Visualizing Comics on the iPad

Steve Jobs didn’t specifically talk about comics and other visually-intensive ebooks on the iPad, but it does fix many of the graphics and usability issues that severely limited the comics-reading utility of the monochrome e-readers and bulky tablet PCs that came before.

With its large color screen, slim form factor and long battery life, it may well be the reading device that comics fans have been waiting for.

While we await the iPad’s arrival, I wanted to visualize just how the iPad might work as a comics-reading machine. I fired up Photoshop and plugged in a couple of screens from the Witchblade books on WOWIO. What do you think?

XO-2: A Second-Generation OLPC Laptop/Reader

One Laptop per Child (OLPC) designer Yves Behar highlights some of the interesting concepts behind the second-generation XO machine envisioned for the 2010 timeframe on the TEDBlog.

Despite OLPC’s oft-discussed organizational problems and the usability issues of the current incarnation of the XO, the hardware designs of the current and future machines exhibit undeniably fresh thinking. The future unit’s software-configurable dual screen/touch input opens up a range of possibilities, from a proper display of two-page book spreads to task-specific input buttons configured for specific age groups and languages. Even collaboration and play by two simultaneous users becomes possible.

I’ll post a link to the full TED talk by Behar when it becomes available. Meanwhile, see more photos and additional details on TEDBlog.

Update: Here’s an excerpt from Nicholas Negroponte’s preview of the XO-2 at the OLPC Global Country Workshop:

OLPC XO and the Magic Sunshine Screen

XO display in sunlight.

Much has been written about the OLPC XO’s remarkable display, given its specifications:

higher resolution than 95% of the laptop displays on the market today [i.e., 200dpi color, which is theoretically higher than that on the iPhone — gm]; approximately 1/7th the power consumption; 1/3rd the price; sunlight readability; and room-light readability with the backlight off

Whatever other difficulties the OLPC organization may be suffering, the display is seemingly a singular achievement that could result in better handhelds, ebook readers and laptops at significantly lower cost.

But how good is the display, really?

In my earlier first look at the XO, I was quite surprised by the display’s high quality, given the low cost of the machine. With the backlight turned on and the screen displaying full color, I found it to be fairly crisp and bright, far better than the murky displays I’ve seen on some low-end laptops.

The XO (in Tablet Mode, Portrait Orientation) and a MacBook Pro Display a PDF Ebook

In bright daylight where ordinary laptop screens are often barely usable, if at all, the XO performed brilliantly. I loaded a pdf of my current read, Pisstown Chaos, to test the XO display’s mettle with the backlight turned off in reflective monochrome mode. A MacBook Pro in the same environment had me running for shade, since the display was barely legible. The XO text display, on the other hand, was highly readable with good contrast. It was completely suitable for reading in bright daylight (see photo at the top of this post). While the satiny surface of the screen could cause some glare issues (below), slight shifts in position were enough to alleviate the problem.

All in all, the XO display quality and daylight performance were delivered as promised. Since the technology behind the display is slated for commercialization beyond OLPC, we can perhaps look forward to a new generation of capable and lower-cost machines with the XO in their lineage.

The XO’s display in bright sun — some glare, but very usable.

XO Laptop as PDF eBook Reader: A First Look

The XO laptop from the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project is a distinctive little machine. It invites children to come and play with its whimsical form: big rounded corners, bright colors, personality-laden rabbit ear (wi-fi) antennas and kid-luggable handle. With tools ranging from musical composition to writing, painting and programming, it’s intended to foster learning-by-doing and collaboration. But along with these active modes, it also is designed to be an effective ebook reader, promising inexpensive or free reading content for developing world areas where print books are often considered too expensive and rare to entrust to children’s hands.

XO with MacBook Pro, iPhone.

I recently took a first look at the XO in the book-reading realm, viewing several WOWIO non-DRM’d PDFs to get a general sense of its display quality, performance and usability. Along the way, I also compared the little green guy against some of the other ebook-capable devices, including laptops, the Sony Reader and the iPhone.

