So this is the year e-books finally broke through to mainstream. Many great reading devices have been launched and Amazon has reported record sales of new electronic books. 

I have been a happy owner of two e-book reading devices for three months now, so it's a time to sum up my experiences of electronic books and reading them. Last May I bought Amazon Kindle 2 and just few days after that I ended up buying an iPad. Both are great book reading devices and have transformed my reading habits trendemously.

My habit of reading books had significantly faded during last ten years as I spent most of my free time browsing through Internet. Now I often find myself opening up a good book instead of surfing through same boring webpages over and over again. Purchasing e-books is easy, so if I hear about an interesting book I can start reading almost immediately instead of writing down the details of the book for my next trip to bookshop or library. 

Actual reading is also surprisingly pleasant experience. When reading paperbacks, you always end up folding and mangling the book to make it stay open. Hardbacks are difficult to read laying on your side as they have trouble staying in balance. Of course these are trivial hardships, but with an e-book reader you just concentrate on reading regardless of your position.

So, how do Kindle and iPad compare as reading devices?

The first thing you notice when grabbing to the devices is the weight. The iPad is somewhat heavier whereas the Kindle feels light even for its size. The weight difference is not that big though: iPad is still at 680g lighter than a thick hardcover book. Kindle weighs 290g and can be compared to a paperback. 

The screen quality is good on both readers. The iPad has a traditional LCD display which emits light, so it's better when reading at evening. If it's totally dark, the display tends to be a little bit too bright even at the darkest setting so it's good to have some background lighting on.

Kindle likes light - more the merrier. Kindle's e-ink display looks like it's painted on top of the screen and looks great in bright light. The downside is that you really need a proper reading light if you're planning to read in evening. Kindle 2's screen is a bit of a grayish side but the new versions are promised to have a contrast that's comparable to paper. Because of the e-ink technology, the Kindle also has an exotic feature - every time the screen content changes, it first goes all black, clears and only after that new content appears. It only takes half a second, but you better get used to it as this happens every time you're turning the page.

iPad has somewhat better resolution than Kindle so the text looks less jagged when comparing the two. Looking at pictures, there is no competition - Kindle's grayscale display is not that suitable for graphics. When viewing graphics and PDF files, iPad is a clear winner with great picture quality and easy zooming. In a previous article I wrote about reading magazine PDFs on iPad.

Even though you can view PDF files on Kindle too, chances are that the scaled-down content is almost unreadable. Zooming in is very unpractical because of the e-ink display: every click of the zoom must go through the same fullscreen refresh as when turning pages, so you quickly learn to avoid zooming because of its tediousness. With books that are designed for Kindle there are no such problems - fonts are the right size and graphics work properly (with newspaper-like black & white quality).

Both devices allow different font sizes when reading books. On iPad, you can change the font too - on Kindle it requires hacking.

Software

When talking about e-book reading, it's necessary to understand the difference between hardware and software. With Kindle, everything is in one package - the Kindle hardware runs Kindle software and you mostly read Kindle format books on it.

On iPad things are a little bit different: you can have many different reading applications on single device. Apple's iBooks is the obvious choice for iPad, but you can also download free Kindle application which in effects turns the iPad into a Kindle - all the books you buy in the Kindle store can be downloaded to iPad's Kindle app too. You can keep same books in both devices and the devices even sync with each other - if you put the iPad away and continue reading on Kindle, you can jump to the same page you were reading on the other device. Kindle reading apps are available on most computers and handheld devices and they all sync with each other.

One device is missing though: there's no Kindle available for Nokia phones, which is a big shame. However, some Nokia phones run Mobipocket reader, which is able to view free e-books in mobi-format.

Apple's iBooks app is available for iPad and iPhone, and just as the Kindle app, it also synchronizes last read page across devices. Perhaps not so surprisingly, nowadays I tend to read books on my iPhone almost as much as on the iPad and the Kindle. It also means that those who are just considering e-books can just as well start reading with their current device and buy a "proper" e-book reader later.

