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Easy and boring: A good way to display e-books—and I hope Adobe heeds!
May 24, 2009 | 10:21 am
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By David Rothman
Apropos of e-book readers, where are the Web simplicity mavens when we need them?
Would that every e-reader look like the one to the right, with its nice, clean appearance. An easy click on an icon, and you’re there. Granted, I’m not saying “boring” is for every book—still photos and videos will be fine for appropriate titles. But let’s rely on the books themselves, not e-reader software, to provide the excitement.
A disappointing Digital Editions
By contrast, isn’t Adobe Digital Editions—shown in the second screenshot—a mess? One goal at Adobe was to simplify the interface so it wasn’t so much like the Space Shuttle-style cockpit. But damn if Adobe didn’t botch it anyway. Even geeks and semigeeks may struggle to adjust the controls to determine font size, positioning, etc., of PDFs. For shame, Adobe! And for shame, me. I should have beaten up hard on Digital Editions when it first came out.
No decent just-the-book-ma’am mode
Unlike Adobe’s usual PDF offerings these days, Digital Editions won’t let you easily switch to even a halfway-adequate just-the-book-ma’am kind of view. You still see distractions even in the “reading” mode. Not that Adobe’s usual offerings are exemplary about full screen, given PDF’s limits, especially on netbook-size displays. But they’re much better with PDF files than Digital Editions is. ePub? It isn’t as tricky as PDF, since the format is natively reflowable and displays line breaks appropriately even on small screens of netbook size or tinier.
Because Adobe is major provider of ePub-capable software, standards-oriented people should care. Adobe Digital Editions is supposed to cope well with both ePub and PDF. It succeeds in neither case since, even with ePub, you don’t get nice, simple book-only view. But wait: let’s not write off Adobe, or at least Sony—read on
Adobe (?) at its best
Ironically the eBook Library software from Sony provides a superior reader, shown in the screen shot at the top of this post. As I recall, Adobe is behind the reader component or a least played a role.
Joseph Gray, a nit-picky user of e-book apps, correctly notes that the eBook Library software “makes a very decent reader in fullscreen mode. I think it an even better non-DRM epub reader than ADE. It does, however, share one flaw with ADE. When clicking on a link, I can’t find any ‘back’ button to return to where I was.
ePub, TXT and RFT imported nicely into eBook Library reader
“The program imported several TXT, RTF and epub books and displayed them very nicely. My only complaint about the epub display is that the small font size seems more like a medium, and things only get larger. It would be nice if the sizes started off a bit smaller.
“All in all, I like it as a reader. Thanks for the tip. Tomorrow I’ll install it on the netbook.”
I’d be curious if others felt the same way about the full screen mode of the Sony e-reading software. One nice touch is that the eBook Library software takes care of the every-which-way line breaks that PDF apps may show on small screens.
Meanwhile bear in mind that the concept of a good full-screen display is hardly new. Mobipocket also has a fairly decent full-screen mode, and eReader, too, is way ahead of Adobe.
Competing with Amazon
For now, I would suggest that Sony and Adobe try to beef up the eBook Library reader, which is free and does not need a Sony PRS-505 or PRS-700 for it to be of use to you.
On top of that, the reader is integrated not just with the Sony store, but also with Google’s giant collection of zillions of free public domain classics.
Talk about ways to help compete with Amazon’s multiplatform strategy! Remember, at this point you can read Kindle books only on Kindles and iPods, not on desktop machines. Here’s a chance, then, for Sony and Adobe to leverage the impressive head start they have in the desktop area.
Another suggestion for the reader in the Sony eBook Library: Mouse-wheel-based scrolling would be good to add—at least I can’t use it with the current reader.
About the Adobe Digital Editions screenshot, the second one: It’s showing the PDF-positioning process in action. Not exactly a cakewalk for many users. Changed from an earlier shot—showing a different aspect of Digital Editions.
ePub vs. PDF: ePub is my real love, not PDF. I value ePub’s reflowability, for example. But done well, Digital Editions, with its ability to read both, could be useful in the transition to the reflowable standard.
Update, 3:45 p.m., Dec. 12, 2009: I replace “optimal” with “good” in the headline. I think I was too generous, although the display is certainly better than Adobe Digital Editions.
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Comments:
David, it’s rather disingenuous to post a worst case library management page to compete with a best case reading page.
OK, some unofficial comment from an Adobe guy (speaking for himself)—thanks, Jim! I went with the library management view simply because the shot was handy (no evil intentions), and in my text I’ve distinguished it from the PDF-interface issue. If you’ve got a replacement screenshot, send it on. I know you have other opinions on the PDF display and interface issues, so let’s hear more from you if you’d like. And I hope others will jump in, whatever their opinions.
David
Update: Have just replaced the library management shot with a PDF positioning one. Wanted to be responsive. Rooting for Adobe to be the same about the Digital Editions reading mode, especially when used with PDF!
The more Adobe people open their mouths and whine about being called out for their crap, the more they sound like crybaby GM execs. Adobe people, just *STFU* and get it done RIGHT. I’m sick of gargantuan corporations crying like babies. Enough already!
I’ve been reading full length ebooks since 2002 and have yet to reading anything longer than a newspaper article on a desktop or laptop, so any Library software reading mode, in either normal or full screen mode, is basically moot. I did install Calibre on my MacBook Pro, but it gets limited use.
As for PDF, I think it should be the floppy drive of ebook formats. At one time every computer had and used floppy drives, but now you’d have to buy extra equipment to access the legacy data storage. While I don’t use ePub now because the Kindle doesn’t need it, there may come a day when it importance ascends and Amazon will add support.
The Sony ebook library software is emulating a Sony PRS-700. So the standard view is a 600×800 pixel page, and the full screen view is just a magnified version of the same pages.
The smallest font size would not be too big on a PRS-700, but I agree that it is too big for the smallest size on a desktop screen.
Would that a reading program waste most of the screen by doing a tall window on a wide screen? That’s pointless. Fullscreen mode should actually fill the screen. This means flowing content to fill all the space available, or offering side-by-side pages. I found the wasteful ways of so many programs and websites annoying enough that I made sure I selected a monitor that could rotate to portrait mode when I replaced my old screen. For almost everything except video, a screen that’s page-tall is better than one that’s TV-wide, so I usually operate in tall mode.
Thanks, Dhami, but I suspect there are various definitions of “full screen.” Also, many and probably most people will read faster if the column of text is not too wide. Of course, as with FBReader, it would be great if people could adjust the width of the column. It might be reflecting the number of characters displayed with the Sony Readers’ six-inch screen—I’m not sure.
Thanks,
David
As always, these sorts of judgements are totally subjective.
What one person finds appealing another person may not.
Cuique suum.
Thank goodness someone has come out and given Adobe Digital edition the bad review it so richly deserves. From the black on black toolbars (?), just SOOO easy to read, the problems of finding your way around anything, the useless page scrolling mechanism….. need I go on? Who designed this program? About the only useful thing it does is keep your place in the book, but then, so does the “read online” function in Project Gutenberg. One gets the feeling it was designed by a high school computing studies class project.