Happy Surprises on Display

The XO uses a specially-designed twist on the standard LCD technology found in laptops. This variation combines high resolution, very low power consumption (the laptop is designed to run on alternative energy sources, including a human-powered hand crank), full color and low cost. The laptop seamlessly transitions between two display modes — standard backlit color (like a laptop LCD) and unlit monochrome for use in bright ambient light (similar to the E-Ink used in the Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader, but with an even higher pixel density).

The XO (in Tablet Mode, Portrait Orientation) and a MacBook Pro Display a PDF Ebook

As you can see from the photo above, the XO’s screen actually fares pretty well in comparison with a MacBook Pro and its designer-grade display (a machine which costs about 10x more than the XO). While the XO’s screen can’t match the Mac in brightness, crispness or color fidelity, it still does a very respectable job in rendering the PDF’s text and graphics. Typography is clear and well formed and images display with good detail. I’ve seen much more expensive laptops with far inferior displays. I suspect that the XO might actually outperform the Mac in bright light outdoors, thanks to its special screen — stay tuned for that test in a later post. From what I’ve seen so far, the OLPC team did a great job in hitting its multiple design objectives with this display.

PDF Performance

XO Display in Portrait Tablet Mode

Given its modest, power-sipping hardware specs and child-like form, I didn’t really expect blazing speed out of this cute little machine. It lived up to those expectations and exceeded them in some ways.

Launch of the various task-oriented apps generally took a bit of patience, with load times taking many long seconds. Once loaded though, performance of apps including the PDF reader were quite acceptable. Scrolling and screen update performance were reasonably peppy, even for a large 310-page document with many embedded photos (like Letters from St. Petersburg, pictured above).

The fully variable (and responsive) zoom and scrolling controls, selectable display orientation and Transformer-like adaptability (from standard laptop configuration to a tablet-like reader) together make a very functional package for reading a PDF ebook. As with the iPhone, the ability to zoom in on PDF pages is particularly useful, since it allows the book text to be enlarged to fill the screen. This is in sharp contrast to the limitations of the Sony Reader, which has a very limited zoom that leaves some books with uncomfortably small text by wasting valuable screen real estate on blank margins.

Interestingly, XO’s reader software actually seems to be more compatible with some PDFs than that in the Sony Reader and the iPhone. For example, the latter devices (as well as other third-party PDF readers on the Mac or Windows) choke on displaying certain embedded images while the XO renders them just fine (just as Adobe Reader does).

XO displays an embedded PDF image while iPhone and other non-Adobe apps cannot.

As I mentioned above, PDF paging and navigation are fairly snappy. Several options are available for navigating including physical buttons for scrolling and paging along with on-screen equivalents and a jump-to-page control. In keeping with the multi-purpose nature of the machine, the physical buttons aren’t specifically labeled. As with the rest of the interface and applications, these functions are best determined through learn-by-playing-with-it trial and error, and that’s a mostly straightforward process. Bookmark functionality is notably absent. Oddly, there appears to be no way to control the cursor when the machine is in tablet configuration, so many of the onscreen controls aren’t accessible without unsnapping the screen and fishing around on the trackpad. Perhaps more experimentation will glean a more usable approach to cursor control, but in the meantime, the hardware buttons accomplish the essentials.

Head-Scratching GUI

I tried to view the XO’s interface in terms of its intended audience — young children unburdened by the baggage of established OS conventions. Perhaps it’s impossible for me to reach such a state of innocence, but even after many of the required trials and errors, I found that the seemingly simple act of opening a PDF file was still terribly obtuse and required too many steps to accomplish. I hope to find a more direct method, since this complexity is the single biggest bump in using the XO as an ebook reader. Once the file was actually open, the reader software was easy enough to use and seemed to work well.

Closing Bits

I haven’t yet had an opportunity to read full books on the XO. In my initial play, though, it’s clear that a tremendous amount of design and thought went into creating a machine that is physically well adapted for use by children in the developing world. The biggest weaknesses are in OS usability — the all-new paradigm for a simple, task-oriented system needs some rethinking and refinement. As an ebook reader, though, the XO shows enormous potential and I’m looking forward to future developments.

Ars Technica’s Read on the Sony PRS-505

Ars Technica takes a detailed look at the latest iteration of Sony’s dedicated ebook reader, the PRS-505.

