The iPad is as much an e-reader as it is an internet tablet, portable computer, games machine, and any other of the myriad uses dreamt up by app developers. Apple has gone to great lengths to position the iPad as a replacement for your book collection, but does it stand up? And which is better, Apple’s own iBooks app or Amazon’s Kindle iPad app? There’s only one way to find out… read our iPad UK review: Kindle vs iBooks!
Read the rest of our UK iPad review:
iPad UK review: design and build
iPad UK review: overall verdict
iPad UK review: iPad OS
iPad review: One month on
UK iPad fans have a problem: at the time of writing, the iPad isn’t on sale on our shores. Importing one isn’t a tricky process, and once you do it’ll activate just fine with a UK iTunes account. What’s more, there are iPad apps available through iTunes in UK pricing, including Amazon’s Kindle iPad app, and while the iPad’s own App Store icon will tell you it can’t download new software, syncing purchases made within iTunes works just fine.
Download the Kindle app to your Mac or PC, sync it to your iPad and you’ll be off and reading. Apple’s own iBooks app, however, is slightly trickier to track down.
Since it’s restricted to the US at the moment, you’ll need a US iTunes account to download and install it on your iPad. We snagged one to install iBooks and put it head to head with the Kindle iPad app, let’s see how the eBooks stack up.
Buying books
iBooks app
Buying books through iBooks couldn’t be easier. Everything’s handled inside the iBooks app, with simple one-touch access to the iBooks store. Titles aren’t cheap, starting at around $9.99, although there are plenty of classic titles available for free, courtesy of Project Guttenberg now they have dropped out of copyright.
The store layout is almost identical to the standard iTunes store for music, movies and TV. If you’ve ever bought through iTunes before, you’ll know the drill. Once you’ve tapped a book, you can see a sample too. Choose to purchase it, and it’ll fly into your iBooks library and begin downloading.
Kindle iPad app
Amazon’s Kindle iPad store isn’t as well integrated as Apple’s iBooks store. Rather than completing purchases inside the iPad app, you’re directed to a web page within Safari by tapping a shortcut button inside the Kindle app.
It’s not perfect, but it’s still pretty slick, with books starting at a low, low $2.35. The iPad’s Safari browser makes skimming through the Kindle books on offer a pain-free business, although it’s not as intuitively laid out as the iBooks store. Finding titles can be a chore, and while there are some free eBooks available, Amazon doesn’t promote them heavily, or make them simple to track down.
Purchasing books isn’t tricky though, assuming you already have an Amazon account. Just tap in your username and password, and you’ll be able to choose which Kindle device to send your book too (the iPad, in this case, althoug there are also Kindle readers for Mac and PC, as well as Kindle devices themselves).
Once you’ve finished buying your new tome, there’s a handy button to take you back to the Kindle iPad app. Tap it, and Safari will close, and the Kindle app will load. Slick, and well thought through. It’s a step behind iBooks, but not a very big step.
Winner: iBooks
Reading books
iBooks app
The iBooks app is a joy to use. Apple has added just enough control to let you tweak the pages’ appearance, without making the interface cluttered. It’s built-in brightness control is a stroke of genius, and makes cranking down the screen’s glare a one-swipe affair, without leaving the app: ultra-handy when reading in bed.
There are few extras included with iBooks though. There’s the option to drop a bookmark, and some snazzy animated page turns, and by tapping a word Apple lets you look up its definition in a dictionary. There’s also a handy countdown of the pages left in a chapter, which genuinely lets you decide whether to race to the end, or cut short your reading. Aside from those extravagances however, the iBooks app is pretty simple. Charmingly so, in fact.
Kindle iPad app
Amazon has gone to town with its Kindle iPad app. It’ll sync up your existing reading library, letting you pick titles you’ve already purchased from your “archive” and have them delivered to the iPad at no extra charge. There’s also the ability to drop multiple bookmarks, skip between them, switch animated page turns on or off, and adjust the font and background hue of your digital pages.
You can also adjust the brightness of the Kindle iPad app, just like its iBooks rival, although Amazon has cheated here – the screen brightness itself doesn’t dim, but rather everything is darkened using a black overlay. The iPad logo, time and battery indicators at the top of the screen give the game away by remaining bright white.
The Kindle iPad app is a joy to use, and easy to read for lengthy periods. However, it’s also markedly less stable than iBooks. It crashed at least once every time we used it, usually while we were trying to navigate back to its home screen. For that reason alone, it’s behind iBooks, otherwise we’d judge them an even tie.
Winner: iBooks (but only just)
Book Organisation
iBooks app
Apple organises iBooks’ titles almost exclusively on the iPad. Introduce iTunes into proceedings and you’ll be opening a can of worms. See, there’s no way to shop for books without using the iPad itself. That’s all fine and dandy, but what if you’ve got ePub titles of your own? Sure, you can drag them into iTunes, which will then let you select the option to Sync Books with the iPad.
Bizarrely, however, this results in a warning that all movies and TV shows already synced to the iPad will be wiped. You’re then forced to re-sync everything again.
iBooks works great on the iPad, but Apple hasn’t applied quite the same level of sheen when it comes to syncing its titles across Mac and PC.
Kindle iPad app
The Kindle iPad app handles syncing much better than iBooks. It’ll download previous purchases from Amazon’s book store at no extra cost, and if you’re already using its Kindle software for PC or Mac you’ll find any purchases you make on the iPad waiting on your desktop automagically.
There’s no option to import your own ePub files to the Kindle iPad app, or to sync them through its desktop counterparts. However, given the mess Apple has created by adding those functions we’re almost glad. For sheer simplicity, automatic backup and peace of mind, we prefer the Kindle iPad app.
Winner: Kindle iPad app
Read the rest of our iPad UK review:
iPad UK review: design and build
iPad UK review: overall verdict
iPad UK review: iPad OS
iPad review: One month on
