Apple - What are the advantages and disadvantages of iBooks and Kindle books for my iPad?

The iBooks app is better. But Amazon Kindle Store is cheaper and has a superior selection.

The books

Publishers are responsible for creating and making available the books in each store. Sometimes a book is exclusive to one store. In that case, you have no option of where you purchase it.

When a book is available in both stores, you must compare the price and quality on a book-by-book basis. This is easy to do because both stores offer free sample chapters. Books tend to be better formatted in the iBooks Store than in Kindle's Store. This can be critical for some genres, such as technical/programming books with graphics, code samples, and tables.

The ecosystem

iBookstore purchases can only be read on iPhone/iPod touch/iPad/Mac. Kindle purchases can also be read on Amazon's dedicated Kindle devices, Microsoft Windows, iOS, BlackBerry, Mac OS X, Android, webOS, Windows Phone, as well as in a web browser.

The apps

iBooks app:

• better interface (you even can turn off the skeuomorphic design features, if you prefer)
• it has less features, but the features it does have are better: dictionary, highlighting, type/fonts, footnotes, navigation, look and feel
• better PDF support
• iBookstore built-into-the-app for convenient browsing and purchasing

Kindle app:

• Sharing feature where you can publicly publish snippets from your book to kindle.amazon.com for linking-to in Twitter/Facebook. Example.
• Amazon creates an email address for you to send documents to your Kindle via email. E.g. [email protected]
• Con: You have to jump out to the web browser to browse and purchase content.

On an iPad, I prefer reading in iBooks because Apple executes the fundamentals better. Amazon's Kindle app has some nice differentiating features, though. All that said, at the end of the day, nothing's better than reading a basic novel on a standalone e-ink Kindle device.

I use both. I use whichever one has the book I want for cheaper, and since I really only use the iPad to read with, I am not fussed by which one is cross platform. Since they are both free, and the books still have to be bought, and feature wise they are both fairly much the same in usability.

One large advantage of Kindle store books is that you can read them on your mac (or PC) whereas there is no good reading solution for iBooks on a mac (or PC). You can take both reading software through their paces using similar free books and sample chapters from the respective stores.

In general, the effort taken to digitize the books has far more influence on how they look than does the conduit / store used to buy them. Both companies have very good customer support and both have refunded me when a purchase was problematic or unintentional. I feel like both Amazon and Apple are looking to take care of me as a customer as opposed to a "all sales final" approach.

iBooks for iPad is free. Amazon Kindle Reader for iPad is free. Both systems have free books that you can download and read. So install both, get some free books for both, and try them out. Then decide if you want to buy some books from one or both services.