More on e-Reading on the iPod Touch

(See also: Ficbot’s early impressions on iPod Touch).

Now that I’ve had my iPod Touch for almost a week, and had a chance to enjoy reading on it, I am even more glad I made this purchase.

I knew I would be happy with the music aspect—this is my third iPod, so I was ready to go in that respect. But I have been delighted to find that reading on this device can be a real treat. The screen is a little smaller than I would prefer, but the ease of use is just on such a different league to any device I have ever had that it is unbelievable. And it is so handy to not have to carry around a separate device to read on. Below are my comments on the two programs I’ve been using. When you compare either to the laborious uploading process for non-PC eBookwise owners (uploading to a remote server on their website, synccing the reader, downloading the content onto the reader, clearing the files off the server and repeating as needed) the iPod takes things to a level of simple that may just make e-books accessible to
everyone. It’s about time!

The Ipod itself

I was ready to go with iTunes immediately, and the app store works the same way as the music store does. I had no problems finding what I needed to get underway. Be aware though that it helps to know what you’re looking for—a keyword search will search the entirety of the iTunes store and bring up results for music, audio books, video and TV shows that match your search term. You can narrow these by area of the store easily, but if you know what you want, it’s a little faster to get underway.

eReader and Stanza downloaded quickly and I had no issues loading and running them. The only problem I had in the first few days was an issue with the battery—it was fully charged when I went to bed and completely drained the next morning. Some poking on Google turned up reports of a glitch in the latest firmware update involving something called the ‘Push’ setting, which is used to fetch data in the email app. I use web mail anyway, which works via wi-fi, and did not need the Push setting to access it. When I turned this setting off, I had no further issues and can comfortably go two days between charges—this is less than on my previous iPod, the Nano, but then I was only using that for music and am using this one for about an hour a day of reading and light games in addition.

Ereader

eReader was the first program I downloaded because I am already a Fictionwise customer and had some books I bought in my Palm days which did not work on the eBookwise. I was very eager to be able to download them again and read them on the go. It was simple to do this. Just click the plus button in the top of the window, and it will prompt you for your Fictionwise or eReader.com log-in. You can choose the titles you want to download. You can also download titles from other sites like Manybooks.net from within the program, but the bad news is that this content cannot be sorted by author like Fictionwise’s own content can. If you prefer to sort by author, you’ll see all these extra titles lumped together at the end. If you sort by title, however, they will indeed sort into their proper spot in the list.

The default controls use swipes to turn pages. You can adjust this in the settings to be a tap instead, which I promptly did. A tap on the top of the screen goes back a page, a tap on the bottom half goes down a page and a swipe brings up the menu so you can get back to the bookshelf, where you can choose another book, add new content or delete a book. You can also turn off the page-turning animation, which I did. Deleting a book is a two-tap process (edit, then the – on the one you want to delete) which is much simplified over the same process on the Stanza.

You can also add other content such as your own documents to the iPod using their personal content server. You can log into the Fictionwise website under your free-to-obtain user account, and there is a link to this server. You are prompted to browse for the file and upload it. Te file does have to be in pdb format first, but I quickly found a free converter tool on-line after five minutes with Google. It is an extra step, though—you cannot just drag and drop a file onto the iPod. You must convert it to pdb and then upload it to the server, then finally download it to your device. Again, not difficult, but not instant either! That’s an iPod issue, not a Fictionwise one, though. I am grateful to Fictionwise for providing a personal content option at all!

Stanza

The second app I downloaded was Stanza. Stanza has many features in common with eReader: font, appearance etc. are all easily changeable via a preferences pane, and the program is straightforward to operate. There are three tap zones: the right-most turns pages forward, the left-most turns pages back and the middle calls up the preferences and allows you to exit to the bookshelf. Deleting a book is accomplished by clicking on the book’s info button, then the edit buttin, then the delete button—a needlessly multi-step process, especially compared to eReader. If you want to delete more than one book, you have to exit to the bookshelf and them open up each of them one at a time, click the i button, then the edit button, then the delete button. You could be there awhile depending on ow much you want to clear!

The bookshelf features colour covers of all the books for which one is available. This may seem like an unnecessary frill, but I actually found it a surprisingly cool feature. It really makes you feel like you are carrying around a shelf full of books. As for the look and feel in other aspects, it really was similar to eReader, except that it does have a flicker when the pages turn, which I don’t prefer, and was unable to turn off. In other usability notes, the program was notably sluggish and often there was a lengthy lag when it first loaded a book. Also, the page-tunring animation made it feel a bit less brisk to me than eReader. I enjoyed browsing its on-line catalogue very much, but I am not sure I would prefer it for actual reading!

