Reading 2.0
I’ve now gone into the digital reading realm full steam by downloading some books on my iPhone. Not just browsing electronic reference material and manuals, but actually reading actual books.
My experience with Dashiell Hammett was a good one, as I read his influential detective novel Red Harvest in the fantastic Stanza app on my iPhone. Stanza lets you download, for free, a whole boatload of out-of-copyright works through sources like Project Gutenberg, among several others. They’ve also got a handy desktop app you can install and use to transmit new books to your phone over wi-fi. The iPhone app is incredibly flexible and allows you to modify most settings, like typeface and font size, colors, spacing, and allows for full control of sleep mode and the dynamic page rotation behavior. For a free app, it’s pretty amazing*.
I’ve been dabbling in Amazon’s offering with their Kindle iPhone app, too. I bought Nixonland a few weeks ago through the Kindle store, and The Man in the High Castle even more recently. The Kindle app shares a lot in common with Stanza, but the most noticeable difference is the lack of customization options. What it lacks there, though, it makes up for with it’s Whispersync utility that keeps your reading progress in sync across your Kindle devices. Useful if you have a full Kindle and the iPhone version. Your devices are bound to your Amazon account, so purchases are delivered immediately over-the-air. Slick and functional.
Electronic delivery and reading on a small device do have their advantages, along with some quirks you might expect. I’ve had a good experience so far, but I have a few comments on what Amazon could do to vastly improve the general “Kindle experience,” with the format and the hardware.
First of all, reading on the small iPhone screen doesn’t bother me near as much as I had expected. I’ve even used it a fair amount for my pre-bedtime reading. Portable, on-the-go reading is what it’s best at, but even at home I find myself using it. The tactile response of flicking back and forth between pages definitely feels preferable to the button press page turning of the full Kindle device or the Sony Reader. Of course I’d prefer to read a paperback, but the paperback is not in my pocket everywhere I go, so the portability is obviously also a plus. And with a light tap in the upper right corner, pages are bookmarked.
Regardless of the obvious negative differences of electronic text from hard copy, ultimately you are getting the same content for less money with the digital format. Kindle books seem to average around $10-$12. That’s just something you have to balance with your desire to read paper instead of glowing glass. I don’t mind saving a few bucks and reading it electronically, though with older works, you’re better off looking in bookstores for used copies you can nab for one or two dollars. Unless of course you want the portability. Another benefit to electronic text format for me is that they don’t consume space on my shelves. Having your book collection exist in the aether is something that’s questionable for some folks, understandably. And even though I’ve got a fairly epic assemblage of books, new and old, I’m even coming around to the idea of my library being in the cloud. No more shelf space required! Colette would definitely prefer it that way.
Some genres of books are extremely difficult to digitize, though. Atlases, reference books, some science works; basically anything with a heavy use of graphics and visuals is best suited to larger page sizes and physical page flipping. I know when I was reading Lord of the Rings, I referenced the maps of Middle-Earth and the glossaries constantly, something that would have dulled my experience had I been forced to do so on a tiny iPhone screen. Physics, mathematics, and geography books are full of diagrams and figures that would be diluted or non-existent on a tiny device.
There are a couple of features that could elevate the Kindle book reading experience above traditional formats, the first being it’s primary advantage: it’s a connected, electronic device. When reading on my Kindle app, I want to be able to highlight a word and use it as a search term in a dictionary or Wikipedia or Google Maps, embedded right in the app. Though this would distract from the experience of reading and interpreting the contents in your own brain, the ability to click Isaac Newton’s name and find his Wikipedia entry could add valuable context. Mapping a location on-demand is another thing I’d enjoy, as a spatial-minded geography person. While reading about the Brooklyn Bridge and it’s surroundings, I could add depth by pulling up satellite imagery of the area to build a map of Lower Manhattan in my head. “Book rentals” are another thing Amazon could implement by taking advantage if Kindle’s electronic nature. It would be neat to pay $1 and get the first 50-100 pages of a book, then be able to pay the difference for the remainder once I’ve decided it’s worth my money. Sort of an analog to what you can do down at Barnes & Noble. I can sit there and read half a novel, then decide I’m not digging it, shelve it and leave. That can’t be done with e-books, and I see no real reason why not. A dollar to “test drive” a book is no big deal, I’d do it all the time.
The elephant-in-the-Kindle-Store, as it were, is something that’s device agnostic, and it has to do with DRM — sort of. When I buy a book on the Kindle Store, I have to register my device to my Amazon account in order for “Whispernet” to sync the file to my device, a wonderful feature if you have multiple Kindle devices for your content. But this means that my content is always bound to my hardware. I have no way of “lending” a file to a friend to read, as I would a paperback. What I want to see Amazon do is turn the Kindle Store into a “social reading” environment. I could buy a book and “lend” it to my brother, at which point it would become available to him, and unavailable to me. When he’s finished, he could “return” the file to me, transferring permissions along with it. I could even reserve the ability to “revoke” his permission to read it, just like walking into his house and taking back my copy. I’ve sometimes wished for such a simple procedure when a friend keeps forgetting to return a DVD or CD of mine. E-books could also allow me to add comments and remarks inline with the content to share with my friends. I could press a “view friends’ comments” button to have my Kindle display footnotes linking to my friends’ thoughts on particular parts on-the-fly. Such a feature would make it more enjoyable to read the same things friends are reading, fostering more discussion electronically and in person.
Of course I’m no stranger to “Shit’s Easy Syndrome,” and I know that developing this sort of interaction in a copyright-based medium like books would be crazily complicated. Additions involving money and security are always touchy, and it may not be something they’re eager to undertake. But that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be worth the effort. In fact, the geniuses at Amazon probably have these features brewing in their Subversion repositories as we speak, waiting to be tested.
I see so much potential for e-books, so many ways we could augment the experience of reading a book. I hope Amazon takes advantage of their new platform. If anyone can do it, they can.
* As it turns out, Amazon has bought Lexcycle (the developer of Stanza) already. I can’t wait until they integrate it’s superior features into Kindle.
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colemanm
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Andrys
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Andrys
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colemanm
