Technologist Jason Perlow has done an analysis of e-book reading apps available on your iPad, and it would be a good idea for you to see what he has to say before downloading any of them.

“The average iPad user may not be aware of features or limitations in the various e-Reader apps available on the App Store,” he says, “so I’m going to try to boil this down so that you can make the appropriate choices which best fit your reading lifestyle.”

You may be surprised, maybe even shocked, by his conclusions. Here in condensed form are his takes on some of the more prominent apps.

iBooks

“While there is no doubting iBooks’ success in terms of its widespread use, of all the reader applications we’ve looked at, it is actually the least functional. Apple designed iBooks to behave and act like a real book, and focused more on the aesthetics and UI than actual App functionality with the initial release….”

“iBooks supports syncing of DRM-free EPUB and PDF content directly to the iPad thru iTunes. This is an excellent feature, but essentially locks the user down to using iTunes as the primary data transfer mechanism and thus requires a host PC or Macintosh in order to maintain the library…”

“Unfortunately, iBooks doesn’t scale very well as the size of your EPUB library increases. While iBooks is perfectly fine for a few dozen or perhaps a hundred or so books purchased from the iBooks Store or synced into iTunes, it is extremely unwieldy once you approach 300+ titles loaded into the database.”

[One issue Perlow doesn't mention is cited by blogger Thomas Baekdal, who writes: "You've already purchased this book but it isn't available for redownload. To purchase it again at full price, tap OK" and his comment is, "ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME?!?!?"]

Kindle for iPad

“Amazon still has the widest array of paid ebook content in existence, with well over 600,000 titles in inventory. However, from a feature perspective, the Kindle software is pretty weak when compared to its hardware counterpart — you can’t import other file formats into it (such as PDFs or .MOBI files) and it only works with titles you’ve purchased in the Kindle store.”

Barnes & Noble eReader

“Of all the paid content readers, by far the best one in existence is probably the Barnes & Noble eReader application. About the only negative thing I can say about it is that like Kindle for iPad, the application is limited to content purchased on the B&N website, and uses the same Safari web interface for purchasing.”

“Other than that flaw, I love this app — the reading experience is far superior to that of the Kindle application, as it has five customizable themes for different colors of text and background and has the best reading fonts I’ve seen in any of the apps I looked at, especially when viewed in the ‘Earl Grey’ theme that almost has me convinced I’m looking at e-Ink and not an LCD.”

“Margins can be adjusted directly from page view to make maximum use of the screen if you’d like. The content browsing interface is also much more elegant than that of iBooks or Kindle for iPad.”

Kobo Reader / Borders eBooks

“Kobo Reader for iPad is…extremely polished and very well-designed.
Kobo’s main benefit is that it supports many different computing and smartphone platforms, so you can have all of your content available with you wherever you go. Like Kindle and B&N, your content is stored in Kobobooks.com’s cloud, so it doesn’t matter if you are using Kobo for iPad, iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, Palm, PC or Mac…”

“The Kobo reader application is one of the nicest looking on the iPad platform, although it isn’t nearly as feature rich as B&N’s or Stanza from a pure reading perspective. However, the text display is very nice, and you have four scalable fonts to choose from plus a White-on-Black “Night Reading” mode.”

Stanza

“Of all the applications listed here, Stanza is actually a very mature e-reader app, this despite only very recently being made iPad-native with version 3, in early June…
Stanza is by far the most sophisticated e-Reader application for iPad, as it supports not only the open EPUB format but also the legacy Mobipocket, PalmDoc (DOC), Microsoft LIT formats as well as HTML, PDF, Microsoft Word and Rich Text Format (RTF). This built-in compatibility eliminates the need for book conversion to EPUB with applications such as Calibre…”

“In addition to its connectivity features, Stanza has access to a wide variety of free book feeds… It has a wide array of font styles and color themes, and many options for text layout…”

“If you have lots of content that you’ve collected over the years, Stanza is definitely a must-have app. There’s absolutely no downside, it’s free to use and does more than any e-book reader app on this list.”

