iPads and Kindles: It's Not Either/Or, and Millions Will Own Both

By Stephen Windwalker

With apologies to Soren Kierkegaard and fanboys everywhere, we do not have have to make an either-or choice between the Kindle and the iPad. It's not Ford vs. Chevy, Celtics vs. Lakers, or Beatles vs. Stones.

You can have both, and you can love both.

I have both, and I love both.

The day before the Kindle was launched in November 2007, you could have asked 100 people if they wanted a dedicated ereader and none of them would have said yes. Amazon has now sold about 4 million Kindles, and people are buying Kindle books every day and reading them on Kindles, PCs, Macs, BlackBerrys, and, yes, all the i-devices from Apple.

Before Apple announced the iPad, tablet computers were a total non-starter. Now Apple has announced that it sold 3 million iPads globally in its first 80 days.

Now that Amazon has reduced the price of the Kindle to $189, it is easy to see what the future holds. The Kindle, because of catalog, connectivity, and convenience, is the best dedicated ereader. The iPad is well on the way to being the best device for everything else.

Within the next two years, the installed base of Kindles will be over 10 million. For the iPad, the installed base will surpass 25 million. For the iPhone and the iPod Touch, it will surpass 200 million.

And there will be at least 5 million serious readers who own both an iPad and a Kindle.

And there will be entire landfills devoted to laptops and netbooks.

Barnes & Noble Gets it 90% Right, But Fails Again, with New eReader for iPad App

By Stephen Windwalker, Editor of Planet iPad

Click here to have the Planet iPad blog pushed directly to your Kindle 24/7 - without advertising! - with a subscription to the Kindle edition

Related post: The Cancer Spreads: Can B&N's Periodicals Offering Really Be a Killer Feature If They Can't Be Downloaded?

I so wanted to say something nice about Barnes & Noble, the Nook, and its new B&N eReader App for the iPad. I've been a little harsh at times in the past, I'll admit: even as recently as yesterday.

So, after reading early reviews of the iPad app from a couple of colleagues, and seeing how, as in the above screenshot, it had already soared to the top of all free apps in the iPad App Store, I was ready. I had even written a headline in my mind for the post:

New Reading App from B&N Advances iPad Experience

At the very least, I felt sure, the new B&N eReader App's cool features will put pressure on Amazon and Apple to finish what they've started and deliver on the unrealized potential of the Kindle for iPad and iBooks apps.

Then I had to go and ruin it all by actually trying the thing out myself.

I'm sorry. I hate to be a grump, a curmudgeon, or all the other names that B&N fans might be thinking of for me just now -- names that I'm sure I richly deserve -- if they are thinking of me at all, which is doubtful.


I downloaded the app. It was free. It took about 20 seconds, and then it only took me another few seconds to delete two earlier iterations of B&N eReader apps that were not iPad-optimized, and which frankly I had not used much. All good so far.

I downloaded Dracula, one of the free books offered right there on the home screen and was charmed by the nicely realized feature set including all manner of font sizes, font styles, margin settings, background colors, page layouts, page numbers, and the furthest advances yet with respect to annotations and highlighting in an iPad-optimized reading app.

So far, I thought, they've raised the bar dramatically, although the lack of selection, while lights years ahead of the iBooks catalog, remains embarrassing compared to that in the Kindle Store.

Time to try to buy something!


Maybe I'm cheap. Maybe it was just my bad judgment, to try to buy a newspaper that I wanted to read for 49 cents rather than laying out $10 or $15 for an ebook (when, after all, I've got dozens of books already in my Kindle account and not enough time to read them all on my Kindle, iPad, iPod Touch, Mac, Blackberry, or PC).

I'd already heard from blogging colleagues that, unlike the Kindle for iPad App or the iBooks App, the B&N eReader App would allow me to buy a newspaper and read it! Perfect for the iPad, I thought, and very convenient since after watching the last night's NBA playoff game I wanted to see what my local Boston Globe writers had to say about elbows, concussions, and gratuitous technical fouls. But I digress.

I clicked on "add books" and was transported to the B&N ebook store.

I clicked on eNewspapers and finger-flicked my way down to the fourth row to find the Globe. There it was, ready to buy, with a big fat "Buy Current Issue" button and a nice graphic of the iPad and a bunch of other gadgets right next to the words "Works with any computer or mobile device."

