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In the eyes of the beholder: Who’s right about the iPhone for e-reading with Kindle software?
March 6, 2009 | 6:21 am
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By David Rothman
"Reading is going to be [more] different on an iPhone than a Kindle. On a Kindle, you can read 30, 40, 50 pages at a time because the experience is more like turning the pages of a book. But on an iPhone, it’s much more likely that people will read a few pages at a time. It’ll be a ‘bursty’ kind of reading on the iPhone." – Gartner Inc. analyst Van Baker, quoted in Analyst: Apple turns its back on e-book market, in Computerworld.
"Between Kindle for iPhone and Stanza, I’ve got all the e-book reader power I need for my iPod Touch. The screen is too small for an ideal reading experience, but until I can afford a Kindle, it’s more than good enough for me." – Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, in Kindle for iPhone—the killer e-book app, in the same publication, or at least the Mobile and Wireless section.
Screenshot is of Kindle for the iPhone in action.
My take: Strictly "It depends." Younger people with good, sharp eyes for close-up will do just fine with the Kindle software on the iPhone. Remember, the font can be blown up to same size as with a book. I’m not-so-young and do okay with the iPhone even if the screen could be bigger.
In fact, I finished most of Indignation, the recent Philip Roth novel, while walking through the halls of my apartment complex, at odd hours when I had less chance of "running" into a neighbor. I used the largest and next-to-largest fonts—much bigger than shown in the screenshot—so the multitasking was easier.
But not everyone’s eyes are so good for Kindling on the iPod, and some might object to the glare of an LCD screen.
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Comments:
This ongoing “screen is too small” nonsense really irks. I have read dozens of complete novels on PDAs and now iPhone. The page size is never an issue, as long as the “next page” is triggered by a simple tap or button press. The act of turning a page quickly becomes unconscious and as the transition is more or less instantaneous, by the time your eyes have flicked to the top of the screen the next page is ready.
My eyes are not brilliant, but I have no difficulty reading in eReader on iPhone at Medium size, which gets a decent amount of text on a single page. My commute is just under an hour, and I will read pretty much all that time, sometimes even when walking along, if immersed in a good book.
For reference material the small screen wouldn’t be good, but for content that is read in a simple linear fashion, the iPhone screen is plenty big enough for me.
Hey, I’ve read *hundreds* of novels on my 4″ VGA-resolution PDA. Now that I have an eink reader I’m not going back.
To each their own but for a lot of us, the iPhone screen *is* too small. Especially if they’re used to 6″ eink screens,
The Kindle for iPhone software is a little fine; the problem I have with it is that one cannot invert the screen colors (to white text on black background), which I find suitable for night time reading.
One neat thing I noticed is that iKindle can read unencrypted MobiReader files as is. Just copy unencrypted MobiReader files into the “User/Applications//Documents/ebooks” directory on the iPod Touch/iPhone.
I don’t have any “sideways”-encrypted Mobi books (i.e. from Mobireader wrapped DRM to Kindle wrapped DRM) to test, though.
Hmm… it didn’t show up. The directory line should read “[root]/User/Application/coded directory line/Documents/eBooks”. You can tell you are in the correct directory by the presence of an .app file there (Kindle.app, Pandora.app, eReader.app, etc.)
And my one line review of Kindle for iPhone should have read it’s fine. It is a very basic reader, probably one step behind eReader 1.0 (since it didn’t have the text/background invert.) I don’t have Kindle books, so the “whispersync’ing” of bookmarks wouldn’t work for me.
Man Ching Cheung – are you on a jailbroken iPhone? I haven’t jailbroken mine, because I don’t want the hassle of having to hack my phone every time Apple issue an OS update.
I’ve read 1.5 novels now on the iPhone Kindle app and it works quite well. In fact, if the Kindle app for iPhone had been available all along, I probably never would’ve bought my original Kindle in the first place.
Give iphonebrowser a try. I believe it works with iPhones of all stripes. You can copy files to and from the iPhone without doing anything untoward. I think.