For the complete article, check out Apple iPad Showdown: Battle of the eReader Apps

Richard Curtis

Mike Shatzkin is a future Prognostication Hall of Famer but by his own admission he tapped a weak grounder to shortstop when he predicted that the iPad wouldn’t not have an “immediate significant impact on ebook sales.” In fact, the impact was nothing short of explosive.  For a couple of publishers, e-book sales tripled or even quadrupled after the Apple introduced its device.

Shatzkin’s prediction had by no means been crackpot. Though he knew the iPad would sell big time (it ended up selling 1 million units in a few weeks after launch), like so many of us he figured its biggest use would be videos and games, not reading. He was also skeptical that a lot of people would want to read on a pinkie-busting 1.5 pound iPad (Kindle weights 10 ounces).

How wrong can a prophet be? “I was proved wrong in less than a month,” confesses Shatzkin in a recent posting.  “Apparently if we get slightly larger and portable screens into people’s hands, they want to read books on them.” And consumers obviously were willing to sacrifice their pinkies to be early adopters of the iPad.

It’s okay, Mike. Your .299 batting average still puts you in MVP contention.

Richard Curtis

“Today they censor nipples, tomorrow it’s editorial content,” said a spokeswoman at Bild, Germany’s newspaper whose high circulation can be laid at the breasts of the topless “Bild girls.” A number of German weekly newspapers sport similar titillating images.

You’ll find them in German newspapers, but you won’t find them on the iPad, according to William Boston writing in AOL News. “Apple’s cyber police removed Stern’s gallery of nude photos and forced Bild to put some clothes on the ‘Bild girl.’

“Stern.de, the Web site of the German weekly magazine, has now installed what its CEO Chris Hasselbring calls an ‘erotic filter’ to ensure that no content in violation of Apple’s rules makes it onto the Stern app for the iPhone or iPad. But Hasselbring and other German publishers are not happy with the situation,” writes Boston

“Jobs’ blitzkrieg against German nudity on his iPad could have far-reaching consequences for the publishing industry if he is allowed to dictate what content is allowed and what should be verboten,” Boston points out.

What’s behind Jobs’s nipple fixation? “In an e-mail allegedly from Jobs that was published on the TechCrunch blog,” Boston says, “Jobs dismissed his critics, saying: ‘We do believe we have a moral responsibility to keep porn off the iPhone.’”

By squeezing nipples off the the iPad Jobs raises many questions

and even more hackles. Are Ingres’ nudes okay but Playboy centerfolders out? And if so, why?  Who makes those decisions?  Men’s nipples okay?  And why do men have nipples, anyway? What about male organs? Michaelangelo’s David, is that a go or no-go? Is there a Hays Office-type review board populated by censors triaging images of breasts? And are there still openings for that position?

Oh yes, one more question: what century are we in, again?

After reading iPad’s Nipple Ban Arouses Ire of German Publishers you’ll have lots of questions of your own, we’re sure.

Richard Curtis

Is there an app for We’re Suing Your Ass?

The New York Post reports that the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission are seriously looking into antitrust violations by Apple over its policy of requiring developers to use only Apple tools in the creation of apps.  A similar action against Microsoft ended in a similar unbundling.

“Regulators, this person said, are days away from making a decision about which agency will launch the inquiry,” writes the Post‘s Josh Kosman. “It will focus on whether the policy, which took effect last month, kills competition by forcing programmers to choose between developing apps that can run only on Apple gizmos or come up with apps that are platform neutral, and can be used on a variety of operating systems, such as those from rivals Google, Microsoft and Research In Motion.”

“After years of being the little guy who used Washington to fend off Goliaths like Microsoft, Apple CEO Steve Jobs is about to learn what life is like when the shoe’s on the other foot,” writes Kosman.

We couldn’t have said it better, and we’re not going to try.

