On April 3, Amazon released a new version of their ebook reader in the US with plans to roll it out worldwide towards the end of April. It’s available in all Apple stores and is of course named the iPad.

The iPad Kindle app makes the iPad Amazon’s best ebook reader to date. Apple’s iBook store has about 60,000 titles at present in the US verses Amazon’s 400,000. So Apple allowing Amazon to jump on board with it’s book store and ebook reader is an interesting move. Steve Jobs would never allow Microsoft to move their Zune music store to the iPad platform so why allow a competitor Amazon?

The bottomline for Apple at the moment is to sell hardware and having an extra 400,000 ebooks available on the hardware platform is good business. I’m sure Amazon thinks that the Kindle app for the iPad is a trojan horse to bring customers over to future Kindle devices and I’m sure Apple knows this too.

But, I bet that once Apple has about the same amount of titles on their bookstore as Amazon, Steve will drop the Kindle app like a sack of potatos.

Tags: Amazon, IPad, eBooks, Apple

I spent part of the Easter long weekend refreshing my notes for a class I teach on book design. I wanted to include information on Apple’s new iPad and to make sense of how it might change traditional book publishing. My initial thoughts were that it might change newspapers, magazine and textbooks but there would always be a market for printed books like the fantastic range of children’s books I fill my daughter’s library with.

That is until I saw the following video from a presentation by Penguin in the UK...



If my two year old can navigate an iPhone’s pre-school apps with just a finger, imagine how much she would enjoy the larger screen and richer content displayed on the iPad.

It’s going to be a very interesting couple of years for mainstream book publishing.

Tags: Apple, Penguin, IPad, eBooks, Book Design