I’ve tried to be faithful in letting you know how I feel about using our iPad as an e-reader. To be perfectly honest, I haven’t used it for much else. I know that Shaun has, but I have a sneaking feeling that he mostly uses it to play games that are totally useless. In short, I think that for him, it is a 5 hundred dollar cool-looking Gameboy. I really have no idea.
Anyway! Back to what I was saying…
One thing that I didn’t tell you is that I did download the Kindle App for the iPad and was pretty under impressed. It was hard to look at and not easy to navigate. It just felt clunky and annoying to me so I never actually read a book on it, I just kind of ignored it.
Today, Barnes and Noble put out their iPad app, so I went this afternoon and downloaded that too. I have to say that I’m pretty impressed. While not as pretty or easy to use as iBook, this knocks the socks of the Kindle app. It is just much more intuitive. Like the iBooks app, it is super easy to change font, brightness, size and mostly anything all with an easy click. So all this sounds great, but… The thing that has made me absolutely drool over their nook is here too- you can lend and borrow books! To be fair, you can only lend each book once, but still it’s better than the no-lending from iBook or Kindle apps. Way, way cool.
The selection in the B&N app seemed like it was larger than the iBooks selection but smaller than the Kindle selection, but not by much and the book prices on all 3 apps were fairly comparable.
All this to say I’m pretty excited about this. We are heading off for the weekend to visit family and celebrate my little brother’s graduation (Congrats, Dalt!) so I’ll have time to fiddle with this in the car and see if it is as good as it seems at first glance. I’ll let you know what I find out.
For a more in-depth look at this app, here is an article from Gizmodo. Seems like they have played around with it a bit more but come away with some of the same thoughts as me. Check it out.