Apple's iPad expected to challenge Amazon's Kindle

Apple's announcement last week of its new tablet computer, the iPad, included the announcement of a new online book store. In addition, the iPad will also run iPhone applications, presumably including an existing app that allowed iPhone users to purchase books from Amazon's Kindle store.

The iPad is positioning itself, at least in part, as a way to read books and magazines, and therefore a competitor for Amazon's Kindle, Barnes & Noble's Nook, and other dedicated online readers.

This will be an interesting story to follow in the coming months. Proponents of the Kindle say that its black-and-white "E-ink" screen, which reflects light rather than being backlit, is easier on the eye and therefore more comfortable for curling up to read a book in long stretches. Proponents of the iPad say that its color screen will allow magazines and newspapers to present colorful, eye-catching layouts, including video, for an experience much like surfing the web.

It could be, of course, that there's room for both approaches, but which one predominates may shape the future of content. I can't imagine that people would want to carry both a Kindle and an iPad with them, so most users will end up picking one or the other.

Amazon has responded to the iPad announcement by saying that multi-purpose applications will be made available for the Kindle, turning it into something more than just a book-reader. But the black-and-white display used by current models, as good as it is for reading, poses some limits to using the Kindle for more graphics-heavy purposes.

It will probably be a few more years before either device becomes omnipresent; times are still tough and not everyone can afford to rush out and purchase the latest electronic gadget, especially when there's an option in the form of real paper-and-ink books and magazines. But as the economy improves, and as the price of electronics goes down, it could be that a tablet-based product -- whether that product is a jazzed-up Kindle or Nook, an iPad or perhaps some iPad competitor based on Windows, Android, Chrome or Linux -- will become as common as cell phones or laptops.

I don't own an e-reader; I still recall, a year ago, when I was in a play in Tullahoma and one of my fellow cast members had a Kindle which he would pull out and read while waiting for his next scene. It seems like a nifty little machine. My fellow actor said he loved it -- his main complaint, only half serious, was that it was too easy to go overboard buying books. Commentators have noted that with a tablet or e-reader, you can have more than one book going at once -- for example, a novel for enjoyment and a business book related to your job -- and switch back and forth between them, keeping your place on each one. The Kindle 2 can hold 1,500 non-illustrated books in its memory, so you could keep an entire personal library and re-read favorite books at a moment's notice.

My editor just pointed out an item at boingboing.net which quotes from the novel of "2001: A Space Odyssey," written by Arthur C. Clarke in the late 1960s, in which Clarke describes an iPad-like device with eerie accuracy:

"When he tired of official reports and memoranda and minutes, he would plug his foolscap-sized Newspad into the ship's information circuit and scan the latest reports from Earth. One by one he would conjure up the world's major electronic papers ... Switching to the display unit's short-term memory, he would hold the front page while he quickly searched the headlines and noted the items that interested him. ... the postage-stamp-sized rectangle would expand until it neatly filled the screen and he could read it with comfort. When he had finished, he would flash back to the complete page and select a new subject for detailed examination."

As usual, Clarke -- who is often credited with creating the idea of the communications satellite in a 1945 research paper -- was way ahead of his time.

What do you think? Does the idea of an electronic book-reader appeal to you? Would you want a dedicated reader with an easy-on-the-eyes screen, or would you prefer a flashier, more multi-purpose device like the iPad, even if it's not as comfortable for long nights with James Patterson or Nora Roberts? Would you rather use a tablet optimized for books or for magazines and multimedia content? Drop me an e-mail at jcarney@t-g.com.

--John I. Carney is city editor of the Times-Gazette and covers county government. He is also the author of the self-published novel "Soapstone." His personal web site is lakeneuron.com.