The latest details on the soon-to-come Apple tablet seem to recommend it as a competitive e-book reader

Mar 15, 2010 10:21 GMT  ·  By

Is the iPad heading towards the e-book-reader’s market category? It may be too soon to tell. But last-minute details about the product will ensure a more appropriate opinion on this matter. Macworld drew an analysis on these specific details and came up with the following aspects to discuss upon.

One of the first features to address is the brightness of the interface and its balancing. The device must offer a maximum long-time reading pleasure and this means that it won’t bring about any eye ache or fatigue. Reading on the iPhone has been proven to be relatively hard due to the backlit screen and, in order to balance the adjust option, one has to exit the e-reading app and then make all the necessary adjustments.

This process takes time and it may be annoying. The new iPad tablet is thought to have this problem fixed. The iBook may allow the user to apply a build-in option for the screen’s brightness feature like Kindle and Stanza anticipated with their white-on-black reading for darker rooms.

The next matter to discuss is the user control on the device’s accelerometer, the feature that decides which way is up and rotates the screen back and forth for a suitable lecture. As the iPhone gained experience shows, the user’s control of this certain feature must be defined.

Moreover, many apps, including the existing e-readers, offer custom “locking” mechanisms to prevent the screen from rotating, but they’re implemented differently and inconsistently, Macworld relates. The new marketing materials released by Apple report a hardware button on the iPad that will indeed allow you to lock the screen’s orientation. So, this problem is also checked. One step ahead against the competition.

Another important feature is the possibility to see the definition or the translation of a work while reading. “The latest word for Apple declares that you’ll be able to ‘touch and hold any word to look it up in the built-in dictionary or Wikipedia.’ That bests the Kindle; touching instead of slowly cursoring to the word is obviously much more intuitive and much less tedious,” MacWorld reports.

And, as related in a Softpedia news piece last week, the new iBookstore has been organized in more than 150 subcategories and it features the “list-view” button in the iBook’s interface for an easier usage.

Last but not least is the VoiceOver feature that “can read you the contents of any page” with no present caveat from the books’ rights holders against this feature.