There is no “better”, there are only different advantages. The advantages are obvious—13” can show you more, 11” is easier to hold 🤷♂️. Which size is better for you is based solely on your specific situation and preferences, but personally I shift positions a lot while reading for extended periods which means I need to hold my reading device, so lighter the better. But I find it uncomfortable to hold anything bigger/heavier than the iPad Mini for long periods, and even for that I require a Pop Socket.
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iPad Pro 11” vs 13” iPad Pro for reading books
- Thread starter Zest28
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Text is resizable though. Yeah iPads aren’t good in sunlight, and most are uncomfortable to hold for a long time, except the Mini with a Pop Socket.
Perhaps, but I don’t think a screen is necessarily always worse for the eyes than print (or e-ink). There are a number of factors and I believe a very good quality display and proper settings should be able to deliver an indistinguishable experience to the eye. After all, eyes just detect photons, so the photons just need to be delivered in the same quantity and frequency, or just as close to the same as the eye can detect. Whether iPads have that ability for everyone I’m not sure, but I think it's at least close, since many people seem to do fine. I think a lot or maybe most of the eye strain people experience is due to screen brightness/color and/or environment lighting set improperly. People tend to set their screen brightness relatively high even in low environment light which is the worst. It’s the same how people watch movies on TV in the dark and experience eye strain. Their TVs are usually set much brighter than the projectors in dark movie theaters.
I'm attempting to read a paper book right now and it's driving me nuts. Too big and heavy, I can't read at night comfortably because it doesn't light up and my clip on light is a PITA. I fell asleep and lost my place. Doesn't sit like my Kobo does on it's built in stand so I have hold the damn thing. When I'm done I have to either find space to store it forever or find someone to take it off me. And it was more expensive than the ebook. Horrible experience!
Lol I hear you. I only buy paper books if I’m forced or for the ones I want to display and keep forever and pass down (pretty rare), and even then I’ll sometimes buy the digital format as well to actually read haha.
I set up a library at home with those invisible bookshelves. I carefully curated a collection of books that perfectly illustrated my taste in books, so a visitor could, at a glance, learn everything there is to know about what I like to read.
Ten years later I have had precisely zero visitors to see said library. So I dismantled it and sold almost all the books to my local second hand bookstore. Humph!
While I agree with you on an intellectual level, the biggest practical consideration for me is space. I own a lot of DTBs (dead tree books) and have no space for more. I've been buying ebooks for almost 2 decades now; I have no idea where I would store the hundreds of books I now have stored either on my iPad or in the Cloud.
Same here. Last time we moved, I had 45 large boxes of books and had to either get rid of them or go ebook. I now have 900 Kindle books.
I'm not saying "don't buy e-books" -- I'm saying they should be made with the proper rights of ownership as I described. In the meantime, yeah, we have what we have. I've bought quite a few myself, and plenty of video games and movies in downloadable formats.
They're just called "books".
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Not when you buy 99% of your books as ebooks, then those are books and paper books are unusual. And if you call them 'paper books' people think you mean paperbacks.
No argument about rights of ownership but for me the space considerations, as well as the ability to search the digital version more readily than the DTB version, make me go digital as a matter of preference for most books whenever possible.
WRT using the term DTB, you evidently are not a super-early adopter of the Kindle. I bought the very first Kindle ever released (the truly butt fugly one) and, among early Kindle adopters, DTB was the term du jour to describe hardcopy books. And I personally prefer it to this day. Diff'rent strokes, diff'rent folks.
I had both, and 13 is surprisingly adequate. PDFs are great on it, but Kindle.app books are also quite readable.
But dedicated ebook reader is an absolute best for pure text.
But dedicated ebook reader is an absolute best for pure text.
Depends on the physical sizes of the books that you usually read.
For reading magazines or electronic copies of textbooks, they're usually on the larger side. Reading them on a 13 inch will be perfect since it's closer to the sizes of their physical copies. Reading a textbook on a 11 inch feels a bit cramped in my opinion.
For something like fiction and nonfiction novels, they're physically smaller. The 11 inch feels more natural for those kind of books since its closer the size of their physical copy. Easier to hold too.
For reading magazines or electronic copies of textbooks, they're usually on the larger side. Reading them on a 13 inch will be perfect since it's closer to the sizes of their physical copies. Reading a textbook on a 11 inch feels a bit cramped in my opinion.