Read details in An antitrust app: Apple may be in the eye of regulatory storm

Richard Curtis

Publishers Weekly‘s “Soapbox”, traditionally the last page of every issue of the magazine, gives civilians a forum to voice their opinions or relate their personal, book business-related experiences. Yours truly has often stood on the Soapbox haranguing the people like some demented prophet of yore, and it is the place where my end-of-the-year doggerel appears.

A recent Soapbox by Kermit Hummel, editorial director of Countryman Press, examined the difference between Amazon and Apple using a different criterion from the usual technical ones.  Hummel looked at bookstore experience, and by that measurement Amazon leaves Apple completely in the dust.

He starts by summing up the blessings that Amazon has bestowed on a book retailing model that had been mired in an archaic mindset, arguably somewhere between 16th and 18th centuries.

Perhaps the greatest contribution made by Amazon to the book industry over the past 15 years has been the depth it has provided to the book-buying experience. The astute focus on searchability and on taxonomy is reflected in those other titles that appear on any given search page. Amazon both revitalized deep backlists and enhanced the shopping experience with those constellations of titles. Amazon took this associative tool further with the invention of Search Inside the Book. These tools and tricks went a long way toward giving online book buying some of the look and feel that previously had been the domain of the well-read independent bookseller. Yes, the idea is to sell the buyer another product. But it also gives obscure corners of the backlist some light.

By comparison, says Hummel, the Apple shopping experience is “grim”, and, even more unfortunately, you don’t discover just how grim it is until after you’ve bought and used the iPad. What’s wrong? Its bookstore is utterly oriented to bestsellers.

“Does anyone actually try looking any further on the App Store than the top 25?” he asks.

The pathetic taxonomy of the App Store, with all of 20 “categories,” makes it impossible to just look around. Everything is buried beneath that single echelon of the top 25 (conveniently segmented into top 25 paid and top 25 free). With iBooks numbering only 60,000 currently, this problem is only going to become more and more apparent as huge numbers of titles are added into the mix over the next weeks and months.

Bottom line? “Apple is at present simply a lousy bookseller,” concludes Hummel.  Read it in full in Soapbox: Apples and Oranges

Richard Curtis
Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by Publishers Weekly.

David Pogue, the wonderful blogger who tells technology like it is for the New York Times, has weighed iPad in the balance and found it not wanting.

He’s also weighed it on a scale and found it heavy compared to Kindle, 1.5 pounds vs. 10 ounces. But that is not a fatal factor in his evaluation.  In fact there are no fatal factors in his evaluation.  His biggest reservation is the fundamental concept of the iPad itself: why does the iPad exist? At first we were mystified by this enigmatic, existential question. But like a koan the answer came the next day.  More on that in a moment.

Pogue’s approach to appraising Apple’s tablet is divided in two: one column for geeks and one for shleppers.  We take umbrage at the distinction, because it doesn’t give much credit to a generation of lay users who are quite conversant with computer specs.  In fact this shlepper didn’t see anything so complex in Pogue’s “techie” section that could not be comprehended by an English major who did his Master’s thesis on Henry James.

Here are some highlights of Pogue’s analysis:

• 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).
• When the iPad is upright, typing on the on-screen keyboard is a horrible experience
• Things open fast, scroll fast, load fast
• The iPad can’t play Flash video…Thousands of Web sites show up with empty white squares on the iPad
• There’s no multitasking…It’s one app at a time
• The simple act of making the multitouch screen bigger changes the whole experience
• A great AT&T cellular deal
• 150,000 existing iPhone apps run on the iPad and 1000 specially designed for the iPad’s bigger screen

We said Pogue likes the iPad with an asterisk, but besides cavils like weight and glare, his specific reservations are so modest we won’t bother to reprint them here.  You can read them on Looking at the iPad From Two Angles

Pogue’s glowing bottom line is this: “The iPad is so fast and light, the multitouch screen so bright and responsive, the software so easy to navigate, that it really does qualify as a new category of gadget. Some have suggested that it might make a good goof-proof computer for technophobes, the aged and the young; they’re absolutely right.”

