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Ever since Steve Jobs first announced iBooks for the iPad, pundits have been wondering about the future of the Kindle and similar e-book readers in the face of this new competition. Now that we actually have access to an iPad , we had a chance to take a closer look at both the iBooks and Amazon's Kindle for iPad apps. We are still waiting for the B&N iPad app, but both iBooks and iPad for Kindle already highlight the iPad's potential as an e-book reader. Sponsor iBooks It doesn't come as a surprise that Apple managed to develop the prettier e-reader app. Switching from the iBooks store - which looks a lot like the App Store - to your bookshelf is done through a nifty animation. Newly downloaded books and samples smoothly slide into the bookshelf and thanks to a faux 3d look and a page-flip animation, the app itself mimics the look and feel of a book. When you click on a book in your shelf, it flips open and zoom to the page you left off. Flipping the iPad to landscape mode switches iBooks from displaying on page per screen to a more book-like two-page view. Given how wide the iPad's screen its, this makes it a lot easier to read as the individual lines are much shorter. With regards to customization, iBooks allows its users to change the size of the font, but also the font itself (Baskerville, Cochin, Palatino, Times New Roman and Verdana). You can also set the screen brightness right from within any book, which is great for reading at night. As far as we can see, however, you can't switch to white text on a black background. Another neat feature is the search function that feels a lot like Spotlight on OSX. This search feature is extremely fast - though sadly it only works for the book that you are currently reading. You can't search through all of your library, though you can initiate a Google and Wikipedia search from within any book (these open up Safari, however). The iBooks app can also read DRM-free ePub texts. You simply download the e-book to your computer, drag it into iTunes and after your next sync, it will appear in iBooks. iBooks Store The iBooks store mostly features books between $9.99 and $14.99 (with a few outliers). There are currently about 30,000 free books in the store (courtesy of Project Gutenberg) and about 60,000 books from most major publishers - though there are still some holdouts . Every book in the store allows you to download a free sample (sometimes more than 50 pages long). Kindle for iPad Amazon, of course, offers a far larger store than Apple. With close to 450,000 paid and free books. It's worth noting that the Kindle store also launched with slightly more books (about 88,000). Compared to iBooks, Kindle for iPad feels a bit more pedestrian, as it doesn't feature fancy animations. Pages just slide left and right and instead of two-page view when you flip the iPad to landscape mode, you just get a single page with a very wide layout. The Kindle app also doesn't allow users to customize the font of a book, though it does offer the standard screen brightness and font size settings. Unlike the iBooks app, which only has a bookmark feature, the Kindle app allows users to annotate books and highlight passages in these texts. For students, this is a must-have feature and it's surprising that Apple didn't include this in its app. As with its other mobile apps, Amazon forces its readers to download apps from the Kindle online store. The only way to access this is through the browser. Here, Apple's ability to integrate the store into the e-reader application is a big plus. Verdict: iBooks is the Better App; Kindle is the Better Platform In terms of functionality, the choice between the two apps depends on your needs. If you need to highlight and if you want to take notes, then the Kindle app is the only way to go. If you just want to read, the iBooks apps is just fine. Prices in both the iBooks and Kindle store are likely to be very similar - especially now that Amazon is slowly giving up on its idea of selling all e-books at $9.99. The real advantage of the Kindle app is that you can read and sync books with more devices. You can start reading a book on the iPad at home or on the plane, for example, and then continue reading on your iPhone while you are waiting in line at the post office. Chances are that Apple will launch an iBooks app for the iPhone sooner or later, but until then, investing in Kindle books seems like a smarter decision as you don't lock yourself completely into Apple's smaller ecosystem. More About the iPad Launch Click here for our full archive of posts about the iPad launch . Discuss
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E-Books on the iPad: iBooks vs. Kindle for iPad
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Facebook is about to become a quieter, less annoying place for users. The company just announced that it has deprecated "application notifications" and will require apps to use other, less intrusive methods of sending news to users. It's a big step in the ongoing anti-MySpace-ification of Facebook. Though to be fair, MySpace recently instituted something similar. Now your "notifications" section on Facebook will just be for things like comments left on your posts. It's a good move that puts the interests of users ahead of short-term benefits for app developers and monetization. That's in everyone's best interests in the long term. Sponsor Facebook has done a delicate dance with application developers for years: the more your users click through notifications about your application, the