Shawn Blanc posted a thought-provoking article about Reading on the iPad and the “power pack” eats it up with their usual back scratching. I suggest reading the articles in this order:
Shawn is correct that Reeder and Instapaper are good experiences on the iPad as I use them 20 times a day to lean back and get some reading done when I have a free moment. I also agree with his cons list when it comes to reading magazines and newspapers. However, Shawn and his blogger friends didn’t make one mention of “Newsstand” for iOS which is coming in the fall in Apple’s iOS5 update. Apple:
Read all about it. All in one place. iOS 5 organizes your magazine and newspaper app subscriptions in Newsstand: a folder that lets you access your favorite publications quickly and easily. There’s also a new place on the App Store just for newspaper and magazine subscriptions. And you can get to it straight from Newsstand. New purchases go directly to your Newsstand folder. Then, as new issues become available, Newsstand automatically updates them in the background — complete with the latest covers. It’s kind of like having the paper delivered to your front door. Only better.
The one-stop shop for subscribing to content and receiving automatic updates is very nice. Implementation may not be as nice but it’s going to make things much simpler for those of us who ingest content exclusively via iPad. I think Newstand will remove many of the gripes that come from traditional news publications that publish on the iPad.
However, John Gruber gets one thing wrong in his link to Shawn’s piece:
Reasonable download sizes. A copy of The New Yorker should not weigh 500 MB. That takes way too long over a slow Wi-Fi connection, let alone 3G (and 3G is metered on the iPad — some iPad 3G users only have 250 MB total data per month). Books from the Kindle and iBooks stores generally weigh in at 10 MB or so. You should be able to download a copy of magazine quickly over 3G. Condé Nast would never ship the paper magazine in a box that weighs 50 pounds. But that’s exactly what their digital editions feel like.
The New Yorker’s weekly issues have never exceeded 150 megabytes and most are around 115 megabytes. The download does not take 30 minutes (as Shawn suggested) but will take about 2.5 minutes via Wi-Fi and 10 minutes via Verizon 3G. As mentioned above, Newsstand with its auto-download of new content as they are available should resolve this issue as you’ll wake up with new content ready to go. It’s safe to say Shawn’s complaint, “that Downloading is the biggest of the pain points…” will be resolved once Newsstand is accessible and publishers integrate it into their delivery mechanism.
The issue with John’s comparison of iBooks to Magazines is that iBooks rarely inclue pictures, audio or video. At most, they’ll have a photo at the start of each chapter with most of the content residing in plain text (since font type and size is user controlled at the app level). 10 megabytes actually seems pretty beefy for an iBook when you compare it to a 75 page New Yorker with photos, slideshows, audio clips and video.
On a final-note, if a 300 megabyte download of Wired is taking 30 minutes, Shawn really should use membership dollars to upgrade his home Internet.
I don’t have a single complaint about reading on the iPad and don’t think that the print quality should be higher or that outside reading should be improved or that the download times are weak. My only request is that I had more time each day to read more on the iPad.
I do agree with Shawn’s Pro that, “The battery lasts forever. There is little to no stress or issues related to using the iPad for long periods of time.” Amen to that.