My mouth was watering, and I will admit that I was wondering why Amazon was so slow to offer periodicals and blogs (yeah, like this one!) in all its various Kindle apps, and why Amazon was so slow to bring obviously needed upgrades including some of the features mentioned a few paragraphs up to its Kindle for iPad app, and why Amazon this, and why Amazon that. But, yep, I digress. This isn't flippin' Ulysses, after all, and I do not need to be boring you with my interior monologue.

I tapped the Buy button.

The credit card I had on file with B&N had expired a couple of years ago, so I was prompted to enter my credit card, my name, my address, and even the little three-digit security code that Amazon has never ever asked me for from the back of my credit card. I gave it all up willingly, perhaps even gratefully. Take that, Mr. Bezos! And you, too, Mr. Jobs!

Might I be well on the way to becoming a B&N guy? A Nook Man?

I might, I might! It might be something less than a fundamental reordering of the U.S. economy, but the thousands of dollars I have spent with Amazon and Apple over the past few years might soon be redirected to "the bookstore I grew up with," as Barnes & Noble's latest marketing message so generously puts it in describing a store that didn't exist until I was in my 20s.

An email appeared almost instantaneously in my inbox confirming my purchase. The 49-cent charge appeared magically among the somewhat larger pending charges in my online credit card account display.

I was close to newspaper-reading bliss!

Back to the home screen, then, where I tapped on the Globe image that had already appeared there.

And here is what I saw next:

Technical difficulties.

I winced. I tried again, exited, re-entered, tapped and tapped again, searching for some way around the little glitch that, ever the optimist, I was sure would soon be set right.

Finally, at long last, a different message appeared:

Aha. Everything was explained.

"This item is not yet supported on this device."

And not only that! Also, "We are sorry."

Okay then.

How about, "Click here for an automatic freakin' refund!"

Or how about "Not only are we sorry, but here's why we're sorry: we just wasted 5 minutes of your time because nobody on our incredibly lame team bothered to take 5 minutes for quality control before we rolled this out."

Nope. Because this is Barnes & Noble, which used an old Edsel launch manual for its Nook roll-out in November, and has continued to foul its own bed with nearly every step it has taken in the ebook arena.

Sure, they will fix it sooner or later, maybe tonight. Everything gets fixed sooner or later, doesn't it? And true, there are a lot of cool features in their new app, which will certainly accelerate the work that the serious players in this arena must do to catch up.

But the bottom line is that B&N has screwed up again. I could be more generous, I'm sure. I could take a step back, take a deep breath, and conclude that I just happened to hit on the one minor screw-up in this latest launch, that there would probably be no others.

But, you know, it's Santayana and the history thing. We've been there and done that:

• We've seen B&N launch the Nook at the holiday season without having any Nooks to sell or any Nooks to show in their 23 gazillion brick-and-mortar stores.
• We've seen B&N tout the Nook's revolutionary LendMe ebook feature only to find out on closer scrutiny that the company vastly overstated what you could do with it.
• We've seen B&N promise free ebook reading in its physical stores and deliver it now and then on a limited basis.
• We've seen B&N lie without apology, in its technical specs, about the weight of the Nook.
• And now we've seen B&N promise an app for the iPad's April 3 release date and deliver it in a screwed up fashion 7 weeks and five days late.

You know the quote from Santayana: "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it." Actually, on a certain level, you could say that B&N seems to learn very well from "history." As I said in a post yesterday, "the best way to predict what Barnes & Noble will do at any given time is to look at what Amazon did two or three years ago."

But I didn't get that exactly right, did I?

To be more precise, what Barnes & Noble will do at any given time is to take what Amazon did two or three years ago and figure out how to screw it up.

Could Apple's iBooks Catalog Be Approaching 100,000 Titles?

By Stephen Windwalker
Copyright © 2010 iPad Nation Daily

Could the title count in Apple's iBooks Store be approaching 100,000 titles just a month after launch?


A helpful new breakdown of titles in Apple's iBooks catalog by O'Reilly Radar's Ben Lorica shows Project Gutenberg as the publisher for 31.4% of all listings, which is about double the number of listings for each of the three largest private publishing conglomerates (Penguin US, Simon & Schuster, and HarperCollins) and over four times the total for MacMillan or Hachette. Random House, the world's largest publisher of English-language books, is unrepresented on the iBooks venue due to the publisher's refusal to submit to Apple's brave new "agency model" world.

Fiction leads the way with 54% of all the listings detected by Lorica, and despite some concerns that Apple would play a heavyhanded censorship role, 1% of all titles are categorized as Erotica.

