Bottom line: the iPad should most likely be an adequate indoors ebook reader.

If Apple have written their own ePub rendering engine (highly likely given their fractious relationship with Adobe) then we might get some attention paid to little details because they certainly understand presentation. Hopefully iBook app will be available for iPhone as well…

50% of hardcover list price is *insane*. Every actually printed book costs real money, and most of them are returned unsold. After the initial, trivial cost of formatting up an ebook (most of which is spent with the pointless DRM), every additional copy costs publishers *nothing*. Zero. Every ebook sale is gravy.

Bull. Did you think that the words somehow dropped out of the sky and into the layout person’s inbox by magic? Books are written by authors, and authors expect to get paid for their work; if e-books become a major edition along with hardcover and paperback, they’re going to be paying the same kind of per-copy royalty as the others. Not to mention, if e-books become a larger and larger share of the sales pie, they’re going to have to start shouldering more and more of the fixed costs of editing, promotion… reproduction and distribution are only part of the cost story.

I think Apple will leave the status quo WRT the touch/iphone, but shut third party apps and book sales out of the iPad; all purchases will have to go through the iBook store, which will also be available for the touch/iphone. If people look to the future, they’ll prefer the iBook format because they’ll be able to use it on large and small devices, so people will move away from formats that only play on the small devices.

I don’t see this happening. Apple has repeatedly stated over the years that the various iMedia stores are run on an approximately break-even basis, as a tool to promote hardware sales; every back-of-the-envelope estimation I’ve done over the years has suggested this is essentially true. (To give an example, when the iTMS hit the 1 billion song mark, a quick estimate suggested that in a single quarter, Apple had made at least ten times as much profit [and note: *profit*] selling iPods as the iTMS had made in its entire existence. At that time, IIRC, iTMS had been open for about 2.5-3 years.)

Hardware sales are where the big profit is for Apple, and selling more iPads takes precedence over ancillary revenue from e-book sales. If having Stanza, Bookshelf, Kindle, and the B&N eReader apps help with that goal, Apple has much more reason to leave them in than to kick them out.

For the same price ($499), it is a netbook computer with a touchscreen that swivels! And you can use 2 fingers on the screen to do stuff. What do you guys think of this?

That way I can sync-read when I am on the bus or train with my iPod Touch.

Now all we have to do is sit back and see what happens in the next six months. We’ve been through six months of heavy duty speculation, we’ve got two to three months before the public gets them in their hands and then we’ll have about three months of public real time testing. Then it will be time for Christmas giving – and if Steve Jobs is right, he’ll be able to sell many more of this thing than any present day information device has sold. If I’m right, Santa will have a very full bag this year. Wait ’til your teenager decides it’s the greatest gaming device. And the best critics will be the numbers in the Apple stores.

One stands out: no multitasking of apps.
It really *is* an iPod, not a computer.

Don’t think it can replace netbooks.

And two more things, briefly: weight. The Kindle is 10 oz … the iPad is 1.5 pounds. People have noticed the “significant” issue with the Nook at 12 oz …. And battery life: 10 hours vs 2 weeks. It means always on the lookout for a fresh charge. When my Kindle took a holiday with me last month, it didn’t need a charge in the full 10 days.

So, not to disparage the iPad in any way: but it’s not an e-reader. It happens to e-read (if I may put it that way) in the same way that a smartphone is a camera. Yes, it can do it: but you’ll want your “real” holiday snaps taken with a dedicated camera. The iPad is trying to play in an interesting middle-space between netbooks/laptops and smartphones. I may wonder aloud if the iPad is a solution in search of a problem ….

I may be interested in one of these as a netbook replacement; I am not knocking it as a device per se. But I am frankly shocked that people are talking about it as if the rest of the ebook market should just give up now and nobody has noticed the fairly salient detail that it’s US-only.

So for pure black-n-white text eink will be technically sharper. But image quality depends on more than just straight resolution; grayscale and antialiasing matter.

Now, I don’t know if Apple has licensed Cleartype or developed an equivalent copy, but Cleartype anti-aliased fonts use sub-pixel addressing which can be equivalent to triple the pixel resolution, which would be about 400dpi. If we were talking a Windows ltablet running MS Reader (like my vitage TC1100) I would be confident that the LCD would be producing sharper text despite the lower specs. On an Apple product I wouldn’t bet the farm but I suspect it will be up to par…

Its really a cost trade-off thing: 10″ XGA screens are a lot cheaper than HD screens and the touchscreen adds cost so something had to give. That’s why the OLED dreams turned out to be just dreams. Similarly, the lack of antiglare saves costs and IPS LCD tech is good for video, but its primary advantage (viewing angle) is wasted on a tablet device, so odds are they got them cheap since 4×3 panels don’t have the demand that 16×9 panels do.

Since the thing is 60-90 days off there really is no way to tell how good the display is really going to be. All we can say is: it is nothing special.

Make no mistake, Apple is serious about this being used for reading. They are tied to current technology which means the IPS display because of the price point they want to hit, the volumes they intend to achieve, and the other functions they need the device to perform.

But they’ve gone with a 4:3 display, this is because they see reading in portrait mode (either web pages or ebooks) as a major use of the device, and widescreen displays, while good for media, are not good for reading in either orientation.

I think Apple will leave the status quo WRT the touch/iphone, but shut third party apps and book sales out of the iPad; all purchases will have to go through the iBook store, which will also be available for the touch/iphone. If people look to the future, they’ll prefer the iBook format because they’ll be able to use it on large and small devices, so people will move away from formats that only play on the small devices.

I think this will also fragment the market and formats even more initially, and consolidation will happen as Apple becomes a major, if not the default, gatekeeper for book purchases, just as they are for music today.

Aside from reading, this would make a fine photo frame; bet Kodak will have an app available to optimise it doing that.