iPhone and eBooks: the Video
August 1, 2007Still photos can give some sense of the iPhone/ebook experience, but nothing can capture it quite so well as video.
As you watch the demo, note that the text on the iPhone is much sharper and clearer than it appears here because quality is lost in the translation to web video.
The most impressive thing for me (once I got past the iPhone’s glorious user interface) is the way it can display the book in its complete, uncompromised form. Cover art, interior illustrations, typography and layout are all preserved, creating a very different experience than ebooks displayed on other devices of this size. More typically on small handhelds, book content is stripped down to text with minimal formatting and no graphics. The aesthetics — and the readability-enhancing cues embedded in them — are lost. On the iPhone, surprisingly little is lost and no conversion of the PDF file is required.
One workaround required to get past the iPhone’s current file-handling limitations was to process the PDF file in Filemark Maker, a free app that allows you to store the PDF file as a Safari-viewable bookmarked file on the iPhone. This utility worked very well for the smaller PDFs that I tried (i.e., file sizes less than one meg). A larger 5 meg file caused Safari to crash.
These shortcomings — an inability to transfer and handle files, and the lack of a proper PDF reader with robust navigation and bookmarking capabilities — indicate that the iPhone isn’t quite ready for ebooks today. Yet the important pieces are all there. We’re only a software update or two away from having a uniquely competent new breed of ebook reader, one which will change the face of the book-reading world.
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[...] (via The Reader) [...]
thanks for video
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All this is fine but none of the current best-sellers (fiction and non-fiction) are available in pdf format - so how does this help?
Thanks, nice informative video
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ebooks.com sells popular books in PDF format but they are often 1 MB or larger files. I would love to try the touch or iPhone with a large file like this to see how well it really works.
I haven’t tried books from ebooks.com specifically, but I did test files of various sizes from WOWIO in the Mobile Safari browser. Files up to 8 meg generally worked fine, though images sometimes didn’t load due to some kind of PDF incompatibility. Files greater than 8 meg would not open.
I also tested large PDFs up to 25 meg in Mobile Mail and in the third-party iPhone app PDFViewer. They opened, but neither of these apps supports landscape mode and the latter is still a bit immature (I tested version 0.3).
With Apple releasing the free SDK and opening the iPhone to program, I expect that eBooks will be amongst the first application added, and probably free (June).
Meanwhile, I have found that “textonline.com” plus out of copyright ebooks at the Gutenberg Project to be a ’satisfactory’ way to put Einstein, and Asimov onto the iPhone.
That works by dishing out the book via a webpage of course, but is well done, and has the advantage of having 30,000 free books, and being able to upload any text you want to read to your account.
*The ebooks at Gutenberg Project can be written out as pdf, or text.
H
An alternative solution:
From your desktop computer, email yourself the .pdf files as attachments, preferably in a single email. Upon opening up the email in the Mail app, scroll down past the body of the email and you will see a clean list of attachments available for viewing. If done correctly, this can be a nice “menu” for your treasured Wowio downloads.
Enjoy.
Thank you for the excellent post. I bought an iPhone recently and still figuring out how to grasp the full potential of this marvel.
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