Their bottom line: “… if the Reader sounds like the sort of gadget you can’t live without and you can live with its quirks, it’s a superbly built device with a screen that will blow you away. It comes highly recommended, but only to those certain they have a use for it.”

This is largely in line with my own continuing experience with the earlier PRS-500 model. I still gawk at the e-ink screen with wonder, though I am at times frustrated by the device’s limitations. For example, during a trip my wife and I took to Las Vegas last weekend, I tried to use the Sony as a reference tool to access an ebook version of the excellent Avant-Guide Las Vegas. Unfortunately, the Reader’s slow paging and navigation made it a poor choice for non-linear, jump-around-and-find-stuff reading. For reading fiction and other works read in a linear fashion, however, I agree with Ars Technica’s assessment — the Sony Reader “…is a beautiful device that excels at what it was designed to do: display e-books.”

Green Titles, Green Books

Blog Action Day and the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize are now past, but it remains an apt time to highlight a few key books on environmental issues which are available (for free) at WOWIO.

This year’s awarding of the Peace Prize to Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was met with controversy in some circles. Essential to any reasoned discussion of the merits is an actual reading of the IPCC’s report, Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis — particularly the Summary for Policymakers.

For perspective on the larger debate over environmental policy, a look at the early clashes over preservation and resource utilization in America can provide insight on the debates that continue to this day. The Battle over Hetch Hetchy: America’s Most Controversial Dam and the Birth of Modern Environmentalism by Robert W. Righter (Oxford University Press, 2005) looks at the social and political conflict that led to the birth of the modern environmental movement and reframed the national conversation in the terms we see today.

Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (WOWIO Books, 2007) is the seminal work that gave a voice to the then-unarticulated tension between the yearning for nature’s simplicity and a modern lifestyle increasingly dissociated from the natural world. Walden Pond: A History by W. Barksdale Maynard (Oxford University Press, 2004) tells the story of the pond itself, from its days as a spiritual retreat for Thoreau and Emerson to today’s role as environmental and cultural icon.

In a nice congruity with the spirit of the subject matter, these books are all in downloadable ebook format. Despite the not-insignificant environmental cost of running the web and the life-cycle costs of the devices needed to consume the content, digital books are still an enormous step forward compared to the impacts of printed books — some 20 million trees consumed for books sold in the US alone, plus the power and waste by-products associated with their printing, distribution and disposal.

When considering the issues surrounding the environment, what are the titles that influenced you the most?

Fake Steve Jobs on the Apple eBook Reader

Fake Steve says it’s right around the corner, so it must be true — Apple just wants to give the world a chance to catch its breath after months of iPhone-induced hypoxia.

Frankfurt Book Fair: Publishers Seeing Pixels

The Frankfurt Book Fair is the biggest book event in the world, with a history stretching back to the days of Gutenberg and the emergence of printing in the west. The billing on its web site is true by all accounts — “everyone who is anyone in the industry will be there: authors and publishers, booksellers and librarians, art dealers and illustrators, agents and journalists, information brokers and readers.”

This year’s edition is now in progress. This year’s hottest topic — adaptation and prosperity in an ever more digital world (from the Book Fair site):

Digitisation will be centre of attention at this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair (10 to 14 October 2007), as the world’s largest book and media event focuses on a topic which has become a major priority for the publishing industry.

The programme will examine how all aspects of digitisation – from e-books, e-marketing and Web 2.0 through to online platforms such as Google or Amazon – will impact on the industry.

Preparing for the Frankfurt Book Fair.

This trend is evidenced by the increasing industry forays into the digital realm — for example, if you’re already a WOWIO user, you’ve seen this movement first-hand in the steadily growing stream of new books and the publishers embracing its unique, all-digital (and all-free) business model.

From a dpa news story reporting on an industry meeting at the Fair:

As publishers gathered Tuesday for the October 10-14 Frankfurt Book Fair, they heard that free online books funded by advertising are one of the up-and-coming ways to earn a living from literature.