This breakdown avoids any repetition of last week's controversy over the number of titles, since Lorica sticks with percentages of the whole without reference to the size of the whole. Apple press office spokesman Tom Neumayr contacted iPad Nation Daily Monday and confirmed that "we definitely have over 60,000 titles in the iBooks catalog."

Indeed, if one juxtaposes the 31.4% Gutenberg percentage with previous reports of 30,000 free Gutenberg-based listings in the Kindle Store, one could extrapolate that the iBooks catalog has grown to about 96,000 titles, but all such figures will remain highly suspect until Apple itself announces some updated catalog count figures.

As Marion Maneker observed earlier this week in a post at The Big Money, "these early numbers suggest that the iPad is very much a direct competitor to the Kindle and that books are a moderate success on the device. It would be interesting to know where the Kindle app stands in relation to these app and iBook numbers. Alas, the one thing Amazon seems to have adopted from Apple is the same obsession with selective numbers and secrecy."

But the Kindle Store does reveal Google-like search counts on catalog searches and consequently allows a high level of transparency for those of us who are curious about such matters, while Apple's various retail stores reveal little of such information.  Apple's Neumayr was uncertain Monday about whether the company would become more open about title counts, but promised to share any such revelations, if they occur, with iPad Nation Daily.


Of course, Project Gutenberg is not the only source of free books in the iBooks Store. There are few if any of the "free promotional titles" that currently occupy the dozen or so highest rungs on the Kindle Store bestseller list, but free ebooks from the DIY/indie publishing service Smashwords do hold four of the top 70 spots on the iBooks "Top Charts" for free books:

• #41 - All Employees Are Marketers (Business)
• #49 - Nostradormouse (Children)
• #65 - Time Zone (Fiction)
• #66 - The Nude (Short Story)

The other two free titles that are interspersed with Smashwords and Project Gutenberg offerings among the top 70 iBooks "Top Charts" listings for free books are Crossway's ESV Bible at #36 and, rather strangely, Winnie the Pooh at #62. Since Winnie the Pooh is automatically downloaded free to every iPad owner who downloads the iBooks app, one wonders how it could rank anywhere but #1 among the top iBooks "Top Charts" listings for free books. I would understand if Apple chose not to count Winnie the Pooh either among the "Top Charts" listings or in the math that supported the company's press release Monday, which stated that the million or so new iPad owners had downloaded 1.5 million iBooks titles in April. But if it is being counted, how could it be #62?

10% Off Kindle Prices on Amazon Marketplace ... H'mm, Are Kindle Owners Jumping Ship?

Throughout the past three months, with the heightening of buzz, competition, and even partnership between all things iPad and all things Kindle, there's been a kind of upside-down, inside-out, Alice in Wonderland dimension to many of the events and news items in this sphere. So today we find that the iPad is the top selling tablet computer at Amazon, and that the price of the Kindle has been coming down -- perhaps due to iPad lust? -- at Amazon Marketplace....

The news is often astonishing here, but seldom truly surprising.

There probably aren't enough Kindles available at these discounts for the prices to last for long, but it seems worth mentioning here that it's a pretty good time to pick up a new or used Kindle at a discount price through Amazon Marketplace.

Are some Kindle owners jumping ship for the iPad or other devices? It's possible, and we are seeing some offerings of the latest generation global wireless 6" Kindle at prices in the $230 to $240 range, alongside Amazon's own $259 direct retail price. With Amazon Marketplace quantities extremely limited, further price fluctuations are very likely, but I'll post the applicable links below so that you can check for yourself.

As always, special care is necessary on the front end of such transactions to make sure that you are buying the Kindle you want, in the condition you want, from a seller who inspires your trust. That being said, Amazon offers considerable support to buyers in its Amazon Marketplace program.

• Kindle Wireless Reading Device (6" Display, Global Wireless, Latest Generation) - $259 from Amazon
• Kindle Wireless Reading Device (6" Display, Global Wireless, Latest Generation) - Used and New, Discounted by Amazon Marketplace Sellers ($230 and up as of 4/19/2010)
• Kindle Wireless Reading Device (6" Display, U.S. Wireless) - Used and New, Discounted by Amazon Marketplace Sellers ($213 and up as of 4/19/2010)
• Kindle DX Wireless Reading Device (9.7" Display, Global Wireless, Latest Generation) - $489 from Amazon
• Kindle DX Wireless Reading Device (9.7" Display, Global Wireless, Latest Generation) - Used and New, Discounted by Amazon Marketplace Sellers ($440 and up as of 4/19/2010)
• Kindle DX Wireless Reading Device (9.7" Display, U.S. Wireless) - Used and New, Discounted by Amazon Marketplace Sellers ($350 and up as of 4/19/2010)