So – what does Pogue mean when he says the iPad is a hit except for the concept? The answer came in an article by Brad Stone and Claire Cain Miller published in the Times the next day. “Many consumers do not understand the device’s purpose, who would want to pay $500 or more for it and why anyone would need another gadget on top of a computer and smartphone. After all, phones are performing an ever-expanding range of functions, as Apple points out in its many iPhone commercials.” A banker commented that “I can do everything on my MacBook Pro, cellphone and BlackBerry. I don’t need any more devices. I already have six phone numbers and enough things to plug in at night.” A Silicon Valley entrepreneur was quoted as saying “But let’s see: you can’t make a phone call with it, you can’t take a picture with it, and you have to buy content that before now you were not willing to pay for.”

But that very same entrepreneur said “The first five million will be sold in a heartbeat.” Not very enigmatic or cosmic, but until something comes along to top the iPad, this would seem to be the last word.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

After a gestation longer than an elephant, speculation characterized by preposterous fantasies, and a delivery witnessed by millions, Apple finally brought forth a bouncing baby iPad. Not since the Essenes have such Messianic hopes and dreams been cherished, and whether they will be fulfilled remains to be seen after technicians take it apart and consumers render their verdict. Nevertheless, it seemed difficult for tech pundits to resist the temptation to kneel before it.

Here for instance is what Gizmodo’s blogger had to say:

• The guts: It’s a half-inch thick—just a hair thicker than the iPhone, for reference—and weighs 1.5 pounds…It’s also loaded with 802.11 n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR, a 30-pin iPod connector, a speaker, a microphone, an accelerometer and a compass.
• It’s substantial but surprisingly light. Easy to grip. Beautiful. Rigid. Starkly designed. The glass is a little rubbery but it could be my sweaty hands. And it’s fasssstttt.
• Apple didn’t really sell this point, but it’s the single biggest benefit of the iPad: speed. It feels at least a generation faster than the iPhone 3GS. Lags and waits are gone, and the OS and apps respond just as quickly as you’d hope. Rotating between portrait and landscape modes, especially, is where this new horsepower manifests in the OS.
• iBooks: It’s an optical illusion, but just seeing the depth of pages makes the iBook app feel more like a book than a Kindle ever did for me. The text is sharp, and while the screen is bright, it doesn’t seem to strains the eyes—but time will tell on that.
• Pictures: Pinch, zoom, whatever—like we said, it’s fast—the photo app is faster that iPhoto performs on my aging Core2Duo laptop.
• Apps: Apps can play in their native resolution, or be 2x uprezzed for the screen. How does it look? An ATV game we tried actually looked pretty good—limited more by its base polygon count than the scaling process itself. Bottom line: it’s about as elegant solution as Apple could have offered, even if that graphics won’t be razor sharp.
• Browsing: Over Wi-Fi, Gizmodo loaded quickly. The 9.7-inch screen is an excellent size for reading the site. You can pinch zoom, but you won’t need to. Of course, on such a pretty web browsing experience, not having Flash makes the big, empty video boxes in the middle of a page is pretty disappointing. Put differently, the fatal flaw of Apple’s mobile browser has never been more apparent.

For these features and many more, the $499 price is universally acclaimed to be a huge bargain for this seamless blend of computer, game and movie player, e-book readers, and more. As to the battery, about which many expressed the gravest skepticism, Apple claims it will run for ten hours even with intense use such as movies. If you don’t like what they’re showing on your flight to Australia, load your iPad up with half a dozen films and you’ll be there in no time.

To see Gizmodo’s hands-on test-drive, click here. You can also view an absolute feeding-frenzy of comments, blogs, tweets, and eructations. Be careful not to stick your hand in there: it will be bitten off.

