After some extended use, I’ve found that the iPhone has the potential to be a surprisingly good ebook reader. This is true for immersive text reading, such as fiction… but how about comics and graphic novels? The demo photos looked good, but how is it in real life?
To test this out, I loaded the comic A Bit of Madness (which, as an aside, has some of the most gorgeous comic art I’ve seen, and a richly-textured story to match) on my iPhone. Well… attempted to load would be more accurate, because Mobile Safari was unable to display the graphics-heavy 25MB PDF (the largest file I’ve been able to open is 7MB). The file was too large for email, so the backup plan of using Mail’s PDF viewer was out, as well.
Assuming that Apple or a third party will someday develop a true PDF reader that can handle the complete book, I decided to use a smaller 2MB excerpt just to test the display hardware and interface.
The results are beautiful to behold. When viewed in portrait orientation, the entire comic page can be shown and the iPhone’s sharp, rich-color display shows off the art beautifully… with one significant problem. The text is simply too small to read. The infinitely variable zooming allows it to be made legible, but actual reading requires a fair amount of scrolling. While the fingertip motion is very natural, it’s impossible to get a sense of the whole page and the integrated, flowing nature of the book’s layout is lost.
Switching to landscape orientation helps legibility, but again, the visual flow is definitely compromised.
On the other hand, a more sequential, panel-oriented comic like retro superhero Pistolfist (below) is much more amenable to the iPhone display’s limitations.
The iPhone’s limitations with storing and displaying documents continue to be a problem, but these are fixable in future software upgrades. However, the reader experience with page-oriented comics is hurt by the small physical size of the display, which can’t legibly display text in a full-page view. Unless your comic reading is limited to panel-oriented titles, you’ll definitely want to consider a larger-screened alternative or wait for Apple to release an iPhone-like device with a bigger screen.
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