Kid on christmas morning

I was anxious last night because I knew today could have been the day where Apple changed the ebook and publishing business forever. I looked forward to 1pm all day and the 6 hours before that couldn’t go by quick enough. I had hopes that the iPad would be some kind of e-ink, HD-color display hybrid that would make me immediately regret buying a Kindle. I’m relieved and disappointed at the same time.

Relieved that my Kindle isn’t obsolete 3 weeks after I bought it.

Disappointed that reading on an iPad will give me few benefits over reading on a laptop screen.

Kindle vs. iPad – Fight to the death only on Pay-Per-View

Elliot Jay Stocks said that ”the fact that it [the iPad] is going to kill the Kindle is now obvious.” I disagree with him. I bought the Kindle for its e-ink and open hard drive (I can put whatever I want on it). The iPad doesn’t challenge either of those so I think the Kindle will be fine. The iPad will be nothing but a bump in the road for Mr. Bezos.

The iPad will be more convenient to hold while I’m reading an ebook than my laptop because of the absence of the weird CPU/keyboard thing dangling off my laptop. The glowing backlit screen will be harsh on my eyes after 45 minutes of pure reading. I see myself reading on the iPad occasionally, but I bought the Kindle for a couple specific needs and the iPad doesn’t satisfy either of those.

I didn’t buy the Kindle to play games or check my email. That’s what my iPad will be for :-)

“Amazon doesn’t reliably deliver my messages to customers’ Kindles. For some people, it works great. For others, I trigger some filter after a while and Amazon randomly blocks Instapaper emails from hitting their accounts unless they call Amazon’s customer service and have them remove the block.”

That’s a shame because Instapaper would be that much more useful with consistent support from Amazon’s PDF conversion service.

I am constantly reading books, but they are mostly technical ones that I like to highlight and markup the margins. Amazon’s Kindle wouldn’t do me much good there. I read tons of blog articles, usually 20 at a time. This is where the combination of Instapaper and Kindle can become a game changer.

There is one thing that will immediately get me to shell out $259 for the Kindle: Instapaper automatically syncing with the Kindle. Instapaper has become a part of my daily routine. I check my feeds throughout the day, open any articles I want to read and save them to my Instapaper account. After I’m done work for the day, I sit on my couch and read the articles from Instapaper on my MacBook. Reading on a backlit screen isn’t ideal because it strains my eyes (and I’m a pretty young lad). I’ve tried reading on my iPhone too, but that didn’t help much either.

Possible User Experience for InstaKindle¹

Not much would change about the way I save my articles. What would change is how I read them. Every night, my unread articles on Instapaper would be quietly converted to a single PDF document and emailed to my special Kindle address.² It would arrive at my virtual doorstep at 6am and be ready for consumption during my morning tea. It would imitate the experience of a morning newspaper at a much lower cost. It would be targeted to exactly the articles I want to read because I’m the one that picked them. It would be comparably easy to read because of the Kindle’s E Ink.

Having Instapaper and the Kindle collaborate to bring me my ultra-targeted newspaper subscription in the morning would be the ideal experience for me.

1. I just made that name up. Feel free to use it, although Amazon might not like that.
2. Marco Arment already has a great start to this functionality.