more notifications you're allowed to send. Many developers would like to notify all users of anything, at any and all opportunities, because those notifications drive traffic. Facebook has sided with users in this equation, though, and today just threw the whole dance out of the spotlight and into a designated and less central part of the user experience. Developers were recently given permission to ask app users for their email addresses, which they can use to email app notifications directly. (Granted, that could get annoying too, but at least it's opt-in.) The creation of a special Applications and Games Dashboard offers another place for app notifications to be delivered. Some developers may complain that they are being further pushed out of users' line of sight with this decision. Facebook is most likely to respond like this: build a good app that people will use and share by choice and you'll be just fine. It's unclear whether this will affect the Facebook Newsfeed, but the algorithmic method behind selection of which notifications to publish to the newsfeed and in what order is so central to the Facebook experience that the company was issued a controversial patent for it yesterday . As the newsfeed paradigm takes over the whole web, though, figuring out how to balance human with automated signals, and communication with marketing in the stream, is no trivial matter. These are the decisions upon which the future of the social web is being built. At first blush, this looks like a good UX design decision that will improve the way everyone using Facebook feels about the site. Look for the change to go into effect on Monday. Become a Fan of ReadWriteWeb on Facebook and we'll deliver you the best tech news and analysis online right into your newsfeed so you can discuss it with friends. Discuss
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Finally: Facebook Silences App Notification Spam
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If an agency has ever pitched you on outreach to women's blogs and they don't mention the BlogHer network, there's something wrong with them. BlogHer and its 2,500 contributing blog affiliates are celebrating the network's 5 year anniversary with the combined traffic of 21 million unique visitors per month and some huge lessons learned along the way. ReadWriteWeb spoke to co-founder Elisa Camahort Page to find out what it's like to run a women's network in a man's world. Sponsor According to the Catalyst Census , "From 1995 to 2005, the average rate of increase in women's representation on Fortune 500 corporate boards was, on average, one-half of one percentage point per year. At that rate of growth, it would take another 70 years for women to hold approximately 50 percent of Fortune 500 board seats and reach parity with men." Page explains that the market was ripe for BlogHer from the very beginning as media began to latch on to the idea of women's representation in technology, science and business. In 2004, Page and co-founders Lisa Stone and Jory Des Jardins created the BlogHer Conference in an effort to answer the media question - where are the women bloggers? As the conference came to fruition, the three were immediately flung into the spotlight with media coverage from CNN and MSNBC. Says Page, "We knew then we were on to something and we decided to make it a business." A year later the conference lead to a publishing network and a diverse range of female bloggers joined forces with the trio to promote discussion across their domains. After 18 months of bootstrapping with their own funding, the co-founders raised $3.5 million from Venrock and have since raised an additional $13 million to build out the 20+ topic channels. The network currently syndicates to iVillage , Oxygen.com and BravoTV.com . While other publishing networks of this size often opt for a wholly automated system of content aggregation, home page features and related blog links, BlogHer has a commitment to curation. Says Page, "It's not just about the traffic, we want to ensure that diverse voices come through in order to generate more discussion. We've got a headline editor who looks for topics we want to explore and we take care to feature interesting content." Featured pieces are then served across the publishing network to the 2,500 affiliate blogs and relevant pieces are linked alongside a blog owner's own content. When asked what keywords (other than "BlogHer") drive the most traffic to the network, Page replied, "Women are not a monolithic block who think, act or buy in the same way. It differs from week to week, but for instance, in 2008 the keywords all revolved around the election or the economy. The areas of interest that drive traffic are not much different than other blogging networks." The one topic that rally's Page's diverse community is female representations in the media, workplace and of course, on the Web. In the backlash against a particularly bad YouTube campaign launched by Motrin , BlogHer was among the first communities to retaliate with a Motringate. The consumer trust, distribution and collective spending power of the BlogHer community is enough to make or break a household brand. As Page and her co-founders begin experimenting with targeted feed and podcast programs, advertisers may find even more opportunities to test their mettle in this female media landscape. To check out the network visit blogher.com . Discuss
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Where Are the Women Bloggers? They're Driving Your Sales
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