Brett Kelly Thinks The Kindle Is A Better Book Reader Than The iPad

I know that a great many folks think that the iPad is a “Kindle killer” (ugh, always with the killing), but I can say pretty confidently that the Kindle is going to fill a void that the iPad couldn’t effectively fill: a light, small device whose single, express purpose is reading, not everything

Too bad the iPad isn’t just a book reader. That’s what Amazon still don’t get: the iPad is a great tablet which does pretty good ebook reading.

Earlier today iLounge reported that, according to their source, a 7-inch iPad is in the works and that will be announced later this year. 9to5mac also speculated that they’ve been hearing rumors of a smaller tablet, equipped with a Retina Display - “something like an insane 1500x1920 type pixel display”.

Now, we’ve got some interesting findings to share and speculate with you.

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Answer: no, but the result is interesting. Basically, the guys over at UseIt wanted to see if tablets really come with faster reading speeds than printed books.

Is the iBooks or Kindle experience really more engaging than old paper?

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There’s a huge market in the iPad App Store right now, and that’s for PDF readers. Here’s what’s going on: the iPad came out without a dedicated PDF app developed by Apple and so GoodReader (our review) quickly became the most popular paid app. Months later, Apple announced that a PDF-capable version of iBooks was coming out, and we all started wondering whether iBooks for PDFs could kill any other similar app out there.

Reading PDFs in iBooks feels good, but it’s not the perfect experience many predicted. The interface design is beautiful and elegant as Apple’s tradition, but the app doesn’t hold up well to large documents and, in my tests, I found that opening a 14MB file required even 10 seconds (or more) for the app to start up, load the document and let you swipe through it. Unlike Apple said weeks ago, there’s no page curl effect, and TUAW exposed the problem. Ultimately, I’m deeply disappointed by the poor performances of iBooks with large PDFs. Perhaps another update is on its way, but who knows.

I’ve been using another application to read documents on my iPad, Fast PDF. It’s indeed the best 3rd party software to read PDF files currently available in the App Store.

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