Amazon has announced a new Kindle that most bloggers are calling Kindle 3. The new device seems pretty awesome, both in features and price. It’s important that we declare both devices as winners in their own right and set some things straight for anyone calling iPad a Kindle killer or the other way around.

Kindle as a service

Kindle is a service that allows consumers to buy books from anywhere in the world as long as there is an Internet connection. Books can be purchased via any device with a modern web browser and you can read those books on any device that supports Kindle software like your Mac, PC, iPhone, iPad, Android and Amazon’s own Kindle hardware.

Amazon’s strategy is different from Apple’s. Apple developed the iTunes Store as a service to drive the sales of its hardware. Kindle software and hardware was created to drive the sale of books and other downloadable content. Kindle is huge for Amazon because going digital isn’t just convenient to the consumer. It’s great for Amazon because it doesn’t have to keep a stock of books and worry about paying to ship those books and the consumer wins by having that book accessible across multiple devices instantly. All Amazon has to do is ensure its selection of books is higher and its price is lower than the competition.

Kindle and iPad finally coexisting

Until today’s announcement, Kindle as a device was scrutinized against the Apple iPad, because while you could read books on both, the iPad was only $150 more than the smaller Kindle and a few bucks more than the larger Kindle DX.

Amazon aggressively slashed prices on the device in a way that made everyone think they were just being defensive and fearful of iPad but today, that all changed.

Kindle 3 is priced at $139 (Wi-Fi only) and an International version with 3G is only $189 (3G via GSM). TechCrunch Reports:

In addition to the price and screen change, the redesigned body is 21% smaller and 15% lighter, down to about 8.5oz. If their press release is to be believed, it’s also got twice the storage (4GB) and significantly improved battery life over the old Kindle.

Kindle is priced so aggressively that true book lovers can buy the new Kindle at a price that’s simply a no brainer considering that Kindle books cost considerably less than real books and you’re saving on shipping and the pesky 3-7 days it takes for a book to arrive at your door. No longer is there a decision to make between buying a Kindle device or simply paying $150 more and having an iPad that does books and so much more.

Amazon is finally showing the industry that it doesn’t want to make millions selling Kindles. It’s about the sale of digital books.

Apple and Amazon are both winners

When you’re just talking hardware, Apple will continue to sell millions of iPads to people who want books, games, movies, apps and the web and the Kindle will continue to sell in the millions for book lovers. This is a huge win for consumers because our decision is made for us and bloggers can stop comparing both devices like they’re the same. I’ll be buying a Kindle for my sister who reads books every day and an Amazon gift card so she can buy a few books to get started. It’s a much easier gift than paying $499 for an iPad that she’ll mostly be using for books, anyway.

So who are the losers?

Basically, everyone that’s not Apple or Amazon. For now and the foreseeable future, Amazon has done a phenomenal job getting Kindle on millions of computers, phones and other handheld devices. Its goal of selling books by the truck load is working well as it just announced Kindle books are now outselling physical books after only three years. The losers are Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Sony’s E-Reader, and any other devices that don’t either work with Amazon or have their own book store. B&N has a fighting chance but Amazon’s user base of passionate book buyers will stay true to Amazon and Apple has over 100 million accounts with credit cards who will dive right in to iBooks. Sorry, but it’s clear who the winners are in the digital book sales space.

What about iBooks?

Amazon and Apple may not be competing when it comes to Kindle hardware versus iPad but they’re still competing in the book sales space. I’ve been meaning to write this for a while but I won’t buy a book via iBooks outside of the free section. The reason is that Apple hasn’t convinced me that my digital DRMed books are safe with them. In the same way that my iTunes movies and music (prior to iTunes Plus) are not playable on other hardware other than Apple’s. Amazon has displayed the right strategy that any device or platform that comes out in the future will eventually get Kindle software and those digital books I bought in 2007 will sync to that device without fail and Amazon is a large company that I trust. iBooks may win me over eventually but for price, selection and compatibility, Kindle (the service) has me hooked.

Kindle versus iPad is a dead argument. You’re both winners. No one is arguing the iPad isn’t better hardware for much more than books but that comes at a price and, even on the iPad, Kindle is just one tap away via its own app.

