Viral Video: Abusing the Apple iPad

That Kindle campaign is outrageously stupid. Talk about a desperate plea.

If you are going to the beach or by the pool and you want to read, you simply buy a paperback book! No matter what electronic reader you have!

As much as Kindle is better than iPad in the one limited situation where you are sunbathing, a paperback book is 1000 times better than Kindle when sunbathing. You can get a paperback book oily or wet and it still works. You can leave a paperback book on a lounge chair while you swim and in the unlikely event that somebody steals it, you’re out $10, not $150. You can get a paperback book as hot as you like and it won’t melt or malfunction. You can throw it in a bag with a towel and forget about it until you’re ready to use it. When you’re done with it, you can pass it on to another sunbather.

Basically, Amazon is promoting Kindle in the one use case where paper books are still vastly superior: extreme weather conditions which are hazardous to all electronic devices. The fact that Kindle’s screen works in direct sunlight doesn’t make Kindle waterproof or sand proof or heat proof. It sucks 99.9% as much at the beach as an iPad.

Further, if you want to go screen to screen, you can flip this around and show a Kindle user straining to read in the dark or in poor light on a train or in a car or many other conditions where you can’t control the ambient lighting, next to an iPad user who does not have to strain their eyes at all because it has a built-in book light with automatic adjustable brightness.

Or you can show a Kindle user straining to decode a graph in a book because the 10 colors have been reduced to a gray mash. Or you can show how iPad works for people who are 100% blind, due to its unparalleled accessibility features.

If your elevator pitch is the screen works in direct sunlight. Man, you have already lost! Give it up. What is next? Promoting Kindle for color blind users?