Is iPad a Kindle killer?

More than ever, the book is at the heart of the debates with the release of the iPad. During the last Apple keynote, Steve Jobs notably demonstrated the iBook store, designed for the iPad. This store enables iPad users to buy e-books online in the open format EPUB.
If the iBook store is as much successful as the iTunes Store and the App Store have been, Apple will certainly get a huge percentage of market shares in the online book market. Besides, five of the largest publishers in the world including Penguin, HarperCollins and Hachette had already agreed to distribute their books through the iBook store. During the keynote session, there was also the New York Times who presented its application running on the iPad. So, is the iPad going to kill the Kindle and revolutionize the publishing world as many analysts predict?

If you remember, I wrote an article on May 2009 about the Kindle and the e-ink technology. When I read it again, the article seems to be at light-years from where we stand now. During the second semester of 2009, I have to admit that Amazon did a pretty good job in developing the Kindle market as it became a hot product during the Holiday season. I now know many people who claim to have bought the Kindle!

One of the great advantage of the Kindle is that it uses the E-Ink technology: this is an imaging film that can be seen easily in direct sun, and can be read at virtually any angle, like paper. It displays black & white images and it offers the same appearance as newspaper. However, because of its black & white screen, many analysts predict the Kindle will not be able to compete against the iPad, which precisely has a color screen. I would like to argue though, that the iPad and the Kindle use totally different technologies. The iPad has a backlit color screen, exactly like a computer screen, while the Kindle, which uses E-Ink, offers an equivalent reading experience to paper. My perception is that reading on a computer screen is less comfortable than paper and causes faster eye fatigue. Now, I am not certain that this argument will prevail when the iPad is released on March. The average buyer will not get the difference between both display technologies, and will only be able to make the difference between a color and a black & white screen. And the same buyer will also point out that “you can do much more things on an iPad than on a Kindle, i.e. watching movies, surfing on the internet, playing games, etc...” which is by the way… true!

File format is also an important difference between iPad and Kindle. The Kindle has a proprietary format called AZW with 400,000 titles already available in this format on Amazon.com, while the iPad relies on the open EPUB file format.

EPUB is an official standard of the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF, http://www.openebook.org/ ). It uses XHTML and it can optionally contain Digital Right Managements (DRM) as an additional layer. The DRM layer is actually not required by the specification. Each manufacturer can therefore develop its own DRM system, which may affect the portability of purchased e-books onto other electronic readers. I have read many articles about the iPad, claiming that EPUB was like MP3 for music files (i.e. totally open). It is actually not exactly true as the EPUB format contains a DRM layer that may likely depend on the device type. In other words, it might be difficult to transfer a book purchased on the iBook store from an iPad to a non-Apple device, unless Apple and the other reader manufacturers adopt a common DRM standard.

Adobe is also involved in this market and the company has developed an e-reader software Adobe Digital Editions . It is compatible with the EPUB format and it is built on Flash. Adobe Digital Editions uses the proprietary ADEPT (Adobe Digital Editions Protection Technology) DRM scheme, which is, by the way, implemented on the Sony Reader and the Nook from Barnes & Nobles.

I don’t know if the DRM issue is going to be resolved soon. During the first year after its release, iPad buyers won’t probably pay attention about the portability of purchased e-books. But, after few years, once the market becomes more mature, portability should become an issue. If we look at what Apple did with the iTunes Store, now selling DRM-free AAC audio files, we should be confident about portability. However, it looks like there is a battle between Apple and Adobe about digital right management. Adobe has equipped its DRM solution on Sony and Barnes&Nobles readers, while Apple should have its own DRM (please refer to this article from an Adobe Blog about this issue: http://blogs.adobe.com/digitaleditions/2010/01/epub_ipad_and_content_interope.html)

Comparing feature-by-feature the Kindle and the iPad, it is clear that the iPad beats the Kindle on many aspects. The iPad is a color device, enabling users to run thousands of applications, to play games, to listen to music, to surf on the internet, and eventually to read books, using the EPUB open format. Kindle is a black & white device using a proprietary DRM e-book file format.

Now, if we take a closer look, the outcome of who is going to win the battle is not so obvious. Indeed, the purpose of the Kindle is to be a book reader and it fits this role perfectly. E-Ink offers a very good reading experience, similar to paper, and Amazon already proposes thousands of books online. On the other hand, iPad’s screen is harder to read due to its backlit display system.

So, if you don’t read on an iPad, what else can you do? Using the iPad for its computer features? Many analysts have actually argued that the iPad has plenty of restrictions compared to a traditional computer: no Flash support, a restrictive iPhone-OS instead of a true operating system, lack of a camera, lack of video output, lack of USB or FireWire, and the inability to run multiple applications at the same time (no multi-tasking). Like the iPhone, the device doesn’t allow full control, and applications can only be downloaded through the Apple Stores. The EPUB format is maybe not so open as it is claimed, because of the DRM, that could be proprietary to Apple. Lastly, contrary to the iPhone, where users primarily bought the iphone for its phone feature, and then discovered its cool internet features, there is no compelling reason to buy an iPad, except for its reading feature, which is not as good as the Kindle.

Having all that in mind, my gut feeling is that the iPad will actually be a success because of its large color screen. Even though the iPad's screen is less comfortable than the Kindle, the iPad's color screen can be used for many other activities than book reading, and that makes the device irresistible. By the way, I have read somewhere Apple bet that users, in average, would hardly read more than one book a year, making the book market a niche in comparison of other digital media markets (i.e. online news and magazines, movies, music and games).  

In any case, these e-readers are going to affect printed books. May be not on the short term, but certainly on the long one…


PS: I have actually dug a little bit around the EPUB format. Many copyright free books are already available online in this format. For example, Google announced in August 2009 that it allows users to download over 1 million public domain books in the EPUB format. There are other websites that contain public domain books, like the Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org “a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works”). Wikisource (http://www.wikisource.org/) is another one, but books are in text format.