Since the iPad came out, Amazon has been struggling to maintain its marketplace presence when it comes to ereaders. That struggle is reflective in Amazon lowering the price of its Kindle. It’s trying to maintain its domination because Apple, with its awesome iBook app, is cutting into the ereader pie. And when it comes to comparing the Kindle to the new iPad, there is no comparison.
Consumer Reports even admitted that “the Kindle is pretty lame for everything but reading books”. And there’s some issue now with how good of a book experience it is. For example, the iPad iBook shows everything in color. That’s important if the book you’re reading has color pictures (i.e. like the series of Visually Teach books). Some books use color to make a point. You’ll never discover that point on the Kindle, because it is black and white.
With the iPad you can turn the unit horizontally and it goes from reading one page at a time, to two pages at a time, something you can’t do with the Amazon Kindle and again, it is something more close to the book reading experience. With the iPad, you turn pages with your finger much like reading a book. With the Kindle you press buttons. And the way the buttons are organized doesn’t always make it that easy to go back a page if you need to.
With the Kindle, when looking at a blog feed you’ve subscribed to (and likely pay for), you can’t view video posted in a post. With the iPad you can view video in its full color form, just like on a computer.
Right now Amazon is going after people that have the name “amazon” or “kindle” in their domain name. They are threatening site owners to give up the domain names or face action. Instead of embracing the idea of social communication on a wide scale, they are trying to control it. We know people they are doing this to and find it despicable on the part of Amazon.com.
Amazon apparently hasn’t learned the lesson from past companies that tried to control everything. Take, for example, Warner Bros.. When the Harry Potter franchise first started, many sites started popping up that had the name “harrypotter” in the domain name. These sites were run by fans enthusiastic about Harry Potter and promoting the franchise. Warner Bros. started going after these sites and demanding that they close down just like Amazon.com is currently doing. The backlash was huge and after awhile of trying to enforce it, Warner Bros. backed down. Then they changed their tactic completely and started providing material for fans to put on their sites. In essence, they embraced the promotion from fans of the Harry Potter franchise (instead of trying to control it) and the franchise has become the most successful in movie history.
Amazon.com is being disgraceful and getting a bad name for their current actions. We, for one, do not support such controlling behavior and that is one (of many) reasons we’ve decided to officially recommend the iPad over the Kindle. We’ll continue to cover the Kindle and also report on anymore attempts by Amazon to kill fan enthusiasm for the Kindle.
Even without Amazon’s controlling and mean behavior, it would be hard not to recommend the iPad eReader application over the Kindle. Just take a look…
