TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘readability’ Category

By Chris Meadows

Steve Pendergrast of Fictionwise has reported that iPhones seem to be siphoning off Kindle users. But after looking at all of the major apps, it seems to me that the overall state of iPhone e-book options is still rather primitive.

Most of the readers are lacking useful features, and in some cases do not even render the text accurately. However, the clients are still under revision, so there’s hope for the near future.

For each e-reader, I will be looking at three aspects: readability, ease of use, and ease of loading up with content (both from the Web and self-made). Clicking the header link will open iTunes to the App Store listing for each application, which includes a screenshot. Shown here is eReader, from an earlier TeleRead writeup. I will update the present article with more screenshots as time permits. To avoid awkward phrasing, I will be referring to “iPhone” applications throughout this article, even though I am reviewing them on an iPod Touch.

eReader (v1.1)

eReader is the grande dame of iPhone e-reading applications, tracing its lineage back ten years to the original Peanut Reader for the Palm Pilot—much farther than any other iPhone reader can claim. Even if the iPhone version does not share any code with other eReaders, it has still had a much bigger head start when it comes to user-interface. That should count for something, right?

Readability

Similar to its predecessors, eReader offers three font faces in four sizes. These font faces are Georgia (serif), Helvetica (sans serif), and Marker Felt (a Comic Sans lookalike). The sizes are “small,” “medium,” “large,” and “huge.” Small Georgia can fit 23 lines on the screen in portrait mode, medium 18, large 14, and huge 12. Just as with Safari, the screen can also be rotated for reading in landscape mode—although unlike Safari, eReader will adjust even if you turn the device entirely upside-down.

(more…)

By Jon Noring

Flexibility helps keep us healthy. We can better enjoy physical activity which, in turn, motivates us to exercise. Keep on stretchin’!

Likewise, a flexible digital publication format is much better for the industry—and for readers—than a rigid, limited one.

To be more precise, a flexible format is more likely to be embraced, due to business pressures.

The IDPF’s new open standard e-book format, ePUB, is rapidly proving its flexibility. And ePUB’s flexibility is, of course, intentional by design.

A little history of ePUB’s predecessor as a consumer standard

Five years, two months and eight days ago, I published the reviewed eBookWeb article: “OEBPS: The Universal Consumer eBook Format?” My article delved into some of the requirements an e-book format must meet to be potentially embraced by the digital publishing industry as the consumer standard. From the requirements analysis, I concluded that IDPF’s OEBPS specification met these requirements and could become, when the time is ripe, the industry standard.

And indeed we are now seeing a groundswell of interest in ePUB by publishers and application developers. The primary reason is its flexibility in a number of areas, some of which are only now being recognized. I’ll delve into a couple of them in this article. [Note 1]

(more…)

By Jon Noring

I have been quite perplexed in reading the many comments about IDPF’s “ePub” format following the release late last year of its underlying specs. A number of very smart people, including several developers who naturally dig deeply into tech specs, have painted ePub as a dark and mysterious digital publication (e-book) format, unlike anything else in the Universe™.

The way some have discussed ePub, if Indiana Jones were to explore the deep caverns of ePub, he would probably find something exotic and other-worldly, maybe even the remnants of a long-lost civilization. [note 1]

In reality, though, the opposite is true. ePub is internally quite recognizable and familiar, very similar to traditional web content that we all know and love.

ePub and web content share a number of important commonalities:

(more…)

By Branko Collin

The Daisy Consortium and Microsoft have announced that they are working on a plug-in for the latter’s famous word processor simply called Word. The plug-in will save MS Word documents in Daisy’s DTBook format. This file can then be converted to a Daisy Talking Book (DTB) or into other e-book formats using existing tools. The plug-in should be available as a free download in early 2008.

According to the Daisy website, a DTB consists of the following elements:

• One or more digital audio files containing a human narration of part or all of the source text;
• A marked-up file containing some or all of the text (strictly speaking, this marked-up text file is optional);
• A synchronization file to relate markings in the text file with time points in the audio file; and
• A navigation control file which enables the user to move smoothly between files while synchronization between text and audio is maintained.

(Thanks Natasha.)

By Paul Biba

Here is a photo taken of a WOWIO PDF as it is displayed on my Sony Reader. Since the text doesn’t re-flow, you can see that it is almost unreadable. As a matter of fact, it is not almost unreadable, it is indeed unreadable.

Now here is that same PDF after it has been processed with a piece of free Windows software called pdflrf. As you can see the text is now readable.

pdflrf is available from the MobileRead forums and can be found here. It is now at version 0.7 and the zip file you will download has both a command line and Windows GUI version.

I also downloaded one of the Japanese fairy tale books from the Internet Archive in a black and white PDF format (as the Sony Reader does not display color). When loaded to the Sony Reader the PDF file produced only solid black pages. I then ran the original PDF through pdflrf and it produced a perfectly formatted file with all the illustrations intact.

This is a wonderful tool for any Sony Reader owner and many thank must go to MobileRead and the author for providing this free of charge.

Related: How to read e-books on (almost) any phone, from MobileRead.

By Jon Noring

Over four years ago I published an eBookWeb article entitled “OEBPS: The Universal Consumer eBook Format?”

Unfortunately, due to eBookWeb going defunct (a casualty of the “E-book Dark Ages” that resulted after the dotcom collapse), that article has essentially disappeared from the Internet.

So I am reposting the eBookWeb article here, not only for preservation purposes, but because its themes are stil very relevant today as will be briefly explained in this foreword.

DeLorean jokes

When I wrote that article, e-books were considered a lot like the DeLorean automobile — weird and impractical — the butt of many jokes. The DeLorean even played a prominently silly role in the movie trilogy Back To The Future.

But times have changed! Just as Google News is full of articles about an entrepreneur reviving the gull-wing-doored, stainless steel automobile to an enthusiastic public, so too e-books are finally being noticed and bought by an enthusiastic public. E-book sales are growing at a fast rate.

My 2003 article had three, closely related themes:

(more…)

By Robert Nagle

[poll=32]

Bonus Question: What does your answer indicate about your style of working and reading? (Leave answer in comment section)

(more…)