iPod Touch

I got an iPod Touch recently, as a replacement for an older iPod. The  
only things I wanted it to do were play music and serve as a pocket  
photo album. But I've been playing with it as an eBook reader, and I  
really think it might work for me.

I'd tried Mobipocket on an early (160x160 pixel, black-and-white--no,  
make that dark-grey on snot-green display) Palm and decided that was  
a bad joke.

The iPod Touch, held sideways, has a screen resolution of 480 x 320  
pixels, 163 dpi, and screen dimensions of about 3" by 2". The pixel  
dimensions are actually the same as those of the Rocket eBook  
(REB1100), which I found to be very satisfactory for pleasurable  
("ludic") reading, but of course the iPod Touch is much smaller. The  
screen is bright, sharp, and crisp. Because of the high resolution,  
characters are smooth and well-formed, with no trace of "jaggies."

Held sideways, the screen is wider than a newspaper column, and I  
don't think there can be any argument that it is much more legible  
than a newspaper.

I'm mostly using the Stanza application (all the applications for the  
iPod are blessedly cheap; Stanza is free). I'm a retiree, I wear  
bifocals, and cannot read "fine print" any more; the phone book is OK  
but the street names on a dense city road map require dragging out a  
magnifying glass. I tweaked the default setting; I'm using the  
Verdana font; the font size and line spacing controls don't display a  
numeric size, but in landscape orientation I'm displaying ten lines  
of up to about 42 characters each. I have it set for unjustified lines.

The big issue is that you're typically seeing less than a full  
paragraph at a time. In normal reading the eye wanders surprisingly  
far above and below the line you think you're reading, so comfortable  
reading requires a bigger "window" into the text than a left-brained  
engineer might expect. You need to flip "pages" frequently (every ten  
or fifteen seconds). Page flipping with Stanza is done by tapping  
near the left or right edge of the screen, and the flip itself is  
"instantanteous," or fast enough not to be disruptive.

I'm now about a third of the way through Sinclair Lewis' "Free Air"  
and think I really can read novels on this thing. I won't know until  
I've really finished a few long novels--the day I knew the Rocket  
eBook worked for me was the day I came to the end of Ouida's Signa, a  
very long Victorian novel. I'm aware of the page size limitation as I  
read, which is not the case with the the Rocket, but I think it's OK.

The Stanza application itself is well designed, and Lexcycle supports  
an impressive online catalog of no-cost content, apparently including  
all of Project Gutenberg. You can import content in many formats via  
a companion Stanza desktop application, currently also a no-cost  
download (it's billed as a "beta" which makes me wonder whether this  
will be true indefinitely). Stanza is very nicely done.

Of course I've also downloaded Amazon's Kindle application, but for  
the moment it's a nonstarter because it doesn't seem to supporta  
landscape orientation, nor does it offer a way to turn off line  
justification. In a font size that's comfortable for me, justified  
lines across a 2" wide column just don't work. I hope Amazon will fix  
this. If they do, then based on my experience so far with Stanza, I  
might become a customer for Kindle content.

Incidentally, just generally the iPod Touch is very nicely done. It  
has the usual Apple virtues; all the stuff on it really works. As I  
say, I got it purely to be an .mp3 player and pocket photo album.  
I've been very favorably surprised at how nicely and easily it  
connects to wireless networks, by how usable the Safari browser is  
(the pinch-zoom feature really works), as well as how well all the  
other Internet-enabled features work. Getting what seems to be a  
usable eBook reader "for free" is gravy.

Oh, by the way, this is the device that proves to me that Michael  
Hart was right after all. He's been saying for years that general- 
purpose devices are the way to go. I've always felt that to date  
general-purpose "computers" of any size remain usability disasters.  
All my experiences with dedicated portable devices (calculators,  
cameras, mp3 players) have been good, whereas all the general-purpose  
"pocket PCs" I've seen have been jokes and very expensive jokes at  
that. But the iPod Touch has changed my mind. It's a general-purpose  
device all of whose multiple functions really are as well-designed  
and easy to use as single-function devices. The fact that you can  
browse the web on a Wi-Fi network doesn't compromise it's basic  
function as a music player, not one bit.


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