iPhone and eBooks: an Early Flirtation

I played with the iPhone for an extended period yesterday, and it delivered the revolutionary, eye-popping experience that everyone has described. It’s clear that this is the future — not just for mobile phones, but for handheld devices of all types, tablet PCs and perhaps other categories of devices we haven’t yet envisioned.

I took a look at the same ebooks that I posted previously to see how they behaved in real life. The one thing the photographs can’t convey is the extraordinary sharpness, brilliant color and overall quality of the display. Even when the PDFs were reduced to fit the full page on the screen, the text was actually still readable, though at such a tiny size that it was necessary to magnify the page to be comfortable. The pages rendered more beautifully than they do on my MacBook Pro with its high-quality screen.

As I noted in the earlier post, the iPhone has some serious (but very correctable) shortcomings in its PDF and file handling. But even given those limitations, the iPhone is still surprisingly usable for certain kinds of content.

The comic book Lullaby was very readable through the phone’s mail app, given its highly graphical nature and short length. Moving with light finger motions from panel to panel felt comfortable and natural.

The Avant-Guide Las Vegas also worked reasonably well as a reference guide where I might look up short bits of content, though navigating to specific material within the book would be a problem given the limited navigation tools.

The promise here is very real. My previous speculation (based solely on word-of-mouth and a few still photos) is confirmed — a few software updates could make the iPhone (and its offspring, especially the ones that evolve a larger display) the killer devices in the ebook world.

I’ll continue to experiment with the iPhone and I’ll post more thoughts and perhaps a video or two here. Stayed tuned!

Related Posts

iPhones and eBooks: The Video
iPhone Reader: The Long Sessions

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Starship Troopers and the Nine-Year-Old: Heinlein at 100

Robert Heinlein influenced me deeply. In ways I won’t ever fully know. I read Starship Troopers when I was nine, and it was the title that set fully ablaze an already-smouldering early love for the written word. Whatever else might be said about its political or cultural overtones, it remains a smashing, action-packed story that grabbed a hold of my young imagination and never really let go.

In later years, I discovered Stranger in a Strange Land — 10-15 years too late to catch its counter-culture heyday, but multiple readings still gave the desired mind-stretching effect.

With the one hundredth anniversary of Heinlein’s birth being celebrated this month, it seemed a good time to remember.

Read Taylor Dinerman’s look back at Heinlein’s legacy for the Wall Street Journal here. Jim Downey also recounts the events at the Heinlein Centennial Gala here.

(via Entertaining Research)

Wandering the Mirror-World: Pattern Recognition

Lest you think I read nothing but books in digital format, I just picked up William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition in good-old-fashioned paperback. It’s been waiting on my shelves for some years, and my recent completion of One Hundred Years of Solitude left an opening for those moments when I want or need to read sans gadgetry.

Gibson creates immersion. Each time I unseal the book’s pages, I feel a distinct shift as I enter its otherworld — heroine Cayce Pollard’s obsessive, design-centric existence. Intensifying the effect, hers is a kind of mirror-world of mine. Like Cayce, I’ve sat in meetings in over-designed design offices, with their softly glowing walls and self-consciously minimalist splashes of color on mono — where accent-inflected Euromales and hard-visaged New York femmes defined fashion solely in shades of black. I felt like I was wandering vaguely wide-eyed in an alternate universe then, and revisiting through Cayce’s eyes is like seeing it mirror-on-mirror, an endlessly-engrossing recursion.

More on this as the story develops.

Banned Books in America: A Timeline

Akumagoro posted a nice narrative timeline of banned books in the US.

These are tangible and literal examples of Frank Herbert’s incantation, “Fear is the mind-killer…”

On Order: the Lenovo X61T Tablet

Yesterday, I talked a little about the various devices that might be used for reading ebooks. We decided to go ahead and order this guy — the one I put at the high end of the spectrum — a Windows-based tablet PC.

Looking at the various tablets that are out there, this one on paper sounds like a good candidate. At just over four pounds and a little more than an inch thick, it’s at least in the ballpark for a comfortable read while lounging on the couch. With a transflective screen that Lenovo claims is very readable outdoors, it could be a good read out on the park bench, too. A claimed battery life of seven hours means I could sit on that park bench in real life for at least 3 or 4. The 12.1 inch display should be big and sharp enough to comfortably display a full-size PDF without having to squint. The screen responds to both stylus and a finger touch, so page flipping and note taking can be done with the most appropriate tool.

With a walk-out price of over $1800, it’s obvious that no one would ever buy this machine solely for reading an ebook. On the other hand, if you’re like me, you might need to have a laptop handy most of the time anyway so this might be a viable option (or, in my case, a good-enough substitute until Apple makes its own Mac/iPhone hybrid tablet!).

