eBooks: iPhone vs Kindle - one author's perspective

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Posted:
in iPhone edited January 2014
Saw this over at Pournelle's blog. The author is Francis Hamit that has been doing e-Books for a while.



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Quote:

And iPhone is the obvious future of e-book publishing because it has attained the kind of critical mass; the installed base, needed to produce significant sales. There are over 15 million iPhones and ten percent of them already have e-book readers on them. Compare that to the putative numbers for the Kindle and the Sony Reader. Then compare the price and the additional functionality and you see that the market advantage of IPhone will continue to dominate this new market.



Link



If you look at amazon's history with ebooks you can see why some folks are not quite as enthused about the prospects of Kindle.



I'll be looking at smashwords. Indie books are obviously going to be a mixed bag but there are probably a few worth reading...on my iPhone.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 4
    Marvinmarvin Posts: 15,585moderator
    I agree with this. People have said that the iphone screen isn't suitable for reading because of its size but I don't find it a problem. You do need to flip pages quite often but it's still a pocket device so you can't have it both ways.



    They could also use a low brightness special screen mode for showing text.



    Apple could really do with offering a bookstore that has texts in a standard format - right now you always get a bunch of custom apps along with the ebooks. Some will do continuos scroll, others do page flipping, some have scalable text, others are fixed, some allow landscape mode, others don't. It needs to be consistent with the same search and bookmarking functions.



    Suffice to say, the iphone is a multi-function device and although the kindle may do its one purpose better, it's not great value for money. If you decide to take a break from reading, the iphone offers so much more.
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  • Reply 2 of 4
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by vinea View Post


    Saw this over at Pournelle's blog. The author is Francis Hamit that has been doing e-Books for a while.



    Money Quote:







    Link



    If you look at amazon's history with ebooks you can see why some folks are not quite as enthused about the prospects of Kindle.



    I'll be looking at smashwords. Indie books are obviously going to be a mixed bag but there are probably a few worth reading...on my iPhone.



    putative?



    She couldn't have used the more common synonym, purported? Still it is nice to refresh one's vocabulary.
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  • Reply 3 of 4
    vineavinea Posts: 5,585member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by mdriftmeyer View Post


    putative?



    She couldn't have used the more common synonym, purported? Still it is nice to refresh one's vocabulary.



    Pretty sure it's a guy. Like in Stripes.
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  • Reply 4 of 4
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Marvin View Post


    ... You do need to flip pages quite often but it's still a pocket device so you can't have it both ways.

    ...



    Ah, but you CAN have it both ways!... The accelerometer does a fantastic job of scrolling the text as you tilt the screen slightly.

    "File Magnet" app has this feature... unfortunately, it's difficult to find mass-market novels in non-DRM format (.txt, .pdf, .doc, etc...).
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