Cathy Healy

How rare is the air I breathe!

Intomobile reports that only 2% of iPad owners are age 65 and up, and only 35% of the owners are female.

But a lot of my retired friends have iPads, and more will buy them as soon as the next version is released, hopefully next winter. Based on my friends, the gender split is about right.

Two of my male relatives, who are in their early 70s, say the Pads are the best gadget they have ever had. (One has all of his flight manuals stored in his pad for when he flies his small plane, and the other is a news junkie.)

I am addicted to the instant news-magazines-books access too, but I’m not nutso in love with my Pad yet because I wanted a 1.6# tablet to replace my 5.5# laptop, and the iPad still can’t replace my computer in three important ways:

It’s still too frustrating to do real writing on the Pad because of the lack of multi-tasking capability. This means that you have to close out of the document you’re writing to go look something up, then close out of that, then re-open your document. You don’t realize how often you look things up until you switch to a Pad. [This will be resolved with iOS4.something, something for iPads, which has been promised for November. My iPhone 3GS has had multitasking for months.]

I need a firewire connection (or high-speed USB) for my video work.

I give Webinars, so I need a video camera. [ I do not need or want a camera to shoot pix.]

My pal Dr. Andrew Laurie, Cambridge, UK, wrote this morning that he’s thinking about getting an electronic book reader. “But which? Kindle?”

Of course not. iPad is the sun and Kindle is the dark side of the moon. Except…for Andrew, maybe Kindle is a sunny day, because Andrew spends his life saving wildlife in remote parts of the Galapagos Islands, Tanzania, Nepal, China, and Mongolia.

Here’s the analysis I sent him:

“The iPad is far and away the best e-reader. For starters, you can get all of Amazon’s Kindle books on the iPad, plus, you can get more book-looking books through Apple’s iTunes, and you also can get converged news + audio + videos from the major outlets, such as BBC, which have set up special iPad apps, and the US’s National Public Radio.

“Also, more and more magazines offer an iPad app–New Yorker two days ago, has a terrific layout and includes a “video conversation.” In fact, some group just set up a magazine using Wikipedia information, which is very cool.

“(Note: Wikipedia magazine is not so heavy on the juicy news you and I laugh about. The best source for that comes from your fellow Brit, Tina Brown, and her Daily Beast. She only has an iPhone app at this point, so the Beast looks pretty lame on the iPad. Nonetheless, you can also get your e-mail on the iPad and I get the Beast’s “cheat sheet” e-mails twice a day with news summaries and links to the full articles, so I seldom go into the site itself.)

“The downside of the iPad for you is that the iPad would be covet-able when you are out in the world. As my nephew DJ says, in Eastern Europe where he spent four years, no one would desire a black-and-white Kindle. I gave him my old Kindle when I my iPad last April, and he is pleased with it.

“Other Kindle pluses: the battery lasts a lot longer. Some critics also talk about how the LCD light wrecks sleep patterns because not enough melatonin gets generated while you are winding down and going to sleep. The Kindle, with its lowlight screen doesn’t seem to cause this problem. I am not sure. I’ve had a couple of restless nights after reading late, but it may have been the subject matter.

“Reading is slower on all screens then when reading a paper book, according to recent studies. The best speed is with an iPad, the next best speed is with the Kindle, and by far the slowest is with a computer screen. The difference between reading speed on iPad versus a Kindle is something like 2%. In other words, a wash.

KINDLE ELBOW

“On the negative side for the Kindle: A year or so ago I went to a conference in Morocco. I downloaded seven books before I left, because I’m a fast reader, and I think I read 6 1/2 over the next nine days, and I ended up with what I call “Kindle elbow” from using my right thumb to click to the next page while gripping the device in my hands. No one talks about Kindle elbow, but it was very painful and got worse, because the pain semi-froze the muscles in my neck and I needed PT and acupuncture for a couple of months before I was pain free.

“This hasn’t been a problem with the iPad, where you turn pages by flicking the touchscreen with a finger. On the other hand–LOL–the iPad is too heavy to hold up like a book comfortably. But, I cross my legs and rest it on my knee and that works just fine.

“I’ve picked up other e-readers in bookstores, but they look and feel clunky. So, among the e-readers, Kindle is my recommendation. But that’s like recommending a wheelbarrow to build a road when you can get earth-moving equipment.

CONCLUSION

“In my The-Future-Is-Now world, iPads are primitive, but they are the future. Kindles are a stop-gap, and bless Jeff Bezos from Amazon for creating them, for pushing publishers to provide Kindle editions and for proving to the world that there is a deep market for e-books.

“I love reading hardback books, but there is nothing better than hearing about a book, downloading it at once for about $10, and starting to read.”

MY BET

I’ll put money that Andrew will choose the Kindle, and get an iPad in several more years.

Beta plugin from Adobe enables inDesign to convert files into Amazon Kindle books

Only 2% of iPad owners are 65 and up

Asks Andrew: Which e-reader should I get? A Kindle?