Recently, I realized that my iPhone gets a lot more photo action than my lovely nikon digital SLR. The photos I take with my phone are nothing like photography. They are documentation.
The phone camera is a kind of sketch pad that collects quick images of whiteboard drawings, interesting plants, spontaneous charm of the kid, a sign in Spanish with words for me to look up later. These bits and pieces appeal to me.
I picked up a flip video camera to see if capturing a few seconds of my life at a time has this same sort of attractive utility. So far, I am rather pleased.
So is the iPhone the break-through device that will finally deliver ebooks to the masses ( or the masses to ebooks)?
The iPhone has a lovely, bright, colour, high-resolution screen, and type is near glorious in its crispness. It has the form factor issues down as far as being ready at hand and useful for many different tasks, from making calls, to listening to music, to surfing the web, to watching the latest YouTube video. Why not reading books too?
I have been following this question throughout the blogosphere this past week or so, and there is so much hope. Some of the hope, and hope that I share, is that there is a magical software update in the near future that includes some decent ebook reader type software and a reasonable way to save and access files.
Pre-magical update, there are a few big challenges to the iPhone as an ebook reader:
It is currently pretty weird that documents, such as pdfs, can be viewed both landscape and portrait in the Safari browser but only in portrait if accessed through the document viewer via email…which right now is the only reasonable way to get files on to the device that don’t go away if you go off-line. This means that you can have one ebookish type experience with an emailed pdf and a different experience with a browser downloaded pdf.
Email is the only reasonable way to get files on to the device that don’t go away if you go off-line.
Navigating books by finger scrolling and manually zooming feels like the act of a rather desperate person. Also quite messy, if you like to read and eat popcorn at the same time. Next page/previous page buttons and automatically sizing to the width of a block of text would be most lovely.
Bookmarking.
Please software update, come quick!
In the meantime, I have seen some nice work by manybooks.net with their versions for the browser and pdf books. The type is legible and in the browser version some early attempts have been made at creating a navigation and bookmarking method.
As a user experience practitioner at WOWIO, I have been exploring how our books might function on the iPhone. WOWIO books differ from manybooks.net in that they are often highly designed, including refined visual, graphical and font treatments. Additionally WOWIO books include a wide variety of copyrighted books and illustrated comic books, travel guides, and children’s books. The attention to craft and visual design is an important part of our value offering.
Here are some prototype images of how three ebooks available from WOWIO currently look on the iPhone, pre-magical software update.Click on the images to see larger versions. I’ve also linked the books to their pages on WOWIO, but please note that we are still prototyping and the books on the site are not iPhone optimized.
( Taking a picture of my phone was harder than expected, so please excuse!)
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