Steve Jobs introduces the iPad

Apple has put out a press release that interestingly tamps down some of the weekend mania over purported numbers for the first weekend of iPad sales.According to the release, the company sold 300,000 iPads on Saturday — not 700,000, as some estimated — and this included deliveries to places such as Best Buy.

But more pertinently to MobyLives readers, the release details that Apple immediatley sold ” over 250,000 ebooks from its iBookstore during the first day,” not to mention “over one million apps from Apple’s App Store,” which, who knows, could have included a Kindle app or two.

Michael Cader analyzes the machine itself in a subscribers only post on Publishers Marketplace:

A lot of first opinions rest on the experience with the backlit (and high-gloss glass) screen. The screen suffers the most in bright sunlight, naturally (Just like laptops, which people and read and work on all the time), which is exactly where eInk screens excel. So the promo for Kindle on Amazon‘s home page now highlights that it’s “easy to read, even in bright sunlight.” But the screen is great in all other lighting conditions, including low and no (e.g. in bed) light. Personally, I read half of GAME CHANGE over the weekend on the iPad and enjoyed the reading experience–after I got over the neck ache in the first hours of figuring out where and how to hold the device when I use it.

As for other reading matter, newspapers and magazines are vastly superior on the iPad to the crippled Kindle versions, and for some people will be vastly better than paper versions. (I prefer the WSJ iPad app to both the paper version and the web version, for example.)

And of course, the iPad is lot more than “just” a reader. Which for the bulk of the world’s population is going to be part of its appeal. People who want a purpose-built device for reading books and nothing else are still likely to favor eInk machines. But particularly now that the specious price incentive to justify a book-only device has been degraded, that may remain a small, if core, group of people.