iphone or networked book reader?

Last year, longtime readers of this blog will note, I did some work with the Institute for the Future of the Book. One of the things that we were always talking about was the failure of all previous dedicated electronic book readers.

Well, that may have come to an end on Friday.

It is remarkably comfortable to read text on the iPhone. The screen is small, but it is 160 dpi, roughly double what a conventional screen has and about 1/2 the dpi of a printed page. At 320 x 480, the screen is quite a bit smaller than than, say the Sony Reader 's 600 x 400, but instead of the latter's 4 level grayscale screen, it is capable of displaying thousands, if not millions of colors under its optical quality glass. The iPhone's zooming and navigation features work remarkably well for browsing texts, even multi-column texts and pulling out the iPhone to read on the subway is easier than reading the paper, let alone reading text from one's laptop. Of course if the iPhone were double or triple the size, say the size of a Moleskine notebook, it would be perfect for this. But then it wouldn't be a phone.

Perversely however, the iPhone lacks the ability to download text or PDF documents to it so I am condemned to posting them to a private web site and downloading them via Safari in order to read them. But if e-book readers have always failed—partly because they were too limited in their functions, the iPhone's stealthy approach to the e-book may be precisely what was needed.

Last year, longtime readers of this blog will note, I did some work with the Institute for the Future of the Book. One of the things that we were always talking about was the failure of all previous dedicated electronic book readers.

Well, that may have come to an end on Friday.

It is remarkably comfortable to read text on the iPhone. The screen is small, but it is 160 dpi, roughly double what a conventional screen has and about 1/2 the dpi of a printed page. At 320 x 480, the screen is quite a bit smaller than than, say the Sony Reader 's 600 x 400, but instead of the latter's 4 level grayscale screen, it is capable of displaying thousands, if not millions of colors under its optical quality glass. The iPhone's zooming and navigation features work remarkably well for browsing texts, even multi-column texts and pulling out the iPhone to read on the subway is easier than reading the paper, let alone reading text from one's laptop. Of course if the iPhone were double or triple the size, say the size of a Moleskine notebook, it would be perfect for this. But then it wouldn't be a phone.

Perversely however, the iPhone lacks the ability to download text or PDF documents to it so I am condemned to posting them to a private web site and downloading them via Safari in order to read them. But if e-book readers have always failed—partly because they were too limited in their functions, the iPhone's stealthy approach to the e-book may be precisely what was needed.