Buying the books

Unfortunately, the book formats are not standard across devices. When buying books, you need to decide which format you're planning to get your books in. If you own a Kindle, the choice is obvious - your device reads AZW books bought from Amazon. On the iPad you can choose more freely - you can either buy ePub books from Apple's bookstore (and do your reading on iPad and iPhone) or buy AZW books from Amazon and use the Kindle app for reading.

The books you buy are DRM locked so they work only on your devices. With Kindle, all the books you've bought are archived in the Amazon website. You register with Amazon all the devices you own and after that you can upload your previously bought e-books to your devices. If you buy a new device, you just register it and after that you can send re-upload your books to the new reader.

With iBooks, authorization is done with your iTunes (App Store) account. When you buy books from Apple's bookstore, they are locked to your username. You can copy the books over to other devices but opening them requires giving the password. You can have books bought with multiple accounts on your iPad - for example, I have books both from U.S. and Finnish bookstores.

Either way, the e-books you buy are much more limited than the physical books. You can't lend them nor sell them to used bookstores. If Amazon or Apple some day decide to stop books business, you can't move your books into new devices - unless they decide to unlock your books or you crack the DRM protection (which is currently a crime).

This is one of biggest turnoffs for me with e-books. I'm a book lover and love owning physical books - we have lots of books all over our house. Digital books are great for quick consumption but lacking the actual object, I couldn't see myself moving to e-books only, especially as I can't be sure that the books I buy now are still usable in 10-20 years. Perhaps the idea of books is fading slowly away, just like mp3 killed the idea of record albums. I still have my vinyl and CD collection but I consume all new music one file at a time and don't buy albums anymore.

Another thing that will face big changes are the libraries. iPad and Kindle don't support book lending so I don't expect any big changes in libraries yet. 

Reading books

E-books don't have page numbers as such, because page sizes change depending on your device and font size. To help referencing locations in a book, Kindle has location numbers that stay the same from device to device. iBooks just reflows the book and shows fictional page numbers. 

One of the functionalities I love in e-book readers is a dictionary. With just one click/press you can bring up a definition for a word which is not familiar to you. It's great for people like me whose first language is not English.

Changing the pages is easier on e-book reader - you just press a button (on Kindle) or touch the screen (on iPad). Browsing through books isn't yet as intuitive as with real books - you can jump to a location, search text and move quickly forward and back but flicking real paper is still more fun.

There are small great little features here and there: on iBooks I love the feature which tells me how many pages there are left on the chapter. That comes handy at night when you're almost ready to go to sleep and pondering whether to continue reading until the chapter ends.

Getting more books

Amazon and Apple's bookstore are not the only places where you can get books. Both devices support additional file formats that let you download free books found on the net. 

But you really don't need to think about formats. Instead, I recommend getting Calibre, a free software that converts lots of different formats to your device. With it, you just convert everything into MOBI (Kindle's unlocked format) or EPUB (iPad's book format) and upload books to your reader.

Calibre is being developed actively so it's getting new features all the time. It does beautiful conversion job: for example, you can convert PDFs that might be almost unreadable on device's display into the reader's native format and have properly sized fonts and chapters and enjoy all the software features.

iPad has lots of additional ebook apps available in the app store. From there you can download interactive story books like Alice In Wonderland, freely available texts all the way from Bible and everything between. 

A great place to get free books is Project Gutenberg, which archives old books with expired copyrights. There are lots of books in various languages and most can be downloaded directly in iPad or Kindle formats.

Conclusion

Which wins the comparison?

Kindle has nice e-ink display which is great in bright light. It's inexpensive, lightweight and easy to carry around. But remember that it's only ebook reader. 

iPad has more features and applications. It has a great colour screen and superb UI. You can use it as a Kindle too. But it is a bit on a heavy side and you can't read books in bright daylight. And it's at four times as expensive as Kindle.

PS. I left out all the mentions of Kindle whispernet on purpose because my Kindle is CDMA version and hence cannot connect to net here in Finland. So I don't really have any experience with whipernet.