Related GigaOM Pro Content (subscription required): Evolution of the e-Book Market

Now that all the commercial e-book distributors have made their iPad apps available, it’s time for an overview of how each app performs, along with their pluses and minuses.

One of my primary goals with the iPad was reducing the amount of paper clutter in my house. As a voracious reader, my home library was quickly approaching the need for a Dewey decimal system. While Andy Ihnatko is known for living a year of digital media last year, for a while now I’ve been trying to reach that goal myself.

The good news is, the iPad makes it very easy to purchase and consume digital media. I’ve had no eye strain issues with the iPad, having read over 10 books on it since its launch. Neither have I found the weight of the device to be a big issue — however I usually keep it propped on something. Reading outdoors is a problem with the glare, though, and there’s no way I’d want to bring my iPad to a beach.

The bad news is, there’s really not one app that’s perfect — especially if you have non-DRM e-books you also want to read in the same app with DRM’d content. Because each store’s content ranges from fantastic to abysmal, it can also be hard to find a single-stop app. However, if you are of the mind to strip the DRM yourself from books you’ve legally obtained, it is possible to get them all into iBooks.

So, here’s how I found each app to hold up. While many of these apps also have iPhone versions, for this article I’m going to be focusing on the iPad.

iBooks

iBooks is Apple’s e-reader. It can read books purchased from the iBookstore, as well as non-DRMd epub-formatted books and PDFs. I found the app to be visually pleasing, and little touches like the page turning animation heightened my enjoyment of reading on the app — it’s trivial, I know, but the little touches add up. iBooks also keeps the PDF and e-books on separate bookshelves, which I found easy to find content with instead of hunting through a large selection.

I did find the PDF reader to be slightly wonky, though. I did an initial sync of about 20 PDFs, but the first time I used the “open with” feature in iOS to open a PDF, it removed all the existing PDFs, leaving just the imported document. I also had the app crash reading a PDF, and that also removed all the PDFs, with the extra bonus of also removing all the e-books on the subsequent sync — and let me tell you, getting all the books back in was a hassle, requiring an app reinstall, and multiple syncs and a lot of four-letter words. Clearly, iBooks 1.1 has that “rushed out the door” taste.

Version 1.1 introduces the ability to add notes (only to epub files; not PDFs) and these, as well as your position, sync to iBooks on the iPhone.

iBooks is also the only one of the apps I found that allows you to manually change the order of how books appear on your bookshelf. I found this handy for arranging a queue of sorts for the order I wanted to read books. You can also get very granular in iTunes for how you categorize the books, and iBooks will let you sort  on them. While reinstalling the app and/or books will preserve your location in the book, the book’s place on your bookshelf is not. So, after that lost e-books saga I just talked about, I had to go in and re-order my shelf again.

While Apple claims that “5 of the 6 world’s largest publishers” are on the iBookstore, that missing one is Random House, which is the largest publisher. Therefore, the iBookstore selection is weaker than Apple would have you believe. Also, you can only view iBookstore from within the iBooks app.

Kindle

Amazon’s Kindle app is a very pain-free reading experience on the iPad, especially if you’re an existing user of the hardware Kindle. After signing into your Kindle account on the app, you’ll be able to download all your purchased books. It won’t grab them all on initial launch; you’ll need to go into Archived Books to download them.

While you cannot side-load your own e-books, and adding content will require your iPad to be connected to the Internet, Amazon’s Kindle store is first-class. I had a tremendous success rate finding books.

Like iBooks, Kindle also allows for annotating, but here’s where I feel the Kindle infrastructure really shines. While you are locked into the Kindle infrastructure from a DRM standpoint, the Kindle app is available on iOS, Mac, PC, Android, and Blackberry, So you’re not locked into a hardware and software combination like you are with iBooks.

Barnes and Noble

Barnes and Noble is late to the e-book party — its Nook reader came out late last year. That said, the app does a few nice things: in addition to adding notes and bookmarks, you can also Google or look up on Wikipedia highlighted text.

The app is very customizable. It ships with a few themes. Instead of the garish themes you might find on a skinning site, these are all very readable. If you don’t see a viewing selection you like, you can make your own within the app.

I found the bookstore selection to be very good — on par with Amazon’s. As with Amazon, you can also get readers for various platforms. You will need to have the iPad connected to the Internet to put books on it, but you can view the bookstore on the web. If you are a Barnes and Noble member, you will not get an additional discount on e-books like you can with a paper book.

