Before I got my iPad, I didn’t think I’d use it much for reading books.  I love books.  The house is full of books. I’m proud that I am perennially short of bookshelves.

Now, I find myself leaning toward buying books via the iPad more than going to the bookstore.

The thing is, I usually have my iPad with me.  It’s easy to carry. That means I can read nearly anywhere, and as a result I can read more often. I’m already a devout reader, so this just feeds the addiction.

Of the available readers, Apple’s iBooks is my favorite.  By no means is it perfect, but it’s good enough.  With the right font, and the right type size, I don’t find the iPad’s LCD objectionable.  It certainly gets dim enough to read comfortably in bed. (It lights up the room considerably less than the LED miner’s lamp I use for reading physical books in bed.)

Where iBooks falls down is in the texts themselves.

Texts

Some publishers are doing right by the electronic reader, and are releasing books that match the formatting and copy-editing of the paper version.  Others are taking various shortcuts.  Browsing the iBookstore, you’ll find many bestsellers getting poor reviews because of editing and typographical errors.  I suspect some publishers are sending off their uncorrected galley proofs for digital conversion in the name of speed, hoping that the electronic buyer won’t notice or won’t care. I suspect those publishers are wrong. I certainly avoid those electronic texts, and as a result those publishers have to wait until I’m done reading eBooks and get to the store… or sometimes, they don’t get my money at all.

Note to publishers: An impulse purchase is a potential sale only so long as the impulse exists.

Even otherwise well-done books have odd flaws.  For example, Preston and Child’s Fever Dream on iBooks looks very close to the print layout, except that the word “fixing” is set as “fi xing” throughout.

Some of the texts from established e-book vendors are highly uneven. Baen Books has embraced free e-book versions of their authors’ back catalogues for some time. They even bind CD-ROMs of their e-book library to new hardcovers for some titles.  Some of these versions are well formatted. Some are okay, but are missing niceties like “curly quotes”—something forgivable on a blog site, but uncomfortable in a book.  A few have obviously taken a detour through plain-text-file-ville at some point in their life, making them awkward to utterly unreadable.  (Imagine reading a book where all the extra line breaks signifying a change in scene or point-of-view have been elided.)

Okay, but those are free e-books, so you have to make allowances, right? Unfortunately, I’ve found the same flaws in Baen’s paid DRM-free ePub e-books as well. If I’m paying for the book, I expect a well-edited text that is properly “typeset.”

If e-Books are going to take off, publishers have to make them as close to the print version as possible, especially in terms of layout and editing.

Readers

I’ve tried the big three iPad e-book readers: Apple’s iBooks, the Barnes & Noble eReader, and Amazon’s Kindle app.

All have flaws.

iBooks limits you to a small handful of fonts. Only one of them resembles anything you’re likely to find in a well-designed mass-market book: Baskerville. I suppose Palatino and Times New Roman aren’t horrible, but they aren’t typical book faces. Cochin is too ornate to be comfortable as a text font, and Verdana… well… it’s Verdana. It’s an ugly Microsoft sans-serif typeface designed for reading on Windows 95-era CRTs.  I suppose it has its fans, but then, the same could be said for velvet paintings of dogs playing poker.

On the plus side, iBooks does a very good job rendering those fonts. Apple’s Type Services are used to full effect; you get ligatures (fi and fl instead of fi and fl, for example) automatically. The letters are well-kerned, and the line-spacing generally matches what you’d expect in a real book.  The result is comfortable to read, especially in Baskerville.

The B&N eReader gives you more font choices: Amasis, Century Schoolbook, Georgia, Joanna, Times New Roman, Ascender Sans, Gill Sans, and Trebuchet MS. With the exception of Trebuchet, all are reasonable fonts. The serif fonts wouldn’t be out of place in a real book. However, the font rendering is fatally flawed. The lack of ligatures is bad enough.  However, except for Century Schoolbook, none of the fonts provided will display italics. Any italicized text gets rendered as plain text.  This can render a book utterly incomprehensible.

Even Century Schoolbook is flawed. While you can make out italic text in Century Schoolbook, it isn’t set in a true italic face. Instead, the font is mathematically slanted (“oblique”) to make a pseudo-italic appearance. The result is ugly, and very reminiscent of early Mac typography circa 1984. The poor typography of B&N eReader is indefensible in a book-reading application.

