Demo of a Standard Ebook on Qurika

[Jacob Mathew]

It's hard to get a sense of the fluidness of Qurika's UI without seeing it in action, so I made a short video of a Standard Ebook on Qurika. I would love to get your thoughts.

https://youtu.be/jn65C_PrElI

This has never happened before but, I'm ahead of schedule for getting the Qurika store and the Standard Ebooks integration live. Depending on app store review times, I think I should be able to go live in a couple of weeks!

-Jacob

https://twitter.com/jacobgmathew

[Alex Cabal]

Very nice effect! Though I see the cover image has been stretched to fit
the screen, distorting it. Maybe that's something to consider tweaking
in the future.

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[Jacob Mathew]

Thanks! 

I'm hoping to unlock a natural way to move through and around a book, and maybe even "feel" a book, that I think is lost in digital reading.

I would love to avoid stretching the cover, but I can't think of any way to achieve that without cropping, and then I will most probably end up cutting off text like the author, or title, which would be worse.

The aspect ratio of the book, and therefore the cover, is derived from the aspect ratio of the screen, so it is going to be different on every screen. If you have any ideas for how to handle that I'm all ears!

-Jacob

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[Alex Cabal]

You could simply keep the image's aspect ratio and put a background in
the areas of the cover that would be empty. Or a hardback-like texture.
IMHO stretched images always look pretty cheap regardless of context,
and you will find that the wide variety of cover image size on the web
will mean that some will look extremely distorted.

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[Jacob Mathew]

Noted.

There might be a tasteful way to "letterbox"  it. I'll explore that in the future.

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[Vince]

I agree with Alex. I assume web sites with stretched covers/images don’t know what they’re doing.

[Jacob Mathew]

Ok, that's good to know.

Any thoughts on the rest of the UI?

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[Emma Sweeney]

In the video, I didn't see you utilize the set zoom component of the app. I am curious about how well this would work on books with images. Some of our books contain music sheets. Can you still read them at the maximum zoom level? Trying to look at images in a book on a tiny screen has been the reason why I prefer reading on my laptop.

If you need a good book to test this with, I would recommend Edward Lear's Nonsense Books. It contains over 400 images, including music sheets.

[Jacob Mathew]

Yeah, I know what you mean. For me, it's maps. I can't get see the detail on maps without the ability to zoom into the image.

You can't do that (yet) with Qurika. You can zoom, but not beyond the boundaries of the page. So it won't work well for books that have highly granular information in images. I'm hoping most books don't fall into that category. 

I have a few ideas for how to incorporate zooming into images and I would love to have that feature, but I think it will have to wait a bit. I want to validate this approach to ebook readers before I build in more specific features.

What did you think about the overall UI approach btw?

-Jacob

On Sat, Oct 3, 2020 at 12:28 PM Emma Sweeney <sween...@gmail.com> wrote:

In the video, I didn't see you utilize the set zoom component of the app. I am curious about how well this would work on books with images. Some of our books contain music sheets. Can you still read them at the maximum zoom level? Trying to look at images in a book on a tiny screen has been the reason why I prefer reading on my laptop.

If you need a good book to test this with, I would recommend Edward Lear's Nonsense Books. It contains over 400 images, including music sheets.

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[Emma Sweeney]

I definitely agree with Alex and Vince on the cover.

Other aspects give the app a smooth, high quality reading experience. You don't want to dampen that experience just by opening the book and seeing a stretched image. It makes the book seem like an unfinished product.

People say "don't judge a book by its cover," but the cover is sometimes what draws people into reading the story. I am definitely guilty of buying books just on their covers alone...

Emma

[Jacob Mathew]

Ok, I'll bump this up on my feature priority list. Now that it's pointed out, I can't unsee it. This is invaluable feedback. Thanks!

If you have any other thoughts, feel free to let me know. I'm always open to feedback. 

-Jacob

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[Jacob Mathew]

Here is how the cover looks like now. I'm letterboxing it. Thoughts?

[Vince]

It looks better than stretching it. Not as good as our cover, but to each his own. :)

On Oct 7, 2020, at 6:09 PM, Jacob Mathew <ja...@qurika.com> wrote:

Here is how the cover looks like now. I'm letterboxing it. Thoughts?

<2020-10-07.png>

[Emma Sweeney]

That's a lot better. Now, it makes me want to open the book.

This cover is nice but I also prefer the SE cover. The SE cover looks like a scene from Pride and Prejudice, while this cover just shows a woman surrounded by flowers.

Emma

 

[Jacob Mathew]

Thanks for the feedback!

Noted about the cover preference.

-Jacob

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