When the machine gets here, we’ll know for certain and I’ll be sure to post the results here.

Have you had any luck using a tablet for ebook reading? How about for day-to-day computing?

Update: It’s in! Take a hands-on first look.

eBook Readers: Looking for Just Right

In my last post, I talked about a workaround for adapting a laptop for better ebook reading. But surely there are better options?

The current crop of devices that are being used as readers seems to be split into three groups.

At the top end are tablet PCs like the Lenovo X60t. A full-up Windows-based machine, it’s a general purpose ultraportable laptop that can be converted into a stylus- or touch-driven tablet. While the good-sized color screens and form factor are nice, it’s not inexpensive at $1200+, batteries drain fairly quickly and it’s a bit chunky for a cozy read in bed. Worse, the full Windows functionality implies increased maintenance overhead. Clearly, if you need a tablet PC for other reasons, this type of machine makes sense but I certainly wouldn’t want to have to update virus definitions just to read a book.

At the bottom (in terms of ebook reader functionality) are small handhelds and phones adapted for the purpose, including the iPhone. While these are undeniably useful for on-the-go applications where you don’t want to lug around a bigger device, I personally don’t relish the idea of reading longer texts (especially for pleasure) in this way.

The category that holds the promise of being just right is the mid-size dedicated or multi-function device, like the Sony Reader or the iRex iLiad. Both are based on e-ink technology, which means very sharp and readable grayscale displays and much long battery life compared to LCD-based tablet PCs. Both weigh less than a pound, and critically, they can show a book-sized page without scrolling.

The iLiad is the more capable — and expensive — of the two. In addition to reader capabilities, it can surf the Web via wi-fi and it allows on-screen writing and notation using a Wacom pressure-sensitive pen. At $700, it’s a stretch unless its additional functionality can justify the cost. Yet, functionally, it’s actually quite close to my concept of an ideal reader. For example, this video from an iLiad user shows that it is very capable of supporting books and graphic novels from WOWIO.

The Sony Reader is a much more specialized device, supporting reading only, with no wi-fi, Internet or writing capabilities. But at $300, the price is certainly much better.

In both cases, the price vs. functionality equation is not necessarily compelling for most. But the buying rush prompted by a recent deal on the Sony Reader demonstrates the pent-up demand for a low-cost but capable device of this type. Similarly, the huge interest in an expensive but highly functional device like the iPhone indicates that given a powerful feature set and outstanding usability (mixed with a good dash of marketing élan), a high price tag would not necessarily be a deterrent for a device of this type.

I’ll be continuing to look at devices like these in more detail in the coming weeks, examining just how usable they are and — more importantly — whether they can be used to really enjoy a good read.

Related Posts

Lenovo X61T Hands-On: A Bookworm’s First Ride
iPhone and eBooks: The Video
Sony Reader: Mammal or Dinosaur?

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eBooks: The Reader’s Experience, Part 1.5

As I continue my experiment in actually reading ebooks, I’ve been experimenting with ways to make the experience work better for me. The photo illustrates one of my current methods of viewing an ebook on a laptop, which I use when the content isn’t better viewed as a two-page spread and I’m settling down for an extended read. It optimizes the display by filling up most of the screen with a single page, providing text that is actually a bit larger than a typical print book. At the same time, the distractions of the OS are completely hidden behind Acrobat Reader’s full-screen mode.

Obviously, the ergonomics are a compromise. Given the standard laptop configuration, the weight distribution is all wrong since the bulk of the machine is concentrated in the keyboard/cpu portion. My wife’s smaller and lighter MacBook with its stubbier aspect ratio is much better suited. Even so, I very much wish I could lop off that whole half — which would pretty much leave a thin and light tablet computer. As long as we’re at it, let’s throw in a higher-res display, an iPhone style interface and some Flash storage and we would already have my ideal ebook reader.

It’s so close. Apple? Will you help?

Charles Dickens and the (Very) Long Tail

I spent part of yesterday reading one of the more obscure (yet fascinating) examples of written works on the long tail, Charles Dickens’ essay, Delights of Travel.

In this piece, Dickens recounts his experiences of roughing it through the US for the first time, traveling by steamboat and stagecoach through what he clearly considered to be the backwater of America’s South of 1842.

