Apple's Bookstore and Amazon's Kindle

When it comes to reading text, my opinion, and I've used both apps, is that iBooks is better than Kindle but Kindle is still good enough. Functionality is basically the same, so it comes down to personal preference, and I prefer iBooks. For their respective bookstores, however, there's not much in it; both, from my perspective, are seriously flawed.

Apple's store, for example, has a very small choice of books (about 31,000 at time of writing) and many of those are duplicates (some books have both free and charged versions) or foreign language texts. Their book categorisation and search tools are not very sophisticated, it's quite difficult to browse their offering and even for authors for whom they stock a reasonable number of texts they generally don't have a complete set.

Surprisingly, for the world's largest bookstore, Amazon also suffer from a shortage of texts. Although they have a very much wider range of books on offer, they only sell through Amazon.com in US dollars and many texts aren't available to customers in the UK. As long as you stay in the dedicated Kindle store you can be reasonably confident that the listed texts are available for purchase in your territory, but the author's Kindle pages (which are a great feature) don't flag unavailable texts and you have to drill down to the book's page to find out if you're allowed to buy it.

So what now? Both stores are broken to some extent. Amazon need a UK version with a more complete set of titles. Apple, currently adding texts at a rate of around 300-500 a day, need to be an order of magnitude faster if they're to offer a reasonable selection before, say, Christmas. As of now, at least in the UK, the race is wide open and neither company could be said to have delivered a killer product.