Yesterday, I had the chance to play with an iPad, which won't be released here in France before "late April".
My first impression was quite contradictory: seeing a real iPad, it seemed larger than pictures and videos had led me to believe, but holding it made me feel it was actually smaller than I thought. And because it feels "small", and especially slim, it feels heavier than you would expect: it's like trying to pick up a comics book, and actually picking 3.
And since much has been said on how the iPad was too heavy to use comfortably for reading while holding it in one hand, I decided to do some real-life fact checking and compare the iPad to a number of books.
Here are the results:
| product | type | weight (kg) | weight/iPad | HxWxD (mm) |
| Anathem (Neal Stephenson) | large hardcover (973 pages) | 1.311 | 1.9 | 239x161x54 |
| iPad (wifi model) | 0.68 | 1.0 | 243x190x13.4 | |
| Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows (J.K. Rowling) | medium hardcover (607 pages) | 0.631 | 0.9 | 205x135x45 |
| Watchmen vol. 1 (Moore. Gibbons) | European-style hardcover comics | 0.580 | 0.9 | 320x229x10 |
| Réponses Photo | French-style magazine | 0.460 | 0.7 | 290x221x6 |
| Martha Washington saves the world (Miller. Gibbons) | US-style softcover comics | 0.245 | 0.4 | 259x169x6 |
| No country for old men (Cormac McCarthy) | paperback (305 pages) | 0.215 | 0.3 | 198x129x19 |
And just to drive the comparison home, here are some pictures of the books used in the table side by side. Because I don"t have an iPad at hand, I added a picture of the device, at scale (please have mercy on my poor photoshopping talents).
So, if you look at weight alone, the iPad is more or less equivalent to a medium-to-small hardback novel or a European-style hardcover comics. And around 3 paperbacks.
Which means, it is not that heavier than a regular large book. Of course, I wouldn't read a hardcover while standing in the bus and holding it with a single hand.
A good analogy in terms of eBooks readers would be that the iPad is a hardcover, and the Kindle is a paperback. I think it goes well with their respective weights, but also with the design and build quality, as well as with the layout and appearances of books on each device. And with their prices, too. My opinion is that the iPad is not a Kindle killer, in the same way that hardcovers are no paperback killers, they occupy different strata.