Stanza

Stanza is an interesting little e-book reader. It’s very side-loadable; it’s the only app that will let you “open with” both e-books and PDFs. By default it will connect to a handful of e-bookstores, and you can also read DRM’d content from ereader.com on it. As with iBooks, you can annotate non-PDF books. You can also use the file-sharing feature within iTunes to transfer content, too.

If you’re not already a customer of one of the large e-bookstores, Stanza is a very appealing app. I love how you can just throw books at it from a variety of sources without any problems. I did find the library view to be wanting, though. The type was a little large for my tastes, and while I could change the thumbnail sizes (or turn them off all-together), I couldn’t see where to adjust the font size.

Zinio

Zinio is more of an e-magazine reader than an e-book reader. I’m mentioning it here because magazines are a large part of my media consumption. At first, the Zinio app got off a rough start. Every time you turned a page, it would take a while to for the page to finish loading. That’s gotten better, though, and page views are almost immediate. While there are viewers out for the Mac, PC, and iOS, Apple’s censorship arm also reaches to the Zinio platform — some titles are not available on the iPad, even though far more explicit material is available in the iBookstore.

I’ve found the selection to be merely OK. You can read MacUser and Macworld UK, as well as Macworld U.S. National Geographic also looks amazing on it. Of my regular reading choices, only Macworld and National Geographic are available via Zinio. The various writing magazines I read are not.

I did find the subscription prices to be very enticing. I grabbed a subscription to Esquire for only $8.

Wrapping Up

Until iBooks started its crash festival, it was my favorite for reading. However, since the bulk of my purchases come from Amazon, and the Kindle app has never, ever, crashed and lost my books, I’m going to be using that app more often. Amazon is also the leader for content, with iBookstore coming in at a distant third. Maybe it’s my reading tastes, but a search of books I was interested in yielded less than a 10 percent success rate. Also, while I love Apple and all, I’m more willing to invest in a reading infrastructure that supports the widest variety of platforms.

What is nice to see is the iPad does deliver on the promise of virtual reading.

What about you? What iPad reading app do you prefer?

While it remains to be seen if Apple’s iBooks app and the iBookstore will be able to transform the print industry, they both have ignited a spark that makes reading more fun. The idea of reading on mobile devices is not new. Devices like the Amazon Kindle and the Sony eReader have been around for a while, but with the buzz surrounding iBooks sparking more interest, are digital books worth it?

The Beginning of the Digital Revolution

When Apple launched the iTunes Store in 2003, Steve Jobs made the case for why digital downloads would be the future. At the time, it was fairly easy to illegally download music through services like Napster or Kazaa. However, Jobs felt that people would pay a price, very reasonably set at 99 cents, to download music that was great quality and featured intact metadata and gorgeous album artwork. But does the same argument extend to digital books? The current offerings on the iBookstore seem to disagree.

Limitations of the ePub Format

There’s a few considerations to keep in mind, such as selection and format. When the iTunes Store first launched, its catalog only contained 200,000 titles. Seven years later, the catalog features over 11 million titles. While Apple hasn’t released a specific number, its website says the iBookstore features tens of thousands of titles with more arriving daily. Still for most, the selection feels a bit limited. It’s unlikely you’ll be able to replace your entire library with e-books soon.

Another consideration is formatting. A lot of digital content like books and documents are in PDF format. This is great as this format can maintain the exact structure, graphics, typeface and colors from the original source material. However, there are some trade offs. For example, zooming on a PDF document, especially on an iPad, will require you to scroll up and down, or even worse left and right, just to view everything on one page. This doesn’t make for a natural reading experience.

Content on the iBookstore is delivered in ePub format, which is essentially an XML-based web page. By using a standards-compliant format (and we all know how Apple loves open standards), the ePub format supports benefits like being able to resize text or switch typefaces. This works because the iBooks app can simply modify the stylesheet applied to the document. When you make these changes, it’s easy for the iPad to reflow the content onto additional pages if needed. But sometimes this can get a bit wonky (yes, that’s a technical term).

First, custom typefaces are not supported in iBooks. While Safari on the iPad itself will support font embedding, iBooks misses out on this feature.

