iBooks vs. Kindle

I've spent some time using both iBooks and Kindle on my iPod touch, and this is what I have to say:

Both have their advantage and disadvantage. As far as accessibility goes, Kindle is the winner because you can use it on more platforms. iBooks is limited to the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad; whereas Kindle can be on those three devices as well as BlackBerry, Mac OS X, and Windows XP/Vista/7, and their own Kindle reading device.

On the other hand, iBooks offers a better reading experience. It offers color pictures and a nice "page flip" animation. When using Kindle on an iPhone or iPod touch all you get is a boring old page scroll.

The biggest advantage that iBooks has over Kindle, in my opinion, is the ability to add custom cover art and the ability to read PDF files. If Kindle has this ability, I have yet to find it.

• Via iTunes on Windows or Mac, you can "Get Info" on any book and change (or add) then go to the "Artwork" tab. This is useful for books that don't provide any artwork such as books provided by Project Gutenberg which provides several older books for free on both Kindle and iBooks. I have downloaded a few to Kindle some time ago, and although I already have them on my iPod, I still downloaded them again on iBooks once that app became available just so I could add cover art to the books.
• Another thing that gives iBooks an advantage over Kindle is the how you can browse your library. It can be hard to find the book you want to read at times on Kindle because the title is too long. On iBooks however, this is not a problem because you can find your books by their artwork. The most disappointing aspect about Kindle on the iPhone is that almost right after iOS4 was released, with the ability to use iBooks, Amazon released an update to Kindle. People might thing "Hey this is cool, Amazon will add some of the features of iBooks to make it more competitive." This is farther from the truth, the update added nothing with regard to functionality.

As much as I love Kindle for it's cross-platform availability, I must conclude that iBooks has killed it. Although the paid books tend to cost more on iBooks, the overall user experience of iBooks makes up for it. Color, page turn animation, PDF functionality, custom artwork – all mean that I will be using iBooks a lot more than I will be using Kindle.

Another good thing about the iBooks app, is it's not limited to only books sold through the iBookstore. Any book formatted as EPUB can be read by the iBooks app. Barns and Noble has a eReader app for iPhone and it scrolls much like the Kindle app does. I took one of their books, put it on my iBooks app, and magically the page turn animation was present as if it was any other iBooks book. That's more reason to love the iBooks app!

(If you're wondering, the reason I didn't include the B&N eReader app in this post, it is because there wouldn't be much to say. It's a cross between the Kindle and iBooks, its only useful feature is Coverflow when you rotate it. And the Desktop version of their eReader is just horrible.)