Friday, 2 July 2010
Ebooks: The Anecdotal Evidence
Recently I received a pre-course reading list for my upcoming studies at Oxford University. Since I don't have access to the Bodleian Library yet, and since I don't live in a city where it's easy to get academic books in English, I immediately turned to my iPad to see how far I could get with electronic books alone. As the results below show, all I can say is that it's a darn good thing that there's a Kindle app on the iPad!
Kindle comes out way, way ahead on selection, and the shopping experience (just the act of searching out these books), was also much easier on Amazon than on the iPad, where you have to go through a rather laborious search process on the device itself just to find out that they don't carry the book you want.
On the other hand, iBooks offers a better, more attractive reading experience than the Kindle reader. And, importantly, it uses the open epub standard, as opposed to Kindle's proprietary format. This means that books can be bought in other places and imported onto iBooks, too. I have already purchased books from O'Reilly this way, and it's a big plus. Given the choice, I would rather read in iBooks.
That said, for a case like this where I had a dozen books to hunt down, there was no way I was going to take the time to individually identify each publisher and go to their site to see whether they had an e-book publishing deal with another vendor that sells in the epub format. That's almost as much work as patching a Linux kernel! For once, Apple has been beaten in the simplicity game, and Amazon's getting a lot more ebook sales from me because of it.