The key selling point of Stanza is its on-line catalogue. It has a built-in interface to access the websites Munseys, Feedbooks and a few others. You can browse each collection by title, author or category. Unfortunately, you cannot search across the whole lot of them (for example if you want a certain title, you have to go through each collection one by one until you find it). But there is a handy section of reading lists to get you started if you don’t know where to go first. It has categories such as high school reading, time travel stories, magazines, and Creative Commons sci-fi, each with a manageable collection of titles to peruse. It also had a few titles I could not find elsewhere, which is cool. A ‘pick of the day’ option for frequent users would not go amiss here. That would be a great add-on for future versions.

This was my first experience with Feedbooks. Their format options are limited, and past readers of mine had formats which were not included among their options. This made it a less useful site to me than Manybooks, and might be a detriment to them down the road. But I did check out their website after trying this program and was overall impressed by what I saw. They seem to be trying to make it more like a real library rather than just a plain database of titles. Some of the titles had descriptions, and they had Favourites and Recommendations features which Manybooks lacks. However, their collection was not quite as comprehensive. I did searches for some of the as-yet-unread Manybooks titles on my eBookwise and fully half of them could not be found. I also noticed that there seems to be no connection between what you do in the program and what goes into your profile on the site. If I download something on the device, the site seems to make no note of
this and I would have to go and manually update my profile with this information if I wanted the download to be factored into my recommendations.

Feedbooks does have a larger collection of short fiction than Manybooks, which was nice. All of Cory Doctorow’s short fiction was available in individual downloads, for example. This was handy because it allowed me to download my favourite story from his collection ‘Overclocked’ and be able to read it without searching through the whole text of the book. The disadvantage for me was that the short fiction was only marked as such if one clicks on the expanded description. If you are trying to fill your device with, say, 20 mysteries or something, in preparation for a big trip, this could slow you down.

Conclusion

Both of these are fairly interchangeable as far as functionality as an ebook reader. I slightly preferred eReader because it was a touch faster and had a smoother page-turn for me once I got the animation turned off. But Stanza’s on-line catalogue is VERY cool, and I am reluctant to give that up at the moment. If they got themselves hooked up with Manybooks.net and added them as another content option, that would be a dream come true. I still prefer the larger collection at Manybooks, in spite of some of the extras on Feedbooks. I also disliked the page-turning animation and general sluggishness of Stanza and in the few days I have been reading, have not used it much except to play. We’ll see how it develops in the future. As it is now, I would not be inclined to pay for it, and I think Fictionwise/eReader is on the better track in offering the software for free and then selling you books to read on it. I have already had a few Fictionwise shopping  sprees since I got the iPod Touch, among them a free membership in their discount club. This will surely keep me coming back for more!

eReader can easily connect to Manybooks and other sites, but I think its real selling point will be the Fictionwise/eReader connection, and for people interested in that, this is truly an exceptional piece of software. It just makes everything so easy! For someone used to the Palm and eBookwise platforms where everything must be syncced using special software or websites via the computer, it was a real treat to be able to do everything right from the device. I could buy and download a new book from bed! And they have some great deals where you can buy a new release at full price and get 50-100% of the money back in store credit. If you plan to buy other books anyway, it’s an unparalleled deal. My current number one book source is the used bookstore: I don’t like to spend a lot of money on a book because I often lack the space to keep it, so buying used minimizes the outlay, and I can get a store credit if I return it when I am done. It’s like paying to
rent a movie. Now that I have something like this, I feel better about spending that money on an ebook instead:

Fictionwise has a decent selection, so I can actually get the best-sellers

• The rebates allow me to use my store credit to try new authors and get more books
• Your purchases are tied to your credit card number, not your device. So you can download a backup to your PC if you wish!
• The eReader format has been around for years and is not a fly-by-night, so I feel secure that my purchases will be readable in the future
• SO much easier to ‘store’ than a paper book! I don’t have to sell or give them back because space is not an issue

So, in short, I think eReader has the edge for me and my needs. But Stanza is still an excellent program and has some interesting features that are keeping it on my device for now. I’ll keep an eye on how things develop in the future!