Testing out my iPod touch as an e-book reader
Author: Hoger
Last month I headed to Bribie Island for an extended weekend of writing, relaxing, chatting with friends and a few drinks. I took three print books with me and loaded a few files onto my first generation iPod touch to test it out as an e-book reader.
I was using the excellent stanza reader and had downloaded George Orwell’s “Why I Write”, War of the Worlds, Cory Doctorow’s “Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future” and a few other bits and pieces.
Stanza is deceptively easy to use. Put the iPod on its side and you get a landscape reading screen. To “turn” the page you simply tap the right or left side of the screen, depending on whether you want to go forward or back. To change the font size you put two fingers on the screen and pinch or push apart your fingers depending on whether you want it bigger or smaller. Unlike the iPod’s photo interface this was a bit buggy but it wasn’t too much of an annoyance given it’s something you really only have to do once and then forget (adjusted for declining eyesight over the years, of course).
I read a bit of the Orwell book and then got stuck into the Doctorow essays. These were a great choice – engaging and relatively short. Coming in at 115 grams, my iPod weighs about a third of a standard paperback (350 grams or 12 ounces), so holding it is no problem. You can turn the brightness right up if you’re outdoors or turn it down, which was my preference, indoors. That saved on battery power and made reading the screen pretty easy on the eye.
The verdict? As an e-book reader, the iPod touch mostly works. It’s light and puts very little strain on the eye thanks to its good brightness control and the crispness of the text. I think it was lucky I was reading non fiction that had no dialogue and infrequent paragraph breaks. The page in the photo has 109 words on it but a dialogue heavy page of Lee Battersby’s“Alchymical Romance” has just over 80 words. To put it in context – that’s about three paragraphs of a well written newspaper article and I think I’d get annoyed having to tap the screen every 10 seconds or so. But maybe that’s me.
Unlike some people I’m not ready to declare the iPod (or any smart phone) theconvergence device. I think we’ll end up converging on two types of devices that share similar functions but mych different sizes. But more on that another time. As an ultraportable e-book reader, it works.
October 24th, 2008 at 3:06 pm
You know, any day where I can be assured I’ve annoyed you in some way, I can sleep happy at night :)))
We’re not going to be able to get to Queensland *again* this summer, so get your asses over to our end and prove to Lyn that I should have one of these shiny gadgets in person!
October 24th, 2008 at 9:32 pm
I bet if Lyn saw a story of hers on an iPod and had a picture posted on a blog she’d want one.
October 25th, 2008 at 9:37 am
Are you kidding? All she’d have to know is that it came in pink and she’d want one :)
December 14th, 2009 at 12:38 pm
I hate the Kindle. I gave one of these to my wife for Mothers’ Day and now she reads a book per week. She gets new books in literally seconds so she doesn’t have to stop reading. She never puts it down. I’m so lonely.