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I have somewhere a half-finished post about reading on the iPod that I can't find. Anyway, in summary: bought iPod Touch over a year ago as part of a university deal on a desktop, and was then startled by the App store thing bursting up a couple of months later, as I’d just thought of it as a slightly nifty music player. Didn’t really appreciate the utility of it (my first iPod was seriously faulty, which didn’t help) – I’d downloaded a few games, but nothing else - until someone somewhere on the internet mentioned there were e-reader programs for it. Wild enthusiasm ensued (plus a number of other apps outside the scope of this discussion).
I went with Stanza as my e-reader program, although I can’t remember exactly how I achieved that decision, and dumped a bunch of books from Project Gutenberg on to the iPod. Technical points: I like the reading interface (although the recent upgrade defaulted to a very annoying page-turning effect; I prefer sliding), I adjust brightness more often than type size (both done by relatively easy finger movements within an existing text), I like the baseline indicator for distance within book (a shaded line where the shading creeps across with % read) as well as the more detailed within chapter/book announcement you get by tapping, and I have no idea why there needs to be a whole special icon for switching the text to white on black. And it annoys me when I hit it by mistake.
Copying over .doc and .pdf files has worked relatively well, although the chapter breaks often fail (I should actually try trouble-shooting this) – one .doc file broke about 3 paragraphs before each actual chapter break, which gave a weird feeling of suspense, and a 500k word .doc that should have come through as ~120 chapters ended up as 7 chapters, one of which is 2 pages long, one ~200 and the rest all about 1500, which I think is its maximum text chunk. One .pdf file copied over without paragraph breaks and was breathlessly unreadable. Chapter epigraphs confuse it and usually end up in the previous chapter.
Actual reading experience – screen rather than paper doesn’t bother me, but I have been reading large chunks of fiction on-screen for the last 15 years so may be an outlier in this respect. My personal disadvantage list for screen reads is losing the text awareness memory of the physical location of an extract (still happens on the iPod) and not knowing how far through a story I am if it’s not all on one page (fine on iPod). Stanza also has the electronic bookmark option, which I use quite a bit, although I still did most of my critique notes (see below) on paper so I could relate them to each other. Portability, slightly increased tolerance of rain (I have it in a protective case) and reading without convenient external light source (buses at night) all go to the iPod; battery issues favour books. The battery life isn’t bad if I just read, but internet usage does go through it a bit faster (fortunately there are very few free unsecured wireless networks where I currently live. Well, actually, this is unfortunate, but weather formation, silver lining etc). Also, I can’t shove things in between the pages, which is both positive and negative when I think about the number of frantic book-shaking searches for crucial pieces of paper that I have had to conduct in the past.
( Walter Scott, Ivanhoe. )
( PG Wodehouse, Psmith, journalist. )
( PG Wodehouse, Jill the reckless. )
( PG Wodehouse, Mike at Wrykyn (re-read). )
( PG Wodehouse, The adventures of Sally. )
( Eleanor Farjeon, Martin Pippin in the apple orchard. )
( Johanna Spyri, Heidi (re-read). )
I also read two unpublished novels for critique.
I went with Stanza as my e-reader program, although I can’t remember exactly how I achieved that decision, and dumped a bunch of books from Project Gutenberg on to the iPod. Technical points: I like the reading interface (although the recent upgrade defaulted to a very annoying page-turning effect; I prefer sliding), I adjust brightness more often than type size (both done by relatively easy finger movements within an existing text), I like the baseline indicator for distance within book (a shaded line where the shading creeps across with % read) as well as the more detailed within chapter/book announcement you get by tapping, and I have no idea why there needs to be a whole special icon for switching the text to white on black. And it annoys me when I hit it by mistake.
Copying over .doc and .pdf files has worked relatively well, although the chapter breaks often fail (I should actually try trouble-shooting this) – one .doc file broke about 3 paragraphs before each actual chapter break, which gave a weird feeling of suspense, and a 500k word .doc that should have come through as ~120 chapters ended up as 7 chapters, one of which is 2 pages long, one ~200 and the rest all about 1500, which I think is its maximum text chunk. One .pdf file copied over without paragraph breaks and was breathlessly unreadable. Chapter epigraphs confuse it and usually end up in the previous chapter.
Actual reading experience – screen rather than paper doesn’t bother me, but I have been reading large chunks of fiction on-screen for the last 15 years so may be an outlier in this respect. My personal disadvantage list for screen reads is losing the text awareness memory of the physical location of an extract (still happens on the iPod) and not knowing how far through a story I am if it’s not all on one page (fine on iPod). Stanza also has the electronic bookmark option, which I use quite a bit, although I still did most of my critique notes (see below) on paper so I could relate them to each other. Portability, slightly increased tolerance of rain (I have it in a protective case) and reading without convenient external light source (buses at night) all go to the iPod; battery issues favour books. The battery life isn’t bad if I just read, but internet usage does go through it a bit faster (fortunately there are very few free unsecured wireless networks where I currently live. Well, actually, this is unfortunate, but weather formation, silver lining etc). Also, I can’t shove things in between the pages, which is both positive and negative when I think about the number of frantic book-shaking searches for crucial pieces of paper that I have had to conduct in the past.
( Walter Scott, Ivanhoe. )( PG Wodehouse, Psmith, journalist. )( PG Wodehouse, Jill the reckless. )( PG Wodehouse, Mike at Wrykyn (re-read). )( PG Wodehouse, The adventures of Sally. )( Eleanor Farjeon, Martin Pippin in the apple orchard. )( Johanna Spyri, Heidi (re-read). )I also read two unpublished novels for critique.
