Books on the iPad: Comparing the Printed Page to ePub and PDFs

Hi Thomas,

I manage the team that produces the books and ebooks here at O'Reilly, and I just wanted to thank you for your detailed and thoughtful post. We've worked hard to make our ebooks look good and function well, so it's nice to meet someone who appreciates it.

Your analysis of reading books on the iPad is the best I've seen so far, and I'm not just saying that because you liked our books. :-) I'm just getting to know the iPad myself, and I found several of your comments and screen shots to be helpful. I hadn't used GoodReader before I saw your post, but I've tried it now and like it.

Thanks again!
Adam

Thomas -- You brought up a very intriguing point in your post about the impact the iPad's speed can have on the reading experience. I hadn't considered the "skimmability" of ebooks before. I always thought we were trading search for skimming, but you're absolutely right: the iPad is fast enough to enable a level of browsing that's near to -- or on par with -- print books. That's a huge upside.

Hi Thomas. Thanks for writing this and posting it here on Answers as well. I've got an iPad and I share your enthusiasm. I was a Kindle v.1 owner as well but I'm finding more reading uses for my iPad than I could have ever imagined on the Kindle.

Jeff Bezos saw the Kindle's opportunity as helping to resurrect interest in long-form reading. Or, as he put it, getting us past "info snacking" on short form content. I find I do a *lot* more short-form, info-snacking and, of course, the iPad is a much better solution. On the long-form side, much to my surprise, my eyes really don't get tired reading the iPad's backlit screen. As your images clearly show, the iPad also renders the page much, much better than the Kindle could ever hope to with eInk.

Thanks again for your terrific article!

All - Thanks for all of the positive comments on the post! I thought that for those who had no access to the iPad or maybe had no way to compare that the article would be useful. Looks like it's gotten a lot of great buzz online.

@Adam (aka Tid)- I have some other thoughts to share specifically on O'Reilly's approach for generating eBooks (specifically ePub) that I'd like to share with you. Message you via this site, or do you have a preferred method? I'll message you my contact information. Or, if you'd prefer I share here, I can.

I will say that O'Reilly eBooks are great and I think the internal workflow is amazing in that the output formats are so well executed. More on this if you'd like offline.