For something like fiction and nonfiction novels, they're physically smaller. The 11 inch feels more natural for those kind of books since its closer the size of their physical copy. Easier to hold too.
Indeed. I used to liken reading on the iPad mini 6 to reading a trade paperback. When it comes to reading eBooks the 11 inch is a bit larger but not all that much. So it’s perfect for reading the kind of book you’d feel comfortable reading as a trade paperback.
Science and medicine textbooks are larger and would do better on the 13 inch—particularly if they include lots of photographs, diagrams, graphs, and other figures (drawings). Law books are also larger but entirely text, so I’m not sure the larger size is necessarily an advantage for them.
Don't you ever tire of the really slow interface though? That's the one reason I can't get into Kindles.
No, not really. What annoys me though is occasional bugs (like you can’t sweep from the up of the screen to go back to your Library). Also there are some weird sync issues.
And pagination sucks on Kindles. Who wants “locations“ that number in the tens of thousands instead of page numbers that range in the hundreds. Pagination is the primary reason I only buy the Kindle version of a book when it is either much lower in price on the Kindle or unavailable completely for Apple Books.
FWIW, Apple Books' decision to move the control panel (including the bookmark function) to the lower right corner is an abomination.
I have never used a front lit e-reader with front light off (I almost never read brightly lit environments, e.g. outdoors, so having some front light is more pleasant than none). So color for slightly more energy consumption is a tradeoff I'm happy to make.
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It depends on the content. For fixed layout content (comics or other color/design laden reading) bigger is better, and that's mostly what I read on my 12.9" iPad Pro. It's fantastic. This content tends to have 'spreads' which in a physical book would be facing pages. IMO 11" is not big enough for this, so I'll probably never get an iPad of that size.
For re-flowable text content, even an 11" screen presents an area larger than any physical book page one is likely to encounter in a novel, and I find it awkward. iPad mini is best size for this, with iPhone a close second. I like using scrolling mode on both. If I needed larger text then maybe 11" would be nice (but not as versatile as 12.9").
When I do find myself wanting to read long form text on my iPad Pro, I like to use stage manager to shrink the app window to about iPad mini size, as I don't like 2 column mode for this type of reading. It is usually attached to magic keyboard, hence landscape orientation, and I can use the trackpad or cursor keys to turn pages without touching the display. But this usually involves having it on some desk or table, which is not where I prefer to read.
For more technical books, using full screen with 2 columns is great as illustrations and diagrams can be viewed along with discussion without flipping pages as you would need to on a small screen. (Unfortunately on Kindle platform many of these are in print replica format, which does not allow 2 pages to display, no matter how large the display is. Fortunately it is possible to convert them to PDF and use some other app to read them on iPad or Mac.)
And sometimes Split Screen is useful so you can have some reference material or note app or Maps on one side while you are reading on the other. Again 12.9" wins for that.
For re-flowable text content, even an 11" screen presents an area larger than any physical book page one is likely to encounter in a novel, and I find it awkward. iPad mini is best size for this, with iPhone a close second. I like using scrolling mode on both. If I needed larger text then maybe 11" would be nice (but not as versatile as 12.9").
When I do find myself wanting to read long form text on my iPad Pro, I like to use stage manager to shrink the app window to about iPad mini size, as I don't like 2 column mode for this type of reading. It is usually attached to magic keyboard, hence landscape orientation, and I can use the trackpad or cursor keys to turn pages without touching the display. But this usually involves having it on some desk or table, which is not where I prefer to read.
For more technical books, using full screen with 2 columns is great as illustrations and diagrams can be viewed along with discussion without flipping pages as you would need to on a small screen. (Unfortunately on Kindle platform many of these are in print replica format, which does not allow 2 pages to display, no matter how large the display is. Fortunately it is possible to convert them to PDF and use some other app to read them on iPad or Mac.)
And sometimes Split Screen is useful so you can have some reference material or note app or Maps on one side while you are reading on the other. Again 12.9" wins for that.
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Yes. That's exactly why I decided to keep my 13 inch M4 iPad after buying a companion 11 inch M4 model. The 11 inch works really well for most of my reading but the 13 inch is better when I need to have a book open alongside a notes app or webpage displaying reference materials.
Don't you miss having those books around you in your room though? There's something about being able to flip through a book that no electronic device can replicate.