Another issue is images which are displayed in-line with the text content. What this means is in an original book, you might have a few photos out to the side of a paragraph but on the iPad, they’ll just be displayed one right after the other, mixed in with the narrative. For some types of content, this may be a non-issue, but for others where the page structure is essential to the reading experience, this can be problematic.

Both of these are the top reasons why you don’t see periodicals available through the iBookstore. Imagine the implications this causes for technical books or textbooks. Isn’t the education market supposed to be a big market for this device?

Some Potential Solutions

There are some potential solutions to this. Publishers could simply display some pages as single images, as this would maintain formatting, but accessibility features and the ability to bookmark and change text sizes would be lost.

Another solution would be that authors could release specific apps for these titles. Some have followed this route, but managing more than a handful of these apps really begins to clutter up the device and suddenly, the simplicity of the iBooks app for managing your content is gone.

Since ePub is an open e-book standard, there is hope that future versions will be able to address these issues. Likewise, the iBooks app itself can also be updated to add additional functionality, however, once you’ve bought a book, you own it. Unlike how Apple offered users to upgrade to iTunes Plus to get higher bit-rate versions of their songs, its unlikely that Apple will go back and update older titles or offer “plus” versions of some of these books.

Instead, Apple is being more selective about which titles are showing up on the iBookstore. Obviously, there are no periodicals. You could argue that the iBookstore is intended for books only, but I really think that’s just the beginning, similar to how the iTunes Store began with music videos before adding TV shows and then movies. But could Apple release a different app to manage periodicals and newspapers? Perhaps and so there is yet another solution.

Regardless, the feasibility of converting your entire book collection to e-books is unlikely in the short-term, either because of a lack of content or simply because e-books are not worthy replacements of the books on your shelves. The ePub format itself still has a number of issues to address before printed books become a proverbial page from the past.

Have you used the iBooks app or the iBookstore? What are your thoughts on the ePub format? Is it sufficient enough to replace your library? Share your thoughts in the comments and tell us what you think.

The iPad will be coming out in just a few days. There’s a good chance that shortly thereafter, as soon as 3G versions are available in stores, I will have my hands on Apple’s newest product. One of the principal reasons that I will be purchasing the iPad is to be my e-book reader. I have been an avid reader my entire life, and as something of a technologist as well, I have been waiting for e-books for as long as I can remember.

Amazon, obviously, got the ball really rolling with the Kindle after years of stagnation in the market. Apple is going toe to toe with them with the launch of the iBookstore. So when I have an iPad in hand I’m going to be faced with a choice, use Apple’s iBooks solution, or stick with Amazon’s Kindle platform.

I’ve been thinking about this ever since the iPad was announced, going back and forth on the issue. On the one hand I have already made an investment in Amazon’s e-book ecosystem, having purchased about 30 books to read on the Kindle app on my iPhone. That’s about $300 invested, but even if I switch to Apple’s iBooks app I can always have the Kindle app sitting next to it on my iPad if I want to read one of those titles. The iBookstore, however, offers several benefits over the Kindle app:

• The ability to purchase books from within the app
• The ability to add any open ePub format book to iTunes and sync it over
• The rumored 30,0000 public domain books that will be available

Given these benefits it might seem like a slam dunk to move over to iBooks, but I’ve decided against it, for one simple reason: cross-platform compatibility.

For me, books are a long-term investment. If I like a book I’m going to read it two, five or even 10 times, and some of my favorite books from my teenage years I’ve read so many times I can’t even remember how many times I’ve picked them up. Books, including e-books, I buy today aren’t something that I’ll one and done like a television episode or even a movie — these are things that I’ll want to be able to access in 10 or 20 years. Given that, it’s important for me to pick an e-book platform that I know will be able to follow me as my tastes and needs for hardware change. What happens if I decide in five years that I don’t want to use Apple products anymore? If I invest heavily into the iBoookstore those books will be lost to me, but with the Kindle there’s a good chance that I’ll be able to read those books on a future Android device, or a Windows tablet or something we don’t even know of today but that I might be using.

It’s hard for me, as an Apple fanboy, to consider the possibility that Apple may not be able to meet my computing needs in the future. But I care more about books than I do about Apple and so I need to be honest with myself about this. When push comes to shove, it’s more important for me to have my books than it is for me to have Apple’s products, and that’s never going to change. So when the iPad comes out and I have one in my hands I’ll be reading my books in the Kindle app.