I have read hundreds of ebooks (mainstream, bought from Fictionwise and public domain books) since the first Palm Pilots came out. Take it as another datum: I prefer the pure black on white available on the LCD displays. Kindle/sony ereader reminds me too much of the black-on-green monochrome of the PalmPilots, which I moved away from every chance I got. So that’s where I’m coming from. I can see how people who might not have experience with reading on PalmPilots may come to prefer eInk over LCD screens.
You should try eReader, Stanza, or Bookshelf. The features for any of these outclass Kindle. That was true even at the version 1.0 of these readers; they all had more features than Kindle 1.0 (although I am sure Kindle for iPhone will improve.)
However, all of the readers have defects. I will boil down the most relevant features from each reader as follows:
eReader has too few fonts enabled, but it has annotations, bookmarking, and word definition lookup (if you have a dictionary on the iPhone.) However, it’s annoying how I would have to manually take off the annotations files and if I want to see them on my laptop. There’s no syncing of bookmarks to the desktop program. There is a teleprompter scrolling mode, but it isn’t as smooth as on my Windows Mobile and PalmOS devices.
Stanza: has everything eReader has, except for the annotation system. Can’t follow links. More fonts, a pretty interface. I also like the way the page turn looks. It has the prettiest library interface (supports coverflow). It’s nice how there are so many online libraries for it, including some free books from Random House (although I think you can get those books from elsewhere, for free, as well.)
Bookshelf: can’t follow links well enough to make it worth my while. I don’t like the “chunking” method Zach Bedell implemented – mainly because he doesn’t link it up with the chapter breaks. I guess I expected that, since it actually reads HTML natively, Bookshelf should utilize the markup inherent in such a document. There’s no scrolling. There’s a free version available (BookshelfLT).
Kindle: No scrolling. No font change. No text/bg inversion. No annotations. Navigation is not ideal, if you want to jump from page to page. The library management is only so so, just like eReader.
I’ve read eBooks from the Apple Newton to the Sony Clie (with several models of the Palm and the Handspring in between). No problems, many books read including Vernor Vinge’s “Fire Upon the Deep” and “A Deepness in the Sky”, both pretty long books.
I think the people that make these statements never did things like read books under the covers at night with a dim flashlight. They aren’t TRUE readers!
I have been reading books in mobile devices for over five years, from PDAs to smartphones to my iPhone… and I’ve never ever complained about screens being to small, but time being too short… that’s the only complaint one should have about reading books.
Well, the experience will be different for everyone.
That said, I’ve read about six whole novel-length books on my iPod Touch and I don’t have any complaints.
In fact, it’s better for reading in bed, there’s no spine to get in the way when holding the ‘book’ sideways.
I got hooked on Autoscroll back in the Palm PDA days and I still can’t live without it. I’ve been using iPhone Bookshelf with Autoscroll and the font size set to ~24-28pt and can usually blow through a book every day or two.
I’m not sure what Man Ching Cheung means by “There’s no scrolling,” since the butter-smooth scrolling is the one feature (possibly the only one, honestly) where Bookshelf excels. eReader’s Autoscroll function is atrociously jerky and, frankly, unusable.
Sorry, that was my bad. I knew Bookshelf autoscrolled. I just didn’t like how the scrolling stops as it got to the chunk, but, it is rather smooth. I also should have been more clear that the ereader scrolling is jerky (as 1977 noted.)
Man Ching Cheung – how would I get to the filesystem to copy anything, without having jailbroken my iPhone, first? I don’t think that it’s possible to copy things to the filesystem, otherwise (i.e., disk mode gets you access to a separate partition).
try looking up http://code.google.com/p/iphonebrowser/wiki/Usage
Hmm… iphonebrowser can in fact access non-jailbroken iphones, but you are limited to some subset of directories. i suppose it is worth a try.
One thing I would like to see is for ebook software developers to use the “sandbox” directories for ebook storage. That way, there are a number of apple sanctioned programs that would let you easily transfer files over through wifi or through usb. I hated having to download my library to stanza, to ereader, to bookshelf, etc. every time my ipod goes haywire.
If you do feel adventurous, try quickpwn. Just a warning: iphones are not the same as the ipod touch. It was rather straightforward to free my first generation touch (firmware 2.1.2). Your mileage may vary.