Kindle Review – Kindle Fire Review, Kindle 4 Review

Paul Carr has written a beautiful post that captures exactly what Publishers and ‘iPad is a better eReader than Kindle’ ideologists are refusing to see.

Paul Carr points out that the iPad is a Reading Killer

Here is the logical progression of the article -

1. iPad is a Kindle Killer – in the title. 
   

   I Admit It, The iPad Is A Kindle Killer. I Just Wish It Weren’t Going To Kill Reading Too

2. iPad is not a good way to read books. At this point we probably lose some of the fanatical iPad supporters. This Paul Carr paragraph is very politically incorrect and also a perfect description of non-readers under the delusion that they are the target market for eReaders -
   

   The iPad is emphatically not a serious readers’ device: the only people who would genuinely consider it a Kindle killer are those for whom the idea of reading for pleasure died years ago; if it was ever alive.

   The people who will spout bullshit like “I read on screen all day” when what they really mean is “I read the first three paragraphs of the New York Times article I saw linked on Twitter before retweeting it; and then I repeat that process for the next eight hours while pretending to work.”

   That’s reading in the way that rubbing against women on the subway is sex

3. iPad is a beautiful device for almost everything else. It’s perfect for newspapers and email and browsing and movies and games.
4. iPad will become the one device people carry with them. Casual readers will be buying iPads and Tablets instead of Kindles and eReaders -
   

   Sales of ebooks soared as first early adopters, then everyone else, left their paper books at home and started carrying around something smaller and lighter that still gave them access to their reading material.

   Those same people are now the ones who will buy iPads, or presumably any one of the myriad alternatives that will soon be flooding the market

5. On the iPad books compete with all other forms of entertainment. On the iPad there are constant distractions. 
   

   Even for those who love books enough to persevere with reading without e-ink will soon face another problem with the awesomeness of the iPad. The device does so many different things so well that there’s a constant urge when you’re using one to do something else.

6. iPad will end up killing the concept of reading for pleasure for a lot of casual readers.

It really is an excellent article and the comments illustrate both pro-Kindle and anti-Kindle beliefs beautifully. Here’s my favorite -

Maybe we will evolve to read well under iPad conditions?

iPad is a Reading Killer and not a Kindle Killer

First, iPad is not going to kill the Kindle because if you love to read you’re going to prefer the Kindle. Even if you choose to go for reading on the iPhone or on the iPad it won’t take long before you realize that it’s not that easy to focus on reading - Then you come back to the Kindle or Nook or Sony Reader.

For me, despite preferring reading over wasting time, it’s been 150+ hours of games on the iPhone in 6 months versus 25 hours of reading on the iPhone. In my first week with the iPad am only 80% through one book (with the Nook it was 2 books in the first week).

There will obviously be a lot of casual readers who are lost forever – However, they are the 80% that only account for 20% of sales. Our concern should be much more about the 20% of dedicated readers that are getting abused by the Agency Model and other artificial restrictions.

Second, iPad is going to kill the concept of reading for pleasure for a lot of casual readers. Here’s why -

1. By promoting the iPad and pushing wrong notions (that the iPad is an eReader, that LCD is as good as eInk) the Press are taking even people who wanted to buy an eReader and feeding them a device that is better suited for every other form of entertainment.
2. Everyone is confusing ‘you can read on this device’ with ‘you will actually read on this device’.
3. With its rich color screen, 9.7″ screen, and good video support the iPad is much better suited to TV and Movies and YouTube than books.
4. It’s amazingly well suited to casual games and casual game makers are amazingly adept at tapping human psychology and relentlessly improving value for money. Publishers are very good at messing up exactly those two things. 
5. It’s just not the sort of device suited for 3 to 4 hours of reading at a stretch and for shorter time periods you have very competitive offerings – casual games, serious games, apps of all sorts, movies, surfing, and more.

Note that we’re saying ‘a lot’ and not all. There will be people who will read ‘more’ on their iPad then they did before – Our argument is that for most readers owning an eReader leads to much more reading than owning an iPhone or an iPad.

If the ‘iPad is a better eReader than Kindle’ ideologists think about it even they will admit that no matter how much better they think the iPad is for reading they read less than someone who owns a Kindle – they read less because they are busy doing magical things like watching movies and playing games on their iPad while we Kindle owners are doing our non-magical reading.

Why Non-Readers and the Press are pushing iPad as an eReader

We’re taking a lot of different people with a lot of different motivations and assuming they are all ‘people who actually read books’. Let’s consider 5 categories of people -

1. People who love to read and read a lot.
2. People who have reading as a top 3 interest and read often enough to want a device they can read very well on.
3. People who read once in a while and want a device they can read on in addition to doing things that they do more often. 
4. People who like to think they read and want to have a device they can read their Flavor of the Year book on every year.
5. People who don’t really read and want people who read to stop reading – because they don’t understand why anyone would read.

The last 3 categories of people are not readers. For them an iPad really is the perfect reading device because its unsuitability for reading and lack of focus on reading matches the low importance reading has in their lives. Yet we are assuming that their advice applies to actual readers.

There’s also a strange discrimination – For some unfathomable reason the 5th category of people aren’t just satisfied to get a device that suits their needs. For them, it’s imperative that they be able to claim some sort of superiority – that they possess a device that validates their existence while all readers have is a device to read books on.

Non-readers are pushing iPad as an eReader so much because it matches their cognitive model of reading as something that’s done once every 3 months (or perhaps for 5 minutes a day in between checking other stuff).

Why the Press are embracing the concept of iPad as eReaders

There have been three distinct waves of iPad reviews -

1. Wave 1 were the privileged few who praised it to the skies – not mentioning portability, range of books (no one mentioned that only 30,000 non-public domain books were available), and lack of readability in sunlight. 
2. Wave 2 were the main-stream press that fell all over themselves talking about the revolution and the magic. 
3. Wave 3 are a mixed group – We’re finally getting negative reviews and reports of people returning their iPads and Paul Carr pointing out that it’s pretty much an anti-eReader. 

It’s only in the third wave that we’re getting some semblance of honesty. For people in the first 2 waves their jobs, their world-view, and their careers depend on the iPad saving newspapers.

That’s why Andy Ihnatko managed to see his iPad screen perfectly in sunlight and why most of the people in the first two waves proclaimed the iPad as better for reading than the Kindle without ever having read a book on the Kindle.

The Reality Distortion Field can’t last forever – Reality Always Wins

The funny thing about reality is that no matter how much you try to distort it it doesn’t change -

1. There can be 100 people commenting about how reading on LCDs causes no eye-strain. If you’re not a LCD-resistant human then your eyes still hurt. 
2. A thousand people who don’t read can shout and scream that eReaders aren’t worth more than $50. For people who read they’re still priceless.
3. Every biased reviewer can claim that the iPad is readable in sunlight and the weight doesn’t make a difference. The screen is still unreadable in sunlight and your hands still hurt.
4. You can pretend there are no distractions on the iPad. The new, hot game and email and that new release on NetFlix are still going to be calling your name. 
5. Steve Jobs can talk about 600,000 book downloads on the first day – That doesn’t change that not much reading is going to be done on the iPad.
6. Publishers can hate Amazon as much as they want. Kindle for iPad is still going to sell more ebooks than any other app.

And, of course, if you don’t read a lot and aren’t looking for a device that is specialized for reading then the last thing you should do is listen to, or care for the opinion of, a blog focused on dedicated eReaders and dedicated readers.

Filed under: iSlate Apple Slate Tagged: | future of books, lack thereof, thanks to iPad