My drop-dead cute and street-wise wife and I decided to split the cost of an iPod Touch together for Valentine’s Day this year. Pretty great, AMIRIGHT?
Anyway, so its a nifty little device. It may seem pricey, but once you get certain apps going on that little guy it starts to feel like a downright bargain. I don’t want to get crazy and sound like too much of an Apple ad or anything, so I will stay focused on one thing that may be my favorite aspect of having that little thing around: e-books. Thats right, you heard me Generation Z or whatever you call yourself these days. Not the latest mind-melding social advertising + “friending” network or twitter-killer or some totally sweet video game, I am talking about reading.
I enjoy a good read, but the act of finding a book that I feel like I might enjoy and then paying for it has never really worked for me somehow. I guess I never found a groove that would keep me searching and finding the next book- and then on top of that the internet has so many short-form things of interest to read it can be difficult to find time for something lengthier anyway.
The Apps
Enter this new iPod and the e-book readers created for it. With the free Kindle app on the Touch, I can grab free previews of potentially interesting books with a one-click-to-buy option (yikes!) at the end of the preview. Its fantastic, and the e-book prices aren’t too bad. (Usually $9.99 or less)
Another app (also free!) I like is called Stanza. The online stores it accesses are fantastically overpriced, but there are a lot of older, free books available right through the app from different places. Right now I’m reading “The Man Who Was Thursday” by G. K. Chesterton (which was free) on the Touch, and its been a very enjoyable experience. Stanza has way more options for fonts, font sizes, “paper” color, line height, etc than the freshly-released Kindle app does, but I imagine Amazon will update their app with more customization options.
The Experience
I personally have found reading on the small screen (in both apps) very easy, but I haven’t put in hours and hours of continuous reading or anything. 30-45 minutes at a time suits me and my eyes just fine though it seems. One key difference in the apps is how you “turn” the page. In Kindle, you swipe horizontally for every page flip, but in Stanza you merely have to touch the screen on either side. A tiny swipe isn’t that big of a deal, but as Mr. Gruber points out its something you will do hundreds of times, so it can get kind of old. In all honesty, I have always found sitting and holding a book to be cumbersome. I have a hard time finding a good way to hold it that stays comfortable, so a tiny, light device like the iPod feels better to me than a book. I suppose I may be in the minority on that point…
The only thing I miss from their paper-bound brethren is well-designed typography that is specifically set for each book. I guess that may not be realistically possible within the confines of standard e-book file formats that have to be viewable on different devices, etc, but hopefully that can be worked out in the future.
And Finally…
Both apps have their own online services for getting content onto the iPod, and both are pretty easy to use, but I would prefer to be able to have all the e-book files on my hard drive with an app to manage them and sync to the Touch more like iTunes. (I kind of think Apple will make a move in this area sometime soon…) E-books are such small files its amazing to think about how many could fit on the Touch.
I’m really excited to see where this technology leads, and so far I’m not mourning the smell and feel of paper at all.