iPad Air. In 2008, I was calling it the “iPod Air” — Is Apple’s Tablet The iPod Air? Off by one single letter. And a few years. Ha!
I think Gruber was the first to combine iPad with Air, in this post about the Mini.
iBooks is now built into the iPads:
I think it has to be, now that OS X Mavericks will also have it. That changes the eBook game for Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and others.
The Retina iPad Mini changes lots of things.
At 326 ppi, there’s not one Android tablet at that screen size with that resolution. The closest is the HP Slate 8 Pro, with its 1600 x 1200 eight-inch screen at 250 ppi.
When the new iPads are out, I’ll be off to the Apple Store to run my Google Books PDF test. And the one for Processed World too. I’d be very surprised if, even using just the built-in iBooks app, both the Air and new Mini don’t ace the test, giving me what I’ve been waiting for — for years. I tried running the test on the iPhone 5s, but the WiFi wasn’t cooperating and the small size of the iPhone is very annoying.
My decision-making process has to juggle the PDF performance versus lack of microSD slot. I can’t even guess at how this will play out. I still need to see the LG G Pad 8.3 and HP Slate 8 Pro in person and see if I can run the tests on those too.
The Tomato T2 tablet was supposed to go on sale today. But not one Chinese tech site mentioned it. Even Tomato’s own site didn’t have any notice. Is this a technical delay or just fear of Apple? We’ll see.
Same-day update: My screensnap from Apple’s site is controversial. It’s been claimed iBooks is not built-in and the website will be corrected. We’ll see.
Mike Cane’s xBlog 
Mike, no question, iBooks is part of Mavericks, together with upgrades to font rendering. Not sure why people are confused about this.
The controversy is whether iBooks is built-in with the new iPads.
That seems like a very odd controversy. Apple making iBooks a standard app on Mavericks, releasing an update to iBooks Author on Mavericks, and updating Pages’ with specific mention of its ePub export capability all point to them treating iBooks as a core product, not a “hobby” item.
The iPad and iPhone are the two platforms on which Apple sells the most ebooks and they continue to work hard to sell iPads in the education market, where they have been very successful.
I would be shocked if iBooks is not a default app on the iPad.
Those with iOS 7 already — updated as well as on the new iPhone 5c/s — maintain it will be a separate download. I think the new iPads will have an iOS 7 incremental update that will make iBooks pre-installed. We’ll see soon.