As it tells (directly or not) of hardships on the road, attitudes about race and even personal hygiene habits, reading the essay opens a portal into a gritty reality lost in most discussions of history (especially the bland and textureless variety offered in most textbooks). The more-familiar fiction from the period — such as Dickens’s own work — can’t match the you-are-there immediacy:

I wake, of course, when we get under weigh, for there is a good deal of noise. The day is then just breaking. Everybody wakes at the same time. Some are self-possessed directly, and some are much perplexed to make out where they are until they have rubbed their eyes, and leaning on one elbow, looked about them. Some yawn, some groan, nearly all spit, and a few get up. I am among the risers: for it is easy to feel, without going into the fresh air, that the atmosphere of the cabin, is vile in the last degree. I huddle on my clothes, go down into the fore-cabin, get shaved by the barber, and wash myself. The washing and dressing apparatus for the passengers generally, consists of two jack towels, three small wooden basins, a keg of water and a ladle to serve it out with, six square inches of looking glass, two ditto ditto of yellow soap, a comb and brush for the head, and nothing for the teeth. Everybody uses the comb and brush, except myself. Everybody stares to see me using my own; and two or three gentlemen are strongly disposed to banter me on my prejudices, but don’t.…

This is the kind of stuff that’s out on the far and skinny end of the long tail. This is time travel.

The Library of Alexandria: Web 2.0 Edition

What if there was a library which held every book? Not every book on sale, or every important book, or even every book in English, but simply every book—a key part of our planet’s cultural legacy.

Grand in its scale and ambition, the Open Library Project is a spiritual successor to Alexandria’s lost treasure house of knowledge. It differs from similar projects in its inclusivity, with hooks to find a desired book regardless of medium or location, whether it’s a public domain online text, a print book for sale from a choice of booksellers, an item to borrow from a library or a title available as a free download.

The project is in an early stage, but the demo site is operational. Poke around, and tell me what you think!

(via Daring Fireball)

Reading: Death, Rebirth or Atomization?

Biblioaddict recently noted the rash of articles lamenting the imminent demise of reading, now that Harry Potter is nearing his end. The stories include one from The Washington Post citing studies by the National Endowment for the Arts and others that point to dramatically declining readership of fiction — for example, their numbers show that most high school kids aren’t reading for pleasure at all.

In contrast, the BBC reports on a study from the UK that finds people are actually reading more than they were in the 1970s. The conclusion: people’s busier-than-ever lives are filled with more little schedule gaps, which they are filling with books. In the US, the study finds people are now spending an average of seven minutes per day reading a book versus five minutes in 1975. Not exactly cause for breaking out the champagne, but it’s a worthwhile handful of straw to grasp.

Over the last decade or two, I find myself reading more, but less of that time is spent reading books. More than ever, the call of the Internet is drawing my eyeballs away. When I do read, the sessions are shorter and those moments of total immersion are becoming fragmented into little disconnected shards.

The less I visit those otherworld bubbles of fiction, the more I miss them.

Are you reading less these days, too…?

Update: You can read the complete NEA report in pdf format here.

eBooks on iPhones: Seeing Is Believing

Paula Wellings (my colleague at WOWIO) has posted a series of photos of the iPhone displaying PDF ebooks, with content ranging from straight text to travel guides and graphic novels.

Nice.

She notes the shortcomings of the iPhone as a reader at this stage, including the lack of proper PDF software with an automated zoom function (like iPhone Safari) and kludgy file management (no direct way to get files into the iPhone).

The good news is, the problems are all just software! The display hardware and the user interface paradigm are already well-adapted to the purpose of reading large document pages (e.g., web pages) in a small form factor. A future (perhaps inevitable) update that beefs up file management and PDF support will change the game in the ebook arena, just as the iPhone is already doing in so many other sectors.

[and, perhaps more importantly, it’s yet another fine excuse to get one for myself someday!]

Read Paula’s full post and see the complete photo set with more shots at different zoom settings and display orientations here.

Update: The page being displayed in the top image is from a pdf version of Avant-Guide Las Vegas: Insiders Guide for Urban Adventurers by Daniel Levine. The graphic novel shown in the lower image is Lullaby Vol 1: Wisdom Seeker 01 by Hector Sevilla, Mike S. Miller, and Ben Avery.

Update 2: See the video demo!

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Sontag, Flickr and Rethinking the Snapshot

As I was pondering On Photography, I ran into an older post by Bob Stein, intriguingly titled, “What would Susan Sontag make of Flickr?”

His commentary (prompted by John Berger’s 1978 essay, “The Uses of Photography”) discusses a new way of conceiving photography. In Berger’s words, “not so much as a reporter to the rest of the world but, rather, as a recorder for those involved in the events photographed.”

The ideas are compelling, forcing me to re-examine my own photographic practice. Take a look and let me know what you think…