Reading on the iPad

I like reading, and reading on the iPad is just fine.  Not great, room for improvement, but mostly good enough.

I have four main book readers: Kindle, iBooks, Readmill and Google Books.  The one I want to use most is Readmill. The one I actually use most is Kindle.  iBooks is fine until you have footnotes to follow, and then it’s unusable; but is my default choice for PDFs.  Google Books is so slow that I’ve not taken the trouble to investigate what else is wrong with it.

Kindle does most things right.  The only key feature it’s missing is an indicator of how far you are from the end of a chapter.  This is probably flagging me as terribly shallow, but I like to know if I’m approaching the end of a chunk of a book or not, so I can decide if I want to spend a few more minutes to get to the end or not.

The sharing from a Kindle is OK, but it doesn’t come close to the direction of Readmill.  I want Readmill to succeed, but it’s just not very good at displaying text: the sizing is all off, making it not fun when you get down to the nitty gritty business of eyes moving over words.  In other respects, it does well.  Rather than bang on about it, here’s my summary:

My opinion of Readmill (as of Oct 2011)