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Does the iPhone flunk as a textbook-reader?
September 6, 2009 | 12:31 am
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By David Rothman
Agree or disagree with Randall Stross—writing in the New York Times?
The standard-size printed textbook provides the maximum amount of text and graphics in a single view. Once cracked open, two facing pages supply about 155 square inches of real estate, an expanse populated by hundreds of words; the occasional chart, table or photograph; and lots of restful white space. All of this is visible without clicking, zooming or swiping.
The iPhone has a grand total of six square inches of display. In my opinion, no amount of ingenuity will enable textbooks to squeeze into a credit-card-size space. CourseSmart, a software company in San Mateo, Calif., is nonetheless trying.
Reminder: Stross is talking about textbooks, including illustrated ones. Novels and other long narratives—normally lacking pictures and charts—might be a different story. The smaller screen area might still slow some people down, but not by as much.
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Comments:
You say novels may be a different story. I disagree.
As a novelist who leans far toward OCD in terms of my control over page formatting, I must say that I’m not at all happy with any of the current e-readers. I don’t see any need for the user to be able to override any formatting choices made by the author/editor/compositor/whoever, or indeed, any advantage at all in doing so.
I’m very concerned that the road we’re on will take us to a place where there is simply no such thing as a bad word division or a bad page break, because all divisions and breaks are fine; a place where all the text in a given book will be identical, not just to all of the other text in the book, but to all text in any book; a place where white space ceases to exist, typeface choice ceases to carry meaning, and page layout is a meaningless anachronism.
A place, in short, where I’m sorely afraid reading will cease to be a pleasure and become, instead, simply another chore.
My take on the NYT article was that “CouseSmart” really took the lazy way to e-publish by simply putting PDFs out for iPhones– the user has to scroll both up and down and side to side just to read a single page. The lovely picture of text on the iPhone was seductive, but misleading. Worse, “CourseSmart” (I put their name in ironic quotes because I don’t think they’re very smart about this at all) requires the user to download each page, creating a lag time of 9-13 seconds per download– and if they want to go back to see a page they’ve previously read, they have to download it again.
What I see is a company rushing a lousy product to market because, well, they want a product on the market. I hope the market rejects this deeply flawed product.