The iPhone as an e-book reader: Zach’s iPhone plans—plus more on the will-it-run? issue
Zachary Brewster-Geisz, who gave the world the Books.app reader for the iPhone, tells us a little about himself and shares his future plans for his program—in an iPhone World interview. He lives in “suburban Maryland with my wife, two kids, two cats, and one very hyper dog and is “a professional father, who also is an independent filmmaker, occasional actor, and hobbyist programmer” enchanted with open source. So what’s ahead for his Book.app? In his words:
- Deletion of books directly from the interface
- Arbitrary folders within the EBooks folder, so you can group books by genre, author, etc.
- A preferences pane to allow you to choose a different font, inverted text mode (white on black), and some other stuff
- A global memory for each book file, so it remembers where you were in every chapter of every book; this would allow you to read multiple books at once
- Some sort of one-touch scrolling/paging system
- Bookmarking!
- Chapter forward/chapter back buttons in the reading screen
“In addition,” he says, “I plan to code an application for Mac OS X to automate the HTML conversion, chapter splitting, and file transfer process, which will also be free and released under the GPL.”
Of course, for now, there’s a pesky little question. Will Apple’s new Software Development Kit allow Zach’s program to run officially, without the risk of a jailbreak approach? What about the issue of disk access, for example? Meanwhile, yes, how could I disappoint folks by not bring up .epub. As a nonproprietary format that major publishers are using for distribution, it goes well with open source.
Follow-up: I’m going to shoot an e-mail to Zach for his latest thoughts on the will-it-run question and perhaps other matters.
(Thanks to Mike Cane.)
March 9th, 2008 at 10:38 am
Thanks for following up. It was something I was going to do, but you’re better qualified.
So, David, will we someday read of you trading in that OLPC for a 32GB iPod Touch? (I only *half* tease!)
March 9th, 2008 at 11:11 am
Hey, Mike, I’m loyal only to PEOPLE—not hardware. If the iPod evolves in the right ways, hey, count me in. Meanwhile thanks for your kind words.
David
March 9th, 2008 at 1:18 pm
>>>Hey, Mike, I’m loyal only to PEOPLE—not hardware.
Tch. You need to evolve another step. Ralph Nader, for instance, is loyal to IDEAS, not people. (See “An Unreasonable Man” documentary.) He’s right, too!
(Oh I will hang now! Get in line behind everyone else waiting with *their* ropes!)
March 9th, 2008 at 5:46 pm
But you can be loyal to people in various ways while sticking to your ideas. They’re both both important. I’d have a lot fewer friends if I filtered by politics. OK, Mike, I’ll now release you from my noose.
David
March 9th, 2008 at 6:29 pm
An application to automatize chapter splitting ? I’d much rather have support on the application for EPUB, which can support chapter division and similar block elements through the use of multiple flows and a NCX file.