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By Chris Meadows

classics-alice In the process of researching my piece on Eucalyptus this morning, I noticed that Classics is currently on sale for 99 cents, down from its usual $2.99. The price was finally low enough that I could indulge my piqued curiosity, so I downloaded it to take a look.

Overall, Classics is a good implementation of an idea, but the entire idea is one that I find highly dubious.

Implementation

The idea behind Classics is to take several public domain texts and hand-format them to look more like paper books, except in an iPhone interface. At the moment, there are twenty public domain books included in the Classics bundle, including such titles as Alice in Wonderland, The Hound of the Baskervilles, and Dracula. The developers promise to add more via free app updates. (One hopes they don’t try to add the Kama Sutra.)

classics-hound This hand-formatting includes illustrations where available (such as in Alice in Wonderland), hyphenation, and justification of text. It also includes page-turning animations, along with a “page flip” sound (both of which may be disabled in the configuration menu under the Settings app).

(Because the pages always flip from right to left, it gives the impression that this book was only printed on one side of the sheets of paper in a tablet. The metaphor only stretches so far.)

There are some moderately clever touches, like a ribbon marking your place in a book, and the way the books themselves are arranged in a handsome varnished bookshelf rather than a sterile-looking menu.

Drawbacks

It all looks very nice—but there are a few drawbacks. Most obviously, the time and effort required to do the hand-formatting means that only a handful of books can ever be ported to the reader; the 20 titles currently available represent only 1/10 of 1% of the titles available at Project Gutenberg (and, by extension, through multi-format sites like Manybooks and Feedbooks). This is hand-crafting as opposed to assembly-line production.

Second, the hand-formatting limits the choices of the reader. There is no way (that I could find) to make the fonts larger or smaller, or to change the orientation from portrait mode to the landscape mode I prefer for a screen this size. There is also no way to turn off the full-justification of the texts, which on a screen this narrow can result in unsightly large gaps between words. Everything is fixed. This is wood-block engraving as opposed to movable type printing.

Third, I question the entire need for a “p-book simulator” approach. It pre-supposes that the reason people read paper books is so they can see and hear the pages turning, as opposed to reading them for the actual content. In prettying up the pages, it locks them into a fixed aspect, and so passes up a number of e-books’ biggest advantages (resizable, reflowable text). It ends up being “neither fish nor fowl”—it might be pretty in some ways, but will not best please either e-book or p-book devotees.

Conclusion

Stanza and eReader are both free, and both can read all the Project Gutenberg e-books that can be found through Feedbooks or Manybooks—not just the ones someone has time to implement. They allow a considerable level of control over text size, page orientation, justification, and other options—and they don’t try to pretend to be paper, because they don’t have to. People who read them are wanting the e-book experience already.

On the other hand, at a price of 99 cents, the app is worth getting just to have those twenty classical books hanging around. I don’t know of any other way to get the illustrated version of Alice in Wonderland as an e-book; there probably is one, but it may not be as cheap as the one found in Classics. I would be hesitant about recommending it at the full $2.99, however.

 
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