates are issued.

Meanwhile, last month I read Gaiman's The Graveyard Book on the Kindle app, which, thanks to Whispersync, was read on both my iPhone and iPad.

Kindle's aforementioned perplexing locations are augmented with page numbers for the iPad version, and I also find the actual layout of text more attractive on the iPad than on the iPhone. Visually, the home page is prettier than the B&N eReader app, and the Whispersync technology can't be beat. Its amazing how many occasions every day you find yourself with a minute or three where you can pull your phone out and read a few paragraphs, where you might not have easy access to the larger iPad.  Currently neither B&N nor Apple's iBooks has a syncing feature, though both promise that in the next iteration of their iPhone app software updates. And, of course, Kindle has by far the best selection of titles.

Where iBooks scores over both of them is in presentation and in the ability to easily load ePub format ebooks acquired from other sources into iBooks with just one click. Because of this, iBooks has been my default reader for amassing a library, in the same way all my music, whether purchased digitally or ripped from CDs, goes into iTunes. I also use Stanza Desktop's "Save as ePub" feature to convert Word Docs into ePub format files, so now I'm doing all my manuscript reading on the iPad. And it's amazing how helpful it is, when thinking about how a particularly manuscript would be if you acquired it and turned it into a book, to actually see it looking like a book, with actual pages. It's really intuitively helpful to me, when judging a book's pacing, to be able to see how far into the book I am, and the feature that tells you how many pages remain in a chapter is fantastic!

Currently you can't take notes in iBooks, though I can't imagine that will be long in coming, and while you can copy sections of text from non DRM's ePub files, you can't cut and past lines into email from the books purchased from the iBookstore (at least the ones I've purchased). So the annotation features in Kindle and B&N score over iBooks in that respect. The iBooks reader needs to do more than it does, but its too strongest selling points - its beauty and its ability to accept ePub files into iTunes - are extremely attractive features that will probably keep it in the top slot for my primary reader. On the downside, the selection at iBooks isn't what it needs to be, though that is something that will be changing fast. But given there is no way to browse through the iBookstore, unless an author/book is listed in the promotional displays in a genre's category, there is no way to know if the book is there except by running a search, which right now will return no results more often than not.

Sadly, none of the eReaders allow you to bring up a full-page view of the cover, which is a shame given how good the iPad is at displaying art. Since this is a complaint with all three apps, I'm wondering if it is somehow a limitation of ePub. Either way, it seems like an essential element of book reading that needs to be addressed and thus, presumably, will be.

In summary, B&N's eReader app is a welcome addition to the iPad eReader space and offers enough that I won't be penalizing it too much for being late to the party. iBooks versatility will make it my default manuscript reading app, and probably my first choice for an eReader, but I anticipate continuing to buy some books from the Kindle (due, if nothing else, to their wide selection) and some from B&N (most notably, the rest of the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser series). Instead of having one reading app and one online library, it looks like I'm going to have one device (or family of devices) and multiple apps. For now, I can live with that. Of course, all the competition between apps and devices can only be good for the overall evolution of the eReader, so who knows where things will be next year? Personally, I'm eager to find out.

B&N eReader:
Pros:

• Customizable fonts, colors, margins, spacing
• Annotations
• Wide Selection
• Dictionary opens inside page. 

Cons:

• Visually boring interface.
• Currently no sync with iPhone version.
• Can only take B&N books despite ePub format.

Kindle for iPad:
Pros:

• Whispersync
• Enormous selection
• Visually attractive

Cons:

• Proprietary Format.

iBooks
Pros:

• Visually stunning.
• Can import any non DRM ePub files.
• Dictionary opens inside page.

Cons:

• Currently no iPhone version.
• Currently no annotation. 
• Currently small selection, poor inventory browsing. 
• No dictionary.

My Life in eBooks

I read my first ebook in 1990. It was William Gibson's Count Zero, and I read it on Apple's Hypercard stacks program. I loved the experience, particularly being able to highlight a character's name and call up every occurrence of that character in the text. Hypercard didn't last, but I was hooked. I could see the future.

In 2000, I worked in a dot com start up called Bookface.com, long vanished now, but one of the first to be taken seriously in the ebook space. (First to market, first to, well you know...). While working at the company, where I read Michael Swanwick's The Iron Dragon's Daughter in our proprietary browser-format, I found that reading online books radically increased my own purchase of physical books. This trend continues...

For the last year, I've been doing all my manuscript submission reading on Stanza for iPhone, and have recently been editing on it as well (most recently The Dervish House and The Goblin Corps). Now I've gotten an iPad, and I've started reading manuscripts in iBooks (using Stanza Desktop's "Save as ePub" feature to convert Word docs, which are then easy to upload to iTunes with a simple click of the "add to Library" menu button.)

