George Orwell Epub E-books Reader
Tanesha Prately
Here's a look a some iPhone apps for reading books. I like the Classics app very much and read the Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Hound of the Baskervilles with ease. Classics has a page-flip metaphor which works well. This app, however, has only 20 books available at this time.Sherlock, another iPhone app, uses a continously scrolling text arrangement, which produces too much moving type and not enough reading on the small iPhone screen--and the faster one reads, the more the type scrolls. With more more patience and practice, I might well have lasted longer than 800 words of Sherlock Holmes.iManual (sliding pages) worked OK for David Pogue's excellentiPhone:The Missing Manual, althoughcomputer manuals can be consumed only in small doses unlike a romp through the Hound of the Baskervilles. Pogue's manual helpfully unveiled the clever iPhone keyboard. The book is the best-selling computer manual these days and is available only on the iPhone.I expect to try out a variety of other digital readers, beginning with Kindle, over the months. A thoughtful discussion of Kindle by the always interesting Karrie Jacobs in Metropolis is here.For some reason, I've always struggled to read through scholarly articles published as PDF files on a desktop computer screen. After a few pages I give up and print the article out. Google Books is useful for look-up, not sustained reading. There are all sorts of interesting book design, interface, and copyright issues involving digital readers. I've been thinking about a digital reader version of my own books, although it would involve substantial compromises since my books are designed to the double-page spread and also they push even paper's resolution (which is 10 times greater than most screen resolutions). On the other hand, backlighted screen images often look much better than on paper and those images can incorporate zooming. -- Edward Tufte Copyright issues in e-Publishing A practical-minded and author-centered view of digital copyright protection for books is here. See also the long discussion that follows. -- Edward Tufte
Response to Digital books and digital readers (Kindle, iPhone, etc.)The most reading I do on my Touch is with Instapaper. By using a bookmarklet you can save webpages for reading them later. I actually prefer to read long web articles on the Touch instead of reading them on a computer screen as the resolution is higher on the Touch and Instapaper displays the content in excellent easily readable form. -- Dominik Unger (email)
Response to Digital books and digital readers (Kindle, iPhone, etc.)I think that one of the problems with reading scholarly papers on the computer screen is that more often not they're the two-columned variety. To be able to read comfortably one needs to fit-width (rather than fitting the entire page), which in turn means that you have to scroll up and down as you go from the left column to the right column. As monitors continue to get wider (but not necessarily taller) this problem is only exacerbated. I've searched the internet extensively for a small plugin that would allow one to scroll through a given page twice just by hitting the space bar, but no such thing exists. This would make reading articles on the computer somewhat more manageable, but I think there will always be the problem that reading from a laptop display just isn't that easy. -- Katie (email)
Response to Digital books and digital readers (Kindle, iPhone, etc.)Would the Soerabaja-Djokjakarta timetable be one of those compromises? While zooming could isolate the perspective to a sub-schedule within a group of railroad towns, it would be difficult to offer the reader an electronic view that shows the full schedule in a useful form. When I first looked at the schedule, it resembled disorder. Then as I read your explanation of it, the order came into focus because all of it was on two printed adjacent pages. That allowed me to continually read your words and analyze the schedule in a back-and-forth fashion. I doubt that I could have understood that schedule in an electronic format. -- Dan MacKenzie (email)
Response to Digital books and digital readers (Kindle, iPhone, etc.)Published papers formatted in portrait are always difficult to read on the landscape format of the computer screen. Two obvious (?) solutions: 1) Re-orient the computer screen. The iphone more rapidly adapts between portrait/landscape formats than any other monitor I've worked with. 2) Revise the publishing paradigm from portrait to landscape to reflect the dominance of electronic consumption of formatted text. -- Michael (email)
Response to Digital books and digital readers (Kindle, iPhone, etc.)The fundamental aspect of resolution in information displays seems a crucial part of e-readers to me. Especially to implement more typographic quality in the software. I am working on screens with varying resolution, say between 1024--1680 px on similar widths. Despite the advantage of higher resolution there is few software that adapts its readability to the resolution. Often the paradigm seems "higher resolution means more text on the screen", which is true to some extent, but readability falls behind. Are there pdf-readers that adapt not only page to window width? -- Gerd (email)
