{"id":2171,"date":"2011-08-06T22:46:27","date_gmt":"2011-08-07T03:46:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/?p=2171"},"modified":"2011-08-06T22:46:32","modified_gmt":"2011-08-07T03:46:32","slug":"reading-on-the-ipad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/archives\/2011\/08\/06\/reading-on-the-ipad","title":{"rendered":"Reading on the iPad"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been carrying an iPad since the second day it got released in the United States… That makes me somewhat of an early adopter. I’ve been reading e-books on the iPad using iBooks (via O’Reilly’s Safari<\/a>) and also via GoodReader when people release them as PDFs. I never did purchase an iBook or Kindle book until recently.<\/p>\n

Last week, right before a long flight back from San Francisco to Kuala Lumpur, I decided to purchase: The Upgrade: A Cautionary Tale of a Life Without Reservations<\/a>\"\" by Paul Carr. I had enjoyed reading his previous book, Bringing Nothing To The Party: True Confessions Of A New Media Whore<\/a>\"\", which he at one stage even released as a free PDF.<\/p>\n

GoodReader has been my most popular application on the iPad. And I do a lot of reading using Instapaper. But for books? I bought an iBook using my US-based iTunes account, and I read the entire tome from Carr on the flight back. I was hooked.<\/p>\n

This weekend, while sitting down in a hotel in Seoul, I decided to try my luck with the Kindle. Lo and behold, I can do one-click purchasing using my Malaysian-issued credit card. Now you’ve got me hooked! First I used the Mac application — figuring out though I would not be reading too much on the Mac (I really only read technical books on my laptop, and that is served very nicely from the Safari<\/a> bookshelf).<\/p>\n

Next I proceeded to download the iPad\/iPhone application (they’ve made it universal). Enter my username and password, and I’m off to reading straight on my iPad. I paid for three books last night and have already made some headway in reading one.<\/p>\n

I can highlight bits of writing, which is a lot better than me dog-earing books and sometimes forgetting to come back to snippets. Now with Kindle? I have a webpage, in where I can see what I’ve highlighted, write notes, see my own highlights<\/a>, see other people’s public notes, and lots more. I forsee that right after I’m done reading, I can just save my highlights in Evernote, and I’ll have a digitally searchable copy of everything.<\/p>\n

This changes the way I read. This changes the way I buy books (currently I bulk purchase them every couple of months, since I visit the United States pretty often). This also probably means I’ll have a lot less to carry in my travels.<\/p>\n

The Kindle experience so far beats the iBooks experience for me. Of course, to buy a book, I’ve got to do it via a web browser and not in-app (thanks Apple for making life a little more difficult for me). Makes me wonder how much longer my Audible subscription will stay alive…<\/p>\n

All that said, the iPad has become a whole lot more useful for me. And an iPad upgrade for myself to the iPad 2 has become a whole lot more appealing as well…<\/p>\n

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