John Gruber on Apple's iBook application

John Gruber has an essay on the UI aspects of the iPad. It segways into an interesting observation about the iPad's formatting of eBooks:

iBooks uses full-justified layout for books, with no apparent option to switch to ragged right. It doesn’t do hyphenation, so you wind up with very unsightly word-spacing gaps. No e-reader I’m aware of does justice to proper book typography, but I was hoping for better from Apple. It’s decent web-caliber typography, not print-caliber typography.

While I agree with him (I would have hoped for better formatting as well), we've seen a rash of eReaders released and previewed that do a horrendous job of formatting, especially when it comes to hyphenation. Better to do an adequate job across the board then blow it every now and then. I'd rather have a little awkward spacing than a "what the hell" hyphenation moment when reading.

Personally, I prefer justified reading, but there is really no reason not to support non-justified layouts.

As for Amazon, they might wind up delighted with this thing. Apple’s in the business of selling devices first, content second. I think Amazon is in the content business first, the device business second. A world where Kindle hardware sales pale in comparison to the iPad but where there’s a very popular Kindle app for iPad that competes against iBooks is not a bad situation for Amazon. Apple is only selling e-books for use on their own devices; Amazon is willing to sell e-books anywhere they can.

Here I disagree. While I think Amazon should be in the content business first, they clearly seem more driven to sell Kindles in practice. For one thing, they profit on Kindles and lose money on many of their eBooks. Secondly, the only third party apps they provide are for PCs (and Macs eventually) plus mobile phones. They do not support third party readers.

Sony would be an example of a company that maybe is more content oriented. While they sell a line of readers, they recently overhauled their eBookstore to convert to a format that can be read on much of the competition (Kindle not withstanding).

It seems strange, to be sure, to label Sony, the consumer electronics company as book sales driven and Amazon, the company that started out selling books to be device driven - but that's the way I see it!

And what of Apple? Well, they just seem to be striving to dominate it all. Rather than get their content all over the place, or focus merely on hardware - they seem to try to design an experience so overwhelmingly positive that everybody ends up seeking out their products exclusively and loading them up with content. They sell more music and TV shows than anyone else by far, and seem to do pretty well in the burgeoning digital movie sales business. If this success translates to books - then yes, the competition should be very worried.