As for e-books and newspapers, Publishers Weekly‘s Calvin Reid writes: “The device was demoed with newspaper content from the New York Times and supports video and audio embedded in the content. Most importantly, the iPad will support the ePub e-book standard and Apple has developed its own e-reader software, iBooks, and will also launch an iBookstore. E-book pricing is reported to be in the $15 range.” If you plan to write a book on iPad instead of reading one, there is both a virtual keyboard (left) and a pull-out.

Now that iPad is born there doesn’t seem to be much left to live for. But we will carry on as best we can, comforting ourselves with the knowledge that the Apple has scaled a pinnacle from which the view of the digital future is truly intoxicating.

Richard Curtis

The other day we reported that Apple-watchers have taken to calling the imminent tablet The Unicorn because of all the magical properties being attributed to it – and because, of course, no one has seen it. If only there were a fly on the wall of Apple’s Cupertino headquarters, a fly with a particularly sensitive transmitter…

In fact we have one. It’s a company called Flurry Analytics. Flurry has developed tools that gather from app developers information about applications they are working on. Jenna Wortham, writing about Flurry in the New York Times, reports that “Flurry can generate reports about the location of an application’s users, for example, or how long it took a user to complete a game level.”

It turns out that Flurry picked up some feedback from about 50 devices on or around the Cupertino campus and came to some conclusions about what we’re going to find under the hood of Apple’s tablet when we finally get our hands on one for a test drive.

Check Flurry’s chart below and you’ll see that the top three apps downloaded from Cupertino are for games, entertainment and news/books, followed by lifestyle, utilities, music, photography, travel, finance, social networking, weather and miscellaneous.

That games and entertainment are the # 1 and #2 apps should not surprise us, especially when one considers that the tablet’s larger screen will enable more than one user to play games on it. But the third one, news and books, raises an eyebrow in view of Apple CEO Steve Jobs’s declaration that nobody reads anymore. It sounds as if people are going to be reading newspapers and illustrated books big time on the iSlate, Unicorn or whatever it’s called.

For more speculations on the Apple tablet, read Jenna Wortham’s A Playland for Apps in a Tablet World. The speculation should end later today when Apple’s formal announcement puts us all out of our misery. But if that Flurry fly on the wall of Apple’s lab is transmitting accurate information, Apple’s announcement should be anticlimactic.

Richard Curtis

Remember why Tivo was invented? Looks like we’ll now need the equivalent of a Tivo to skip embedded advertising popups that simply will not go away until you acknowledge them with a click. Certainly that’s an Apple App waiting to be invented, yes?

Don’t count on it. The evil feature was created by Apple CEO Steve Jobs himself. Of the five inventors listed on the patent application, his name comes first. The application would post popups on anything that has a screen: phones, TVs, games, media players – if it has a screen the ads will appear, and they will not go away until you actively do something about them.

Randall Stross, writing in the Digital Domain column of the New York Times, describes the technology: “Its distinctive feature is a design that doesn’t simply invite a user to pay attention to an ad — it also compels attention. The technology can freeze the device until the user clicks a button or answers a test question to demonstrate that he or she has dutifully noticed the commercial message. Because this technology would be embedded in the innermost core of the device, the ads could appear on the screen at any time, no matter what one is doing.”

In other words, you are now utterly at the mercy of the advertiser.

As Stross explains it, “What the application calls the “enforcement routine” entails administering periodic tests, like displaying on top of an ad a pop-up box with a response button that must be pressed within five seconds before disappearing to confirm that the user is paying attention.”

Or, to put it crudely, Apple holds you down while the advertiser inserts its ad. And there’s no app to prevent it.

Stross wonders aloud if the invention could be a big turnoff even for fanatically loyal Apple lovers: “Would anyone have guessed that Apple, so widely revered, would seek patent protection of a gimmick not unlike one used to sell vacation timeshares?”

For details, read Apple Wouldn’t Risk Its Cool Over a Gimmick, Would It?

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by The New York Times.