Related GigaOM Pro Research: Evolution of the e-Book Market

It may not be ready in time for the launch of the iPad, but Amazon wants you to know that its Kindle app will be worth the wait. That’s why it’s created a special preview page of the upcoming software, dubbed “Kindle Apps for Tablet Computers” with “Including the iPad” in much smaller font beside that primary title.

So its clear that while Amazon wants to capitalize on the iPad’s hype and pre-release popularity, it also doesn’t want to go as far as helping Apple convey the impression that it’s the only tablet game in town. To me, the “Including the iPad” sounds like a begrudging admission of the “I was wrong and you were right” variety.

Of course, it might just be that Amazon would like to appeal to the widest group of potential customers possible, while at the same time acknowledging that Apple is likely to win the brand recognition fight in that particular category. Whatever the marketing logic, the actual software Amazon is previewing looks to be pretty fantastic, especially for those (like me) who are already hardware Kindle owners.

First, the Kindle tablet app will offer Whispersync services, which means you can pick up where you last left off reading, no matter which device you happened to be using. I can’t count how many times I’ve used this between my Kindle 2 and my iPhone, so I can’t imagine it being any less useful with my iPad when it finally graces these Canadian shores.

The app will also synch your notes and highlights and bookmarks across all compatible devices, including the recently released Kindle for Mac software, which can read notes and bookmarks, but not make new ones of its own as of yet.

Visually, the Kindle app looks like what you’d expect. Page turn animations are included, or you can turn them off if you’re not so crazy about mimicking a paper reading experience on your digital devices, which I most definitely am not. You can also change font size and color, and background color in order to make the reading experience more comfortable.

Kindle for tablets also supports full color images and graphics, which is great news not only for fans of comics and graphic novels, which haven’t really been a great option on the Kindle thus far, but also for textbooks, recipe books, and some more adventurous fiction that uses in text images and font color changes as narrative devices.

Finally, you’ll be able to shop in the Kindle store via a built-in web view, so you can indulge all those buying impulses on the fly instead of having to wait till you have access to a full computer. All-in-all, it sounds like it’ll give my Kindle 2 a run for its money, even with potentially eye-straining backlighting.

It’s been teased for a fairly long time now, but Amazon finally released its Kindle companion software for Mac, as of yesterday. To date, the Kindle application has only been available for Windows machines, which has made it slightly harder for Mac users to organize and manage their Kindle collection.

Kindle for Mac also offers e-reader features, so you can access all of your e-book purchases, download and read them right on your computer. It’ll also sync the furthest location read with all Kindle devices registered to your account if you want, so that you can continue reading on your Kindle, iPhone or Mac without missing a beat.

Not yet present in the current version of the software is the ability to make and edit notes, highlight portions of the text and conduct full-text searches, but these are all planned for a later update, according to Amazon. Future versions will also let you click on images to zoom in to see a larger version, and to rotate it if you wish. One feature that is present is the conveniently-placed “Buy a Kindle” link found in the Help menu. Subtle, Amazon.

The application also lets you manage your Kindle and make purchases in the Kindle store, although for both of these functions it actually just kicks you over to Amazon’s web site in your default browser. In fact, the Mac software really isn’t much more than a bare-bones e-reading application. Not that that’s a bad thing, but I’m wondering why exactly it took this long to get the software out there.

The answer is probably that Amazon didn’t really have a good enough reason to until the iPad came along. Up until that point, drawing a link between a free iPhone app and a free Mac app to display content that Amazon was originally taking a loss on selling didn’t make much sense. The Kindle itself — the hardware — was the key to success, and it’s pretty easy to chuck that altogether when you’ve got the other two.

Amazon must’ve seen the writing on the wall following the iPad announcement, and realized that joining the company would be considerably more productive than attempting to beat it at this point, and so decided to cover all Mac-based platforms instead of just partially serving Apple customers. Will it pay off in the long run? We’ll have to wait and see how well Apple tolerates iBookstore competitors when the iPad hits store shelves early next month.

Related GigaOM Pro Research (sub req’d): Evolution of the e-Book Market

Read the rest of this story at MacRumors

Read the rest of this story at MacRumors