One thing that may be keeping some Kindle owners from jumping ship, ironically, is that there is some misleading information being passed around about the hardware requirements for buying and reading Kindle content with the free Kindle for iPad app. "Unless you have a Kindle, you cannot send yourself books so you are  limited to the Amazon Kindle store content and any previously purchased  content can’t be read using the Kindle App," says the usually reliable Dear Author website in a purported review of the free Kindle for iPad app and other iPad-compatible reading venues that is also referenced at Teleread.

The fact of the matter, of course, is that all of the Kindle apps (for the iPad, the iPhone, the iPod Touch, the PC, the Mac, and the Blackberry) are "No Kindle Required" apps that work just fine whether you have a Kindle -- or have ever had a Kindle -- or not.

Meanwhile, it's also worth following up on our earlier mention of the fact that, with continued shipping delays (currently 5 to 7 days) of the the wifi iPad at the Apple Store and postponement of the 3G iPad's ship date from "late April" to "May 7," there are brisk sales of those models -- at premium prices -- among Amazon Marketplace sellers. As of the afternoon of Monday, April 19, the iPad family is represented at the top of Amazon's bestseller lists for Tablet Computers:

Parsing Steve Jobs' Numbers: 450,000 iPads Sold, 600,000 iBooks Downloads, But What's Really Going On?

By Stephen Windwalker, Editor of Kindle Nation


There are some interesting numbers floating around about the iPad and its iBooks Store, and some of them seem to merit a closer look.

First, congratulations to Apple and Steve Jobs for an impressive rollout of a pretty cool device, and for being reasonably straightforward with the public in sharing some numbers. Given how close Amazon plays such numbers to the vest, covering the Kindle is a bit like navigating through heavy fog by comparison.

Jobs appeared at an iPhone event on Apple's Cupertino campus yesterday and led off with a bit of an iPad progress report, as reported in a New York Times blog and elsewhere.

Jobs said that there were 300,000 iPads sold "on the first day," and that the cumulative total as of today's even was 450,000. This is impressive, but it makes me wonder:

• It was widely reported that there were at least 125,000 iPad pre-orders on the weekend of March 12-14, the first weekend when pre-orders were taken. So, if those 125,000 were counted in the 300,000 first-day total, as one would expect, does that mean that the total number ordered and sold fresh on Saturday, between all Apple Stores and other retailers like Best Buy, was only 175,000?
• How many pre-orders were recorded from March 15 to the beginning of April and included in the 300,000 April 3 sales? If those totalled 5,000 a day, could that mean there were only 125,000 fresh sales on April 3?

Don't get me wrong: 450,000 iPads sold to date at the various iPad price points means over $250 million at retail, which, as I said, is impressive. The online Apple Store shows a slight shipping delay right now, and Jobs said today that "we're not making enough right now" and that he "heard Best Buy was sold out." And Apple has yet to reveal anything about the number of iPad 3G pre-orders fir late April shipment, which could conceivably double the volume of wifi iPad orders.

At the same time, when we become so accustomed to expecting magical things from Apple (and it's been Apple's choice to use the word a fair amount lately), something like the actual sales figures can seem a little underwhelming. 

After waiting over the course of the last year or two for the launch of the iTablet or the iSlate or the iPad, one naturally expected there to be some pent-up demand, and there was. But that iPad Fever seems to have been roughly equivalent to the pent-up demand that led Amazon, on its February 23, 2009 release date for the Kindle 2, to ship roughly a quarter of a million units after several months of waiting. 

250,000 units in a day, 300,000 units in a day, those are great days for a new product. But Apple has shipped 50 million iPhones and another 35 million iPod Touches, so one is almost inclined to say "ho-hum" at launch-day sales in the low six figures.

There were other numbers from Steve Jobs today, specifically about ebook sales. 

He said that there had been 250,000 ebook downloads from the iBooks Store within the first 24 hours, and 600,000 ebook downloads in all so far (which means about 90,000 per day after the first 24 hours). He didn't say how many iPad owners had downloaded the free iBooks app, so it's impossible to suss out the relative numbers of iBooks visitors and Kindle for iPad visitors, or how many books the average visitor is buying and downloading. 

