Kindle vs iPad: My take after the media blitz

So being that I have to eventually salivate over an iPad, but already have a Kindle 2, I’m going to venture this review based on browsing the web, watching Steve Jobs’s introduction of the product and just my general sense.

1) The iPad will be a big hit.

2) The kindle is already a hit and will not be supplanted by the iPad once people reach the heart of summer and go down to the beach and have the shiny reflective surface blind them mercilessly when then are trying to show it off.

3)Kindle app store…wtf.  With that slow display and limited input capability?  Do you really expect a user to use the toggle switch to traverse practice tests in a textbook and supply answers?

4) The kindle is a dedicated reading device that has and will change how we read books.

5) The iPad is a huge highly capable iPod Touch and will eat into mac computer sales.  I probably will get one after the 3G version comes out so that I always have a backup network to get to in a pinch, but what I probably will do is walk around with my Kindle and my iPad in my backpack and leave my macbook home for doing intensive stuff (like editing video, concentrated writing, et cetera).

6) If the kindle app for the ipod touch works as described (as the other 140,000 app store apps are expected to), why do I care if I’m holding my iPad or my Kindle if they sync the same purchase between the two from Amazon?

7) I now can line up my lightscribe pen, my droid, my kindle 2, an iPad, my apple TV and my MacBook in a row and take a picture just because each one is slightly bigger than the next.

8 ) The reason I think that the iPad will eat into laptop sales rather than Kindle sales is because if iWork on the iPad is for real, you now have a productivity suite in your hands that is desktop quality and capable in a useful form factor.  If you keep docs on iWork.com or even on your iDisk on me.com you can get to any piece of work, download it and then show or edit it.

9) I was walking around the mall behind my wife today while she went up and down aisles in Filene’s basement in Watertown.  my Kindle 2 was paperback book sized.  An iPad would be TOO BIG to stand around and and act semi-attentive.  Heck my kindle 2 gets looks from people and a kindle dx would be too big also.

10) What I didn’t see (which may be there) is if the Music App on the iPad can broadcast/stream to my apple TV like itunes on my macbook (not the streaming on the appleTV, the reverse where you can tell the macbook to use the appleTV as its speakers).  If it can, I could see how useful (sitting on the couch like Steve Jobs) browsing/reading while my selection of music goes to my Apple TV and my surround system.

That’s my take on it.  Kind of disjoint.  I might get one in 90 days or so when the 3G version comes out…or wait till my birthday in the summer…or wait till Christmas.  Although if I wait till Christmas, I’ll wait until January to see if they do an update at MacWorld or some other venue.

A Marketing Experiment via tweets…

With all the SEO experts, social media experts, marketing gurus and whatnot, I thought I’d try something.  I’ve scheduled 4 tweets on peoplebrowser to appear every 5040 minutes, each one about 20 minutes apart about my book, Urtaru.  These will repeat 9 times each.  Given my social network map which I talked about in another blog post (which now has yahoomeme attached to it) I should be able to hit the 4 corners of the earth twice a week.

So as to have a good sense of my clicks, I have bit.ly to see what people are clicking on, and google analytics on my book website.  If the clicker ends up in my blog on wordpress, that has some level of analytics too, and can send people to my google/bit.ly-ized links.

We’ll see how it goes.

OK so I published my book…Urtaru…on Kindle

Supposedly in 24 to 72 hours my book will appear on the Kindle site.  I had to scramble to make a book cover so that it had something to show when it listed it.

The publishing process itself wasn’t so bad.  I had to take the book which I have written in Apple’s Pages, export it to Word format, dump it to html and then upload it.  At that point I was able to see flaws in my stuff.  In one section (the piece I put here in a previous blog entry) the settings for the footnotes got all screwed up and ended up as end notes.  Being as how this wouldn’t make sense since these were footnotes for a chapter which was being presented as a excerpt from another text, and not the whole book I had to play with the HTML to get it to the right place.

Once I fixed that I noticed that on the very last page, I never indicated that book was finished.  So I added some text to indicate that this was the end of the first of 3 books.

Setting the price was strange.  I have no gd clue how much this book is worth.  and Amazon gives me 35% of the price that I list it for.  so if they sell it for more I get screwed.  But if they sell it for less, there’s a chance that they’ll lose money.

So in a couple of days, the book should be available for kindle download.  I haven’t heard that people are getting rich beyond their wild avaricious dreams but you never know if someone likes it and wants to make a movie