The iPad still uses an illumination-based technology. It’s a computer with a computer screen, no different than the screens I stare at all day, including this one.

The Kindle uses a different kind of display that’s much closer to the ink-on-paper experience and is far easier on the eyes.  The device is about the size of a small hard-cover, but thinner.  It’s optimized for reading books and that’s its first, best task.  Turn off the wireless connection and you can read for a week without recharging.  Try THAT with an iPad.  The iPad is tablet PC, designed to function like one.  Not the same thing at all.

I’m sure that for 999 out of a 1000 functions the iPad “beats” the Kindle.  The Kindle does one thing well: It allows you to read books electronically with the look and feel of reading paper and ink.  It does it superbly.  And that’s all I ask or expect of it.

So…if you have a reason (besides books) to use and carry the iPad, it’s simple enough to get the Kindle ap and use that, carrying only the one device.  But if you object is to use the device primarily to read books, I cannot see how the iPad, with twice the weight, twice the volume, twice the cost (or more) and far less battery life is a preferable choice.

Damn it Anarcissie and Peter Scheer, I am going to order my Kindle just soon as I pay off all my credit cards in about two years or a little later when the Green party takes over!  Do they sell Kindle book downloads at the Hospice store? Maybe the book is going the way of Sadist and whip, but for now it is a book for me sans whip!  I like the concept of one product for one reason, anyone want to buy a VHSTV combination for $139.00?

I think Amazon’s deal with the Kindle is to sell downloads.  The profit margin so far is terrific compared to books on paper.  The device is not consequential—the point for the moment is to sell the downloads and get people used to the idea of reading books on a little computer.

You might be right about the two audiences, Anarcissie, but as one of the older cranks on this board *and* a luddite I have to say that the iPad reading experience just floors its user, hand-swipes across the page and all.  I actually said “game over” out loud at the time.  An improved interface & display on the Kindle strikes me as making it the best damn buggy whip on the market.

People who know tell me that Beta was hands-down better than VHS…

Judging from the advertising I’ve seen, the marketing for the two devices is aimed at somewhat different audiences.  The Kindle is aimed at down-home types who want to read books, and the iPad is aimed at people who want to be cool—a younger, more self-consciously with-it community who think they need to check the prospects of their trust funds in the Wall Street Journal.  One of the smart things Steve Jobs has done so far is focus on ‘early adopters’, that is, people who will buy new high-tech devices at a steep markup simply because it is new high-tech and has been glitzily advertised to them.  The man is a genius as a marketeer.

I don’t know whether there’s a niche for the iPad, however.  The Kindle was very clearly designed to move into the entertainment paperback niche and does seem to have found a home there.

Clearly Mr. Scheer hasn’t seen an iPad yet—but hasn’t he wondered about Amazon’s panicked price slashes to (reportedly) below the cost of Kindle’s manufacture?

Now usually it’s here that I’d spend a couple of paragraphs doing compare and contrast, but the sad truth is that iPad so completely wipes the floor with Kindle that there’s nothing really left to say.  You don’t take sides in a contest as one-sided as this, you just watch the carnage from the sidelines like Adam Smith would, meerschaum pipe in hand…

Why do you people think I’ve never seen or used a Kindle?  Three people I know have them, and I’ve had a good chance to play with them and discuss them.  I’m maybe all too familiar with little computers.

If you all love them, that’s great.  I see the Kindle as a frustrating transitional device overly attached to a particular corporation.  Same for the other readers, plus iPod, iPad, and iPhone.  But that’s okay.  I dumped all over the IBM/Microsoft PC when it came out—and I was right—but that didn’t stop it from being a best-seller, consumer of billions of hours of unnecessary highly-paid labor for people like me, and the foundation of the zippy, buzzed world we find around us today.  Dog works in mysterious ways.

Isn’t that odd, people have different opinions of the same thing.  What will happen to us?

I want a waterproof one so I can read it in the hot tub.

You know what, Anarcissie? Enjoy yourself!  You have no idea what you are missing with a Kindle, the best of the eBook readers (I’ve read books on my PDA and it’s painful).  I look FORWARD to reading on my Kindle, as it’s nothing like reading on any other electronic device I’ve used over the last 30 years, from monochrome green-screen dumb terminals to my latest 23” LCD dual monitors.  Reading a Kindle is, to your eyes, like reading a book, only you can pack a lot of books into this slim volume.

You don’t EVER have to let Amazon touch it.  Just don’t turn on the wireless function (The battery lasts for days of reading that way).  You can download books to your PC, then off-load them to the Kindle.  I trust Amazon a hell of a lot more to protect my privacy than Steve Jobs, or America On Line, or Face Book, or Google, or Twitter, or the Government, or, or, or….

freikish—I have quite a few ideas about the Kindle.  One of them is that if Amazon can delete a file remotely, then they can do anything else they want; one might say it’s pre-hacked, but by a corporation—the nightmare version of Microsoft.  (I guess it was Sony that actually put autohacking code on their CDs, but I’m sure M$ wanted to do it.) One of the selling points of the Kindle is the modem, so one is unlikely to turn it off.

I wasn’t advertising the iPad.  I regard Steve Jobs’s control-freakery to be far worse than anything Amazon has done (that I know about).  However, he’s good at product design and a real whiz at marketing—look at the unit profit margins for the iPod and the iPhone.  I give the Devil his due.  However, when I buy and use something, it’s something I understand and can fully control, and as a matter of principle nothing with any sort of DRM is going to be on it, ever.

How come the “ad” suddenly becomes an “article” or “news” or “political opinion”?  It could have been written as information, but is not.  Instead, it “sells” far more than it tells.

So—you have any other advertisements masquerading as news?

To Bill Melater—LOL!! Just perfect.

Anarcissie:  Please don’t comment on things you have no idea about.  Actually, the content of one’s Kindle is under one’s own control, as long as one doesn’t turn on the 3G modem.  And then, the paid content of one’s Kindle can be updated by Amazon, but only the paid content.  I’m guessing the new Wi-Fi ones are similar.  If you copy content to it over a USB connection, Amazon doesn’t know what’s on the Kindle, and can’t actually mess with it in any way.

Compared to an iPad, a Kindle is a wide open device, which allows you to put whatever you’d like onto it.  There’s no eye strain reading on it, unlike a back-lit LCD.  Yes, I had a non-back-lit laptop back in the day.  And they stunk.  But the Kindle’s e-ink screen is significantly better.  Of my friends & acquaintances, thosethat read books prefer Kindle.  Those who occasionally read articles find the iPad more compelling.

If you’re worried about “under ????‘s control”, you should be careful how you talk about the iPad.  Apple’s old 1984 ad is reversed:  You’re not allowed to create software for the thing without using Apple’s blessed tools.  And you’re not allowed to put an app on there that hasn’t passed Apple’s completely undocumented, unexplained, and apparently arbitrary “screening process”.

Apparently the content of one’s Kindle is under Amazon’s control.  It’s not the sort of thing I care for—sort of like being stuck at an mall with no second-hand bookstores, no libraries, around, and Big Brother looking over your shoulder every minute.

Physically, I guess it’s all right.  I would not have made the just the same design decisions myself, but this is going to be true of almost any industrial product.

Netbooks and the iPad point the way to a ‘pocket’ computer which will be at once a PC, an ebook reader, a tablet, a music and video player, and a telephone.  (The technology is there now.)  The Kindle will then vanish.