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Comment by danilocampos | Hacker News Reader

I crack the hell out of my Kindle purchases. Not for piracy, but so I can read them on Apple's superior iBooks app. It's pretty simple to do. Funny part is, I didn't start buying Amazon eBooks until I was certain I could defeat their DRM.

The Kindle iPad app is anus.

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Why is it superior to the Kindle app?

When I tried it awhile ago, the Kindle app had a page turning experience that can only be described as maddening. Tap in the wrong spot, boom, page has turned. The iBooks app, for all its over-done skeuomorphism, makes interacting with the book pretty easy. Simple things like page edges make clear what will happen when you tap in a particular place. iBooks just feels really nice.

More than that, the Kindle app is just ugly. It has this janky animation when you jump to another section of the book that's painful to watch. It's a shame – the Kindle v3 hardware is a pretty badass product. The Kindle iPad app feels barebones, insipid and unpolished. Does a disservice to the brand.

That's interesting. The initial feedback I read on iBooks vs Kindle back when both apps were first available was very heavily skewed the other way: people seemed to prefer the Kindle app.

Perhaps it was just a case of familiarity and the majority of the reports at that time being by existing Kindle users. Apple has also pushed out a few good updates since (including proper hyphenation!) so that has probably helped too.

You can copy and paste snippets from it, for one. The page turning is less psychotic, for another. Speaking as an iPhone owner who uses both apps.

I also crack my Kindle books, again not for piracy, but as an insurance policy against the sort of behaviour that people are worried that Amazon could indulge in.

I'm happy to play fair so long as they do...

That said, if I think a book is something I'm likely to want to keep long term, I still tend to buy the paper version. My Kindle is for convenience.

I have to agree with Danil. I like the page turning behavior in iBooks better, but not enough to crack my books.

I prefer the experience within Stanza to either iBooks or Kindle -- ability to resize, page turning, etc.

That said, there is a big difference between the "apps" and they Kindle device itself.

iBooks is very slow on my iPhone 3G, but the Kindle app, though not as pretty, runs fine.

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