Response to Digital books and digital readers (Kindle, iPhone, etc.)My favorite "digital reader" for scholarly articles is my tablet computer. If I orient the screen in portrait mode and put Acrobat in full screen view, then my computer screen is a fair facsimile of a printed page: no scrolling and the text is large enough to read comfortably (usually). The ability to draw on the page and save my annotations is a nice addition also. -- Ted (email)
Response to Digital books and digital readers (Kindle, iPhone, etc.)One other book reading application available for the iPhone is Stanza. There is also a desktop version that has some interesting features - multi-column view (newspaper like). There is a huge library of books to choose from (Gutenberg and other free text collections). You can also read PDF documents using the desktop version (maybe for the scholarly articles).However, I agree that with the current set of applications (desktop and mobile) it is fairly difficult / cumbersome to do extensive reading.We would have to wait for some of theses devices to converge to get real improvements in readability for digital readers - kindle's reflective screen as a second screen on a netbook, maybe! -- Tariq Rauf (email)
Response to Digital books and digital readers (Kindle, iPhone, etc.)This was mentioned in a thread about scroll bars, but deserves a note here too. Amar Sagoo's Tofu is, in my opinion, the nicest way to read free-form text on a screen. I really want to see some applications with both hyphenation and a decent paragraph composer (TeX's, for instance; a modified version of the algorithm is used by InDesign IIRC), so that we can begin to fit text in columns, competently justified, to the specific shape of the display at hand. It's never going to be as perfect as something composed or corrected by hand, but it'd be far far better than what we currently deal with, in web browsers, PDF readers, etc. -- Jacob Rus (email)
Response to Digital books and digital readers (Kindle, iPhone, etc.)I feel it necessary to mention that I feel Pogue's stance is the wrong one. As much as piracy may occur with digital content, there have been multiple findings that they may, in fact, drive sales (albeit they often lack a controls and samples sizes are often 1). see: -finds-pirates-buy-more-music -of-free.html -stats-post-free-ebook/ -numbers-on-free-random-house-books/I pirated two of Edward Tufte's books as an undergraduate in Geology.Let me be more specific. I downloaded two books which had been scanned and digitized and posted online. The quality was poor, and they were difficult to read, but I was curious and they weren't available at my university library, or the local public library.I have since purchased The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information, Visual Explanations and Beautiful Evidence for myself. I've also purchased various numbers of copies of each to give as gifts and donate to libraries.I've always gotten a little grumpy when I see people say something like "The proportion of people who left a tip after downloading "Trigger Happy" was 1 in 1,750, or 0.057%." This was Steven Poole who also said at the time that "Trigger Happy" had been downloaded in excess of 30,000 times (as of this comment the counter reads 35,017). But how many people after reading a chapter or two decided to go buy a physical copy and didn't donate, or how many people bought a physical copy as a gift, or for the local library? Further, while Pogue is happy to quote Poole's comments about freetards (an apt term) and his sales figures he leaves out a very very important paragraph."To come back to the relationship between traditionally published books and their electronic counterparts: the happy truth is that right now, electronic downloads don't cannibalize printed sales; if anything, they encourage them. In fact, I would gladly give away my newer book, Unspeak, in the same format right now, except that I am contractually obliged to wait until next year to do so."I believe that holds true even for piracy, if your product is quality, and I can get a taste for free, I'll probably buy it. -- Anonymous Coward (email)
Kindle reviewA traditionalist reviews the Kindle: _fact_baker?currentPage=all(The New Yorker piece was written before amazon remotely deleted Orwell's 1984 from the Kindles of those who had purchased and downloaded the novel. Real books don't call home.) -- Edward Tufte
Response to Digital books and digital readers (Kindle, iPhone, etc.)Here's a feature I like --- using "Page up" and "Page down" gives one the impression the pages are actually turning, versus going directly from one page to another: simple thing that makes the digital book appear more like a "book" book.Mike Round -- Michael Round (email)
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