Evan Schnittman, a New York-based Oxford University Press executive giving a briefing on digital books, said US website WOWIO was already in the free e-book business […]

“WOWIO will make a lot of news in the future,” he said.

iPhone + Comics: (Not) Seeing the Big Picture

Cover art (above) displays beautifully, but text in the interior pages (below) is illegible without zooming.

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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New Sony Reader (PRS-505) Now Available

A few weeks after initial details of an upgraded Sony Reader leaked out, the new unit is officially available.

Since my first report, a few additional improvements have been revealed, most notably an improved display with better contrast, faster page turns and more shades of gray.

Overall, the changes are nice incremental improvements, but nothing revolutionary. See the diagram below for a comparison of the new model (PRS-505) versus the original (PRS-500).

Additional details are available at the MobileRead Forum.

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iSlate vs. iPhone: A Clear Reading Advantage

iSlate is said to be 1.5x larger than iPhone.

The long-dreamed-about iSlate is once again a hot topic, as fresh rumors claim that Apple has been working on such a device for 18 months and that it may hit the market sometime in 2008.

While some question the likelihood or even usefulness of such a device, the iSlate and its bigger display have at least one clear advantage over the iPhone — it would be ideally suited for reading documents like web pages or ebooks, while the iPhone is a compromise requiring changes in zoom or display orientation.

In the simulated displays below, a page from the pdf ebook Letters from St. Petersburg is rendered to fit on the current iPhone’s 480×320 pixel resolution (left). Even zoomed in to fit the full width of the display in portrait orientation, the text is small and difficult to read. The same page is rendered at right on the rumored iSlate‘s much larger 720×480 screen — the entire page fits comfortably with room for additional zooming, while the text is already rendered at a more readable size.

This display spec, if true, supports speculation that the iSlate would be the opening salvo of an Apple campaign to transform books and reading, just as it has already done for music.

Wishful thinking? Perhaps we’ll see in just a few months…

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iPhone Reader: The Long Sessions

I managed to hold out for almost three months. While I had done some testing on an iPhone, I didn’t buy one for myself — that is, not until my 5G iPod met an untimely death against unyielding hardwood and “necessity” provided the required excuse.

In a fit of geekiness, I performed the required hacks on the newly-purchased machine to install third-party applications such as file transfer utilities and the Apache web server. This allowed me to directly move several PDF ebooks onto the phone and to read them from the Safari browser by pointing at its own web server (i.e., no Internet connection required). The one major limitation with this is file size: Mobile Safari refuses to load PDF files much larger than 8 megs or so.

Easy on the Eyes

Actual iPhone text, enlarged.

I’ve now had several multi-hour reading sessions on the iPhone, and I’m finding that it affirms my earlier impressions that its display and touch interface are quite well suited to the purpose of reading long, text-oriented PDFs. The ultra-sharp screen and flexible zooming — combined with easy rotation to landscape orientation — allow fixed-page (non-reflowable) PDFs to display at a comfortable reading size. While I’ve generally hated reading on small devices like PDAs in the past, the iPhone’s excellent display makes it not just viable but actually quite enjoyable. I read in a variety of lighting conditions, including bright outdoor sunlight, artificial light and total darkness, and in all cases, the display performed brilliantly.

Tactile Pleasures

Scrolling is pleasantly tactile.

Touching the slippery-smooth glass to scroll through the book made the experience pleasantly tactile, somehow better echoing the positive visceral experience of turning pages of a paper book than the mechanical, button-pushing motion used on most other reading devices. Since the touch interface permits for simultaneous scrolling in both horizontal and vertical directions, I expected to have some trouble with unintentionally moving diagonally instead of straight down, but the system seems to have built-in smarts to ignore such spurious motion off the main axis of movement.

Obstacles and Building Blocks

Lack of a bookmarking function for the book-length PDFs was a major problem. Each time I loaded the book into Safari, I had to manually scroll to the desired page — obviously not an ideal solution.

All in all, my longer-term experience with reading ebooks on the iPhone confirms my initial testing — its hardware and user interface show tremendous potential, but the lack of a readily-accessible file system and full-featured reader software will continue to hamper mainstream users. The building blocks are all in place. It’s now up to Apple — or the growing army of highly creative iPhone hackers — to put together all the pieces.

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