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Having tried every book reader app in the iTunes store except the Amazon app I was disappointed to find my new iPad makes a poor eBook reader. It certainly does many other things admirably well and I am happy to keep it. Even its problems as a book reader could be fixed and I hope they will be. This is my subjective impressions of the iPad as an eBook reader. I hope someone will correct me where I am in error.

First I tried eReader because it’s the oldest. Like many MR members I have lots of eReader books in my library already and I’d love to read them on the iPad’s larger screen. Alas, since Barnes and Nobel took over Fictionwise they have failed to provide eReader support for Apple. The old eReader app that Fictionwise originally designed for the iPhone appears as an iPhone screen sized box in the middle of the iPad screen. If you enlarge it to 2x, it renders text either as rather poor large print with medium jaggy letters or headache making jaggies when you render your book in the smallest font.

That was disappointing. Next I turned to Kobo which had become my favorite eBook store. Most of the books I previously bought from Kobo were still in my Kobo library and I was able to retrieve them into the Kobo reader. All was well until I discovered that you have to be connected online to read books from Kobo. When you go offline all your books are deleted from the iPad along with your bookmarks. Not so good. But worse was still to come. I bought two new books from Kobo: 1491, a history of the Americas before Columbus arrived, and a copy of the NIV Bible. The table of contents on both of these books failed to work properly. 1491 could jump to chapters but while the TOC listed the maps they could not be viewed. Curious, I loaded it into my 5-inch Pocket Pro which uses adept DRM from Adobe and sure enough, the TOC worked and the maps were there—unreadable for sure on the little screen, but at least they were there. The TOC for the Bible also worked on the Pocket Pro. On the Apple however, the Kobo app was unable to render more than the Bible's title page and copyright notice.

On to iBooks. This one has promise. It looks great, especially in its ability to present a two page view in landscape mode. Sadly, despite its being hyped for supporting ePub, any book you buy at the iTunes store for the iPad can only be read on an Apple iPad and frankly, I find the iPad inconvenient to haul around. It makes sense to me to put current reading on a smaller book reader and keep the large one at home or in the office for books that need the big, color screen.

Perhaps Apple has no more control over what Barnes and Noble does with the Fictionwise app than you or I have. eReader would make a pretty good contender on the iPad if it could render eBooks on the larger iPad screen. I have no idea how hard it is to change an existing app to work on the bigger screen so I have to admit I don’t know what I’m asking of B&N’s Fictionwise property.

Likewise I have no idea what problems are engendered by letting a genuinely ePub rendering engine onto the iPad device, whether from Kobo or someone else, but I think Apple has to do something like that in order to reach an audience of experienced eBook readers. We collect books after all, and many of us follow the dictum that the only reason to read a book is to find the ones you want to read again.

At another level, iPad is great at rendering comic books—this is the first time I’ve bought a comic in 40 years and I plan to get more. It’s also great for newspapers and between Okay and excellent at WEB browsing. iPad does many other things like games and office apps that other eBook readers can’t do. I’m crossing my fingers and hoping Apple can get these shortcomings fixed. I think the iPad is excellent at many things but only promising as an eBook reader.