I've learned that I can walk and read, and, in fact, walking and reading cuts down on all the distractions offered by the Glorious Desktop Screen, so I'm reading on Stanza for iPhone in the morning, and in iBooks on iPad in the afternoon in Starbucks. (I walked 11 hours over the last four days, by the way. Drunk a lot of coffee too.)

I've purchased books for the Kindle app, the Barnes & Noble eReader app, and the iBook app. And I've downloaded quite a few free ones. I don't own a Kindle or Nook, but I have played on the former briefly and borrowed the latter for a few days from my father - before it froze up on him and he returned it!  Yesterday, I finished reading Fritz Leiber's Swords & Deviltry on the B&N eReader on my iPhone, and I completed a 10 day long (chapter a day) read of Winnie the Pooh to my son on iPad.

So here's my thoughts on eReaders, with the caveat that my needs are fairly specific, given that I read more manuscripts than finished books, and YMMV.

First in general, I really don't like e-ink, which looks to me like reading off a digital watch. I do my pleasure reading in bed, from 6 to 6:35 am while my wife sleeps, and I need the back-lighting. And I like color. And I just much prefer the screen on my phone to the screen on either the Kindle or Nook.

When reading documents on the iPhone, Stanza is far and away the best reader, given how easy it is to upload, how easy it is to cut-and-email paragraphs (to authors, with notes) and also the general user-friendly and aesthetic experience of the reader itself. Because it's such a versatile device, it loses some formatting, particularly italics, so it's not my ideal reading device for commercially-available books, just manuscripts. The Kindle app, by contrast, is a much less comfortable reading experience. I've noticed weird kerning and leading between words in the way text is displayed, and I just don't find it comfortable on the eyes. So for commercially-available books, I use the B&N eReader software. It was the most comfortable read, the best display, in many ways, the most like Stanza actually. My only complaint is the number of books they offer that are currently missing their covers, and the inability to customize your ebooks by manually adding the cover you want back in (as you can with Stanza).

When reading on the iPad, iBooks is hands down the best experience. Now, it should be said, neither Stanza nor B&N has come out with an iPad-optimized version of their respective reader, though it is expected both will appear in May. By that time, however, I may be completely hooked on iBooks.

However, it should be said that Kindle for iPad is gorgeous, much much better than Kindle for iPhone, or really, the actual Kindle itself. And, while you cannot purchase magazines for your Kindle for iPhone ap, Apple has very wisely chosen to treat the Kindle for iPad like another form of Kindle, and you can read magazines on it. I downloaded samples of Asimov's and Realms of Fantasy, and was impressed with the display. I've yet to read a whole book on the Kindle for iPad app, but plan to soon (most likely starting with Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book, since I already own it in this format as well as hardcover -- see prior comment about ebooks/physical books.) I expect I could be reading magazines on the Kindle app soon too.

Where iBooks scores over all of them is the ability to upload your existing ePub files into iTunes with a click, which is as simple and elegant as adding MP3s to iTunes has trained us to expect. And in its display. I would have thought two weeks ago that I wouldn't have cared less about replicating the look of a book turning pages, but I have to say it made reading Winnie the Pooh to my son, who thrilled at watching the pages flip under his finger. Also, the artwork in the book, essential for children's books of this age range, looked fantastic. The artwork in Kindle books, by contrast, looks much much better on the iPad than on the iPhone, but still has a box of contrast around it (the white of the illustration background against the white of their page). I have Elric: Stealer of Souls in Kindle format, though, and I must say that Picacio's artwork looks amazing. So I am nitpicking, as the Kindle books I've sampled on the iPad all look great and Kindle for iPad is a very close second to iBooks. And, of course, you cannot beat Kindle for availability of titles, which is key.

What I'd like to see from iBooks soon is the ability to annotate the text and export the annotations. As it is, you can already copy selections of text and then close out of the application and paste them into emails, which makes it fine for manuscripts requiring a light edit, but not great for ones requiring a heavy one. (For those, I'd use the Pages app, except that it is wonderful in all respects but one: it lacks a Track Changes feature, making it useless for editing!!!) I'd also like to see an iPhone version of iBooks, but since we are reportedly seeing that come the next OS update this summer, I'm happy.

In summary, I wish I could come down to just one app on one device, but I figure I'm going to end up using multiple apps on two devices, both with an i at the start of their names. I expect that for manuscripts I'll continue using Stanza for iPhone when I need to be at my most mobile, iBooks for iPad otherwise, and that for my own ebook purchases I'll probably stick to iBooks (whose selection isn't yet where it needs to be), with occasional purchases from B&N. I would have already purchased Swords & Death from them, if their eReader were optimized for the iPad. As it is, I'm waiting.

But I cannot see purchasing a Kindle or a Nook when you can purchase an iPad and have the option of all three reading platforms in one device, that also surfs the web, does email, plays games, streams movies, etc...

So, screw all those cliched complaints about "Where's my Flying Car?" - this is the future world I've personally been waiting on since 1990. I might even have to go full circle and reread Count Zero.