Digital books (and how to put ET books on the iPad)

Here’s a look a some iPhone apps for reading books.

I like the Classics app very much and read the Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Hound of the Baskervilles with
ease. Classics has a page-flip metaphor which works well. This app, however, has only 20 books available at this time.

Sherlock, another iPhone app, uses a continously scrolling text arrangement, which produces too much moving type and
not enough reading on the small iPhone screen–and the faster one reads, the more the type scrolls. With more more patience and practice, I might well have lasted longer than 800 words of Sherlock Holmes.

iManual (sliding pages) worked OK for David Pogue’s excellentiPhone:The Missing Manual, although
computer manuals can be consumed only in small doses unlike a romp through the Hound of the Baskervilles. Pogue’s manual helpfully unveiled the clever iPhone keyboard. The book is the best-selling computer manual these days and is available only on the iPhone.

I expect to try out a variety of other digital readers, beginning with Kindle, over the months. A thoughtful discussion of
Kindle by the always interesting Karrie Jacobs in Metropolis is here.

For some reason, I’ve always struggled to read through scholarly articles published as PDF files on a desktop computer screen. After a few pages I give up and print the article out. Google Books is useful for look-up, not sustained reading.

There are all sorts of interesting book design, interface, and copyright issues involving digital readers. I’ve been thinking about a
digital reader version of my own books, although it would involve substantial compromises since my books are designed to the
double-page spread and also they push even paper’s resolution (which is 10 times greater than most screen resolutions). On the
other hand, backlighted screen images often look much better than on paper and those images can incorporate zooming.