Jakob Nielsen performed an experiment comparing the reading speeds of an iPad and a Kindle to that of a book. The results were that both electronic devices were approximately 10% slower than a book.
I haven't used a Kindle, and I have yet to read an entire book on the iPad. I have loaded a few of the free Gutenberg Project titles: Robinson Crusoe, Don Quixote, The Three Musketeers in iBooks and I loaded The Hobbit and Neuromancer as PDFs.
I prefer the iBook interface to the PDF interface because the text can re-flow as the font-size is increased or decreased. I tried using Calibre to convert a text to ePub and it was very confusing to use.
Given a choice, I would still buy a solid book over the digital version because I can read it "anywhere", make annotations and notes (hand-written in a Post-It inside the front cover) and because there is currently no technology that matches the clarity of printed typography. I can also lend the printed book friends and family.
Coincidentally, last Saturday's Globe and Mail Focus and Books section, had an essay on the encroachment of the digital world into the traditional paper world and how it affects book collections and their collectors. Though the essay does make the usual point about digital books being unreadable in subsequent decades, it fails to point out that the content of digital books is far easily searchable that that of their solid brethren.
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