Several people have asked me about book reading on the iPad. The books in iBooks are gorgeous, but for a number of reasons I still prefer Amazon’s Kindle.

Update 10/26/2011: Both Apple and Amazon have come out with new devices since this was written. Amazon has had two major releases, and Apple has refreshed the iPad; but the experiences described here are not significantly different between those versions. The tablet-like Kindle Fire might be a different story. – J

The iPad’s brilliant screen is much easier to use under sub-optimal lighting conditions. The screen resolution is very high — typography actually looks better on the iPad than the Kindle.

But it’s bright. If the poor contrast ratio on the Kindle screen bothers you, the iPad’s brilliance will be welcome. But if you want to relax with your favorite floor lamp and arm chair, that’s going to be a little difficult. The iPad gives your face that nice blue monitor glow, and that spoils the mood.

Another thing that’s welcome is the much larger screen area. I have the smaller Kindle, and the iPad is considerably bigger than that. Remove the Kindle’s barely functional keyboard and the side navigation buttons, and you’ve got yourself a monster reading surface. You can get a lot of book on there at one time, and if you’re using the iBooks app in landscape mode you even get two pages to a screen, just like a “real” book.

And boy is the iPad responsive. You can turn a page in no time at all, whereas the latest version of the Kindle takes a beat and the whole screen flashes.

Why the Kindle is still better

The size, responsiveness, and brilliance come at a price: twice the price of the Kindle, of course, but also portability. The iPad is much heavier, more along the lines of a hardcover book. And it feels much more delicate. While it’s pretty easy to drop the Kindle to, say, answer the door, you’ll want to put the iPad down gently. The size and weight of the Kindle also seem more subway friendly. You can also take the Kindle into the bathroom with you, but the iPad presents some strategic challenges.

The real winner for the Kindle is the portability of the books. And for that you don’t even really need the Kindle.

As of right now, you can only read your books on the iPad. If you can read it on your traditional computer I haven’t discovered how. But I can read Kindle content on my laptop, iPhone, iPad, and Kindle. And given a wireless connection, these devices all sync with each other — so if I put down my Kindle and pick up my iPhone, I can start reading where I left off. In my experience with the Kindle so far, that’s a very nice feature.

Kindle’s bookshelf is also “in the cloud,” as they say; iBook books are still synced from a local library. That’s not really a problem for the iPad, since you can’t share a book across devices anyway, but it’s something to keep in mind further down the road.

The bottom line

If you’re looking at the iPad as simply a book reader, don’t do it. Not yet. You have to want the other things the iPad has to offer (and there are plenty) to justify the increased cost and decreased portability. If an electronic book reader is what you want, then buy one of those and not an iPad.

On the other hand, the iPad is perfectly acceptable as a book reader and even more pleasant to use than the Kindle if the circumstances are right. (If you’re in the dark and have cybernetic arms.)

And most of the benefits of having a Kindle come not from the device itself but from Amazon’s delivery mechanism — you don’t have to have a Kindle device to buy Kindle books or read Kindle books. So you could just buy an iPad and use the Kindle app.

I’m sure that’s not the advice Apple wants you to hear. But for the moment, it’s a pretty good solution.