E-book review: iPhone: The Missing Manual
I first encountered the writing of David Pogue when I bought his Palmpilot: The Ultimate Guide (2nd edition) simultaneously with my first Palm. His writing is helpful and clear in the best user-friendly sense, and leavened with snarky humor to make reading it fun as well as informative.
iPhone: The Missing Manual, currently on sale for $4.99 as a pre-packaged app rather than its list price of $9.99, is no exception. Not only is it useful and informative but it also overcomes one of the major appbook handicaps: the issue of being able to read it on something other than the iPhone.
The Content
First, we’ll get this out of the way: although the book itself does not make this claim, you will still find it useful even if you have an iPod Touch. Parts of it won’t be “the bits about taking pictures or making phone calls” but apart from those, the Touch is an iPhone in all but name. The information on playing media, surfing the Internet, typing, and so on are all applicable.
How helpful is the book? I have already found a lot of remarkably useful information just in the space of a few chapters. It would be no exaggeration to say I learned things over the course of a couple of hours of reading that I never learned in months of iPod Touch ownership.
For example: you do not have to make three keytaps every time you want to insert a comma. Just tap and hold the “.?123″ button, then slide your finger over to the comma, then lift. It’s amazing. And here are some other useful tips as well, just so you have some more idea of what you’re getting.
No matter what your level of iPhone or iTouch experience, you are almost certain to learn something new.
The Interface
Unlike other appbooks, the Missing Manual comes bundled in a very familiar user-interface: an app-wrapper version of Lexcycle’s Stanza e-reader. It has the very same control scheme: tapping in the middle of the screen brings up the top and bottom menu bars that have all the old familiar Stanza controls with the exception of the “out to library” arrow in the upper left.
The text is clearly legible, you can pinch and spread to resize the font if you do not want to go into the configuration screen to do it, turn justification on and off, even fiddle with line and paragraph spacing. The book itself is very well and professionally assembled, with larger screenshot pictures interspersed with text, as well as tiny icon pictures within the paragraphs.
The only bit that does not work so well is the blockquoted “Tips” passages, which are probably inset sidebars in the print version of the book. If the screen is viewed in portrait orientation, these sections end up being about four words wide. Still readable, but a little awkward.
Popping Open the App Can
One thing that might keep many people from even considering an appbook regardless of price is the idea of having it tied to an app. Some might find only ever being able to read it on your iPhone, or the app taking up one of a (relatively) finite number of available icon spaces to be insurmountable handicaps, and pass up a book that they otherwise might have bought.
I am here to tell you now: don’t worry. Contained within the disguised ZIP file that is the iManual.ipa application, within your My Music\iTunes\Mobile Applications\ directory, is an easily-extractable unencrypted ePub file of the complete book.
Once you’ve unzipped it, it can be read in ePub-reading software such as Adobe Digital Editions (looks flawless) or FBReader (formatting a bit messed up), or even synced into the iPhone version of Stanza by sharing from Stanza Desktop. (Though as the book is almost 9 megabytes in size thanks to all the illustrations, the Stanza app may choke and require a reboot the first time you load it, but after that it opens fine. I suspect the wrapper version of Stanza is optimized for the book’s large size.)
Here’s how to pull it out:
- Go to iTunes’s “Applications” screen, right-click “iManual,” and choose “Show in Windows Explorer.”
- Right-click the iManual.ipa file, choose “Open With” and select a zip application such as WinZip or WinRAR.
- Tunnel down the folders to Payload > iPhoneMissingManual.app and extract the file singlebook.epub.
- Rename the extracted copy something like iphone-missing-manual.epub and open it with your ePub reader of choice.
Given that the “official” e-book version costs $24.99, getting the $4.99 iPhone-app version and pulling the ePub file out is not only convenient, it’s also a big savings!
That being said, for use on my iPod Touch I actually find it more useful to have this book available to me in the app wrapper that will always open to that one book every time, rather than requiring me to close whatever else I might have been reading in Stanza first.
I think I will end up deleting the copy from my “normal” Stanza’s file list and keeping the app version on my iPod instead—I am not in any danger of filling all ten of my home screens yet.
Conclusion
iPhone: The Missing Manual is a very helpful, fascinating, and insightful book—and, happily, can readily be extracted from its gilded app-wrapper cage for use outside your handheld device. It would be a bargain at its usual price of $9.99—but at $4.99, you simply can’t lose! If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch at all, you must go and buy this appbook right away.
Related
- Here’s David Rothman’s exuberant review of the appbook.
- Paul Biba writes about how well the appbook performed over the holiday season compared to print books.
- Court Merrigan writes about another happy customer who bought a related appbook when it was selling for for $3.50.
February 5th, 2009 at 7:17 am
The title “iPhone: The Missing Manual” is catchy – but the manual’s not really missing.
Every iPhone comes with an “iPhone User Guide” – it’s a bookmark in mobile Safari.
February 5th, 2009 at 8:20 am
But it isn’t called “The Missing User Guide.”