250,000 downloads in a day seems impressive, doesn't it? But for those publishing industry observers who see salvation when they see Steve Jobs, it may be worth noting by comparison that as early as October 2008, when the Kindle's installed base was not much larger than the iPad's installed base is today, there were a handful of Kindle Store authors who were experiencing daily Kindle Store sales of over a thousand copies per individual title. Cumulatively, over the 28-month life of the Kindle, it is very likely there have been over 300 million ebooks downloaded from the Kindle Store. This estimate, of course, includes Kindle books downloaded to a growing range of Kindle-compatible devices that now includes the iPad.

One interesting if minor disconnect, at present, is in the two listings of bestselling "free apps" for books that one finds in the two iterations of Apple's App Store that appear, respectively, on the iPad itself and in the iTunes Store's App department that comes up on a computer:

• In the iPad's rendering of the App Store, the iBooks app is listed as the #1 top free iPad app. There's not another "books" listing in the top 20, but a public domain app called Free Books is #21, a great Marvel Comics app is #22, and the Kindle for iPad app is #24 as of 8 p.m. EDT April 8.
• Meanwhile, if you look at the Top Free Apps under "books" in the iTunes Store's App department as it comes up on a computer, the Kindle app is #1 and the iBooks app is nowhere to be found. 

Some of this disparity would seem to be about the fact that the Kindle app is also an iPhone app, and the underlying fact that there are nearly 200 times as many iPhones and iPod Touches that can run it as the number of iPads that can run the iBooks app. But it does seem as if there may be some effort on Apple's part -- perhaps inadvertent? maybe they forgot there was something called the Kindle? -- to tilt the playing field when one initiates a search for iPad-compatible books apps in the iTunes Store's App department and finds dozens of apps listed, but no Kindle for iPad app:

Naturally, with a catalog that is less than 10 percent of the Kindle Store's catalog after adjusting each store's list to omit free public domain titles, it will take the iBooks Store a while to compete seriously with the Kindle catalog regardless of the liberties that may be taken with home field advantage. But it does seem clear that, with each iPad sold, the future looks brighter and brighter for both Apple and Amazon.

First Looks at the iPad - Two Videos and a Pogue

By Stephen Windwalker
Originally posted at the iReader, April 1, 2010

Let's begin ever so modestly with two videos and one review that take a useful and fairly objective look at the iPad, by reviewers who have actually had the opportunity to test drive the wifi version of the iPad for a few days. First up is the Wall Street Journal's Personal Tech columnist Walt Mossberg. He likes his Kindle, but he prefers reading on the iPad:

What Mossberg does not address is ebook price and selection, and it appears that at least for a while, the best prices and selection for reading ebooks on the iPad may be found in the Kindle for iPad app once it is released. The approach that we'll be taking, here at the iReader, begins with the assumption that most of us who want to use the iPad for reading will avail ourselves, at the very least, of both the iBooks and the Kindle for iPad apps, since both are free. Part of the mission of this blog will be to share information -- on the best content, selection, pricing and convenience from a reader's point of view -- in ways that are app-agnostic. In other words, we'll try not to be drawn into fanboi or hater camps with respect to any device, app, or company, but that of course will not keep us from calling 'em as we see 'em.

In a written review of the iPad that is featured in today's New York Times, tech columnist David Pogue is pretty positive about the iPad reading experience, but raises his eyebrows at the initial lack of selection in Apple's iBooks store:

There’s an e-book reader app, but it’s not going to rescue the newspaper and book industries (sorry, media pundits). The selection is puny (60,000 titles for now). You can’t read well in direct sunlight. At 1.5 pounds, the iPad gets heavy in your hand after awhile (the Kindle is 10 ounces). And you can’t read books from the Apple bookstore on any other machine — not even a Mac or iPhone.

Tim Gideon's PCMag has a pretty thorough, balanced, and occasionally witty review and video here, although I suspect this brief snippet may inspire a few chuckles at Amazon: "Of course, the iPad has iBooks, and they look great. It will be interesting to see if the Kindle and other ebook readers stay in the game."

Thanks for tuning in to our first post here at the iReader. There will be plenty more to come, and they will soon be available in the Kindle Store. I will also promise Kindle subscribers that fewer than 10 percent of our posts here at the iReader will include embedded videos. Whenever you do find a video or other content that will not open on your Kindle, you can go to http://theireader.blogspot.com/ on your Mac or PC and view the entire post with the embedded videos there.