I also find the line spacing and page width options uncomfortable.

I quickly ruled out the B&N app.

The Kindle app gives you one typeface, reminiscent of paperbacks from the 1950s and 1960s. It’s not bad for reading, but it is what it is. It also comes with relatively unimaginative page design as a result. However, it does scale to small sizes very well, and is very legible on the iPad’s screen.

Like the B&N app, the Kindle app fails to take advantage of iOS’s built-in support for advanced typography, such as ligatures.

The B&N and Kindle apps both lack an in-app bookstore, forcing you to jump out to Safari and use the vendor’s web site to purchase new books.  On the other hand, both the B&N and Amazon web sites are far easier to browse than Apple’s iBookstore.  Trying to “browse the shelves” in iBookstore can be infuriating, as you see only a fraction of the content unless you perform a search.

All three apps have a common failing: None of them implement proper hyphenation. This leads to some ugly typography, especially for certain texts at certain font sizes. I don’t find it as objectionable as some, but many book snobs find it painful. The B&N app offers an option to display ragged-right text, which reduces the need for hyphenation; the other two only offer full justification.

* * *

So far, all three readers are flawed, but I find iBooks’ flaws the least objectionable. It looks good, it works well, and it feels polished. B&N’s app is decidedly half-baked, and not up to professional standards—never mind professional book publishing standards. The Kindle app shows more experience with e-Books, but is definitely “Kindle lite” and short of the mark.

I look forward to future versions of all three, hopefully combined with a more serious commitment to quality from the publishers.

Since I got my iPad, I’ve been a bit worried about dropping it.  The aluminum back doesn’t give one a lot of confidence; while I’ve not dropped it yet, it sometimes feels distressingly like it could slip out of one’s grasp.

It seemed like a silicone slipcover would be just the ticket.

I bought the Incase Grip Protective Cover at an Apple Store. Admittedly, I confused it with the almost identical Incase Protective Cover.  It was the Protective Cover I was really looking to buy.

I have several Incase protective cases, and I’ve been happy with their design and construction.  But…

The Grip Protective Cover isn’t just a straight silicone slipcover.  It adds two humps near the top and bottom of the iPad.  They provide a bit more heft to grip the iPad when it’s held in landscape orientation.  Some may find they help in the normal portrait orientation, as well; I find them sort of awkward.

There are two major flaws with the Grip Protective Cover:

1. The humps add weight.  A noticeable amount of weight.  With the cover on, my wrists complain more quickly and more loudly about trying to hold the iPad one-handed.
2. It doesn’t fit tightly enough.  If you hold the iPad in portrait orientation with your hand about halfway up the screen, your grip will tend to peel the Grip Protective Cover off the side of the iPad.  It could stand to be a good deal tighter.

There’s also the common flaw to silicone slipcovers for any iPod or iPad: although you can use a docking cable, you can’t use a dock without removing the cover.  This is especially true for the Grip Protective Cover; the humps eliminate any question of docking.

I’m not impressed with this product.  My objection to the humps are my own mistake, but the loose fit is a problem.  I recommend passing on this product.

My coworker Jack expressed a thought about the iPad that I have had myself a few times over the past few days. While it’s a great too, and does many things well, it is a bit on the large IDE to be one’s constant companion. It would be awesome if Apple released something in between the iPad and the iPhone. Something paperback-sized. Something that would fit in cargo shorts.

I also have a few gripes about the onscreen keyboard. Typing on it isn’t a problem, per se. The thing is the keys that it’s missing.

The worst omission is the apostrophe key. You have to go into a submenu to get that. If you are used to touch-typing, you will find yourself hitting Return a lot when you mean to use an apostrophe. Your alternatives are to learn to type without them (and hope that the autocorreect does the right thing, not always possible with English’s homophones), or press a button to make the keyboard switch to “symbol mode.” That’s quite annoying.

The other problem is that there are no number keys on the main keypad, even in portrait orientation where there is plenty of room to have them.

I’d rather have a smaller visible arrea above the keyboard and have number keys and an onscreen apostrophe.

Maybe the idea is to sell more Bluetooth keyboards…

If someone comes up with a decent iPad case having an integrated Bluetooth keyboard, even if the keyboard is largely rubbish, it will sell like Ames.

My iPad is on order.  Maybe I’ll post more often once it arrives…