iPad and Kindle Reading Speeds

A study of people reading long-form text on tablets finds higher reading speeds than in the past, but they’re still slower than reading print.

iPad and Kindle Reading Speeds

Amazon Kindle Apps for Tablet Computers

Assuming Apple doesn't reject it, this should mean you can read Kindle books just as easily as Apple's iBooks. Be interesting to see reviews of the reading experience on both apps.

Study paints Kindle e-reader a dark shade of green

According to a study by the Cleantech Group, you need to download 23 books for the Kindle before it breaks even in CO₂ use.

Also, as pointed out in the comments, Kindle versions are $9.99 compared to maybe $15 for a new book, but you need to add $299 to the price of the device. At that rate, you have to buy a Kindle and 60 books ($900) before the Kindle’s prices win out.

An Apology from Amazon - kindle Discussion Forum

An Apology from Amazon - kindle Discussion Forum

Jeff Bezos:

This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle. Our “solution” to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we’ve received. We will use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward, ones that match our mission.

A nice apology. I think the whole situation is good to remind people about how paying for things online doesn’t always confer ownership. Part of me still wonders if Amazon didn’t do it on purpose to maybe give them some arguing power down the road against copy protection.

September 4 Update: Amazon is giving free downloads of the books to affected customers.

Some E-Books Are More Equal Than Others - Pogue's Posts Blog - NYTimes.com

Some E-Books Are More Equal Than Others

Decreases my already low level of desire to get a Kindle. Stick around for the punchline at the end.

Why the newspaper still beats the Amazon Kindle

Why the newspaper still beats the Amazon Kindle

Sadly: “But both versions of the Kindle are missing what makes print newspapers such a perfect delivery vehicle for news: graphic design.” Hopefully they can improve on this in time.

Jeff Bezos: Kindle Books and Readers Are Separate Businesses - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

Jeff Bezos: Kindle Books and Readers Are Separate Businesses

I’m glad to hear this. A standard of some sorts for ebooks would help people designing devices know what their users are going to see, so that eventually ebook designers know what constrains they’re dealing with.

Kindle Content Design (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)

Kindle Content Design

As I’ve argued before, I think newspapers could go far on the Kindle (and other such devices). There are some good guidelines here for design, but I wonder how they’d change between the Kindle and the DX? With the DX you can more closely copy the print layout. Would that be better?

Watchmen, X-Men, and Jimmy Corrigan: Putting Our Favorite Comics on the Kindle - Gearlog

Watchmen, X-Men, and Jimmy Corrigan: Putting Our Favorite Comics on the Kindle

Handheld devices with big screens are the future of comics if they don’t die out first.

PADD

(I’ve deleted and started this post over five times now. For some reason I can’t put words together about this topic I’m happy with.)

The Kindle 2 doesn’t appeal to much more than the Kindle did. Though I can see some uses for e-readers, and there are good arguments for their advantages, especially in saving printing and distributions costs for publishers, I really like reading novels.

What I’d like is not a book reader but a magazine reader. I actually feel guilty reading newspapers and magazines because I’ll often only read a few articles. I look at all that paper that was printed for my to read just a small percentage of the words. Sure, most of the articles are online, but the Web isn’t a great place to read newspapers or magazines. You get a column of text with maybe some embedded photos. None of the nice layout you get on the real deal. You often don’t get the sidebars or inset graphs, or if you do, they’re squeezed into what the Web can do.

I’d like to see a device with some size to it, maybe 7″×10″ or so with a color screen that can display a full page of magazine text. Give it pinch-to-zoom like the iPhone has for smaller text, and a sensor to let it flip to landscape for double-page spreads. Then you just need a subscription service (I think the Kindle already has this) where you can pull down each new edition of a publication when it comes out. Ditto for comic books. Lots of time is being spent trying to replicate comics on the Web, but reading tiny lettered text on a computer monitor feels unnatural. On a handheld device I think it’d work very nicely.

In other words, someone please invent this.