Chamber Four » formats

Wednesday Links 10-21-2009

Sean Clark — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 11:00:51 +0000

Wednesday again. As usual, let’s start off with ereaders and go from there.

The Barnes & Noble ereader (maybe named Athena or Nook) is looking pretty snazzy. It’s rumored to be priced competitively at $259; it’s got dual screens and runs on Android. Not to be outdone, so does the mysterious Spring Design’s Alex. Plastic Logic also released some details on their upcoming device, the QUE, which looks pretty sleek and will be available in just a few months.
Google has decided to launch an ebook store called Google Editions., which got the Frankfurt Book Fair atwitter. Walmart wants in too, so they will begin selling ebooks on Walmart.com. For the most part I find Walmart to be just about the most evil corporation on the planet, but it will be interesting to see what effect this has on ebook prices, beyond the current scuffle with Amazon–and what formats they make available.
German parliament bought a buttload of ereaders for some reason. And, might we see ebooks in bookstores soon? Aussies will. Corey Doctorow put an interesting piece for Publisher’s Weekly about ebooks and why he thinks they can be free. Read this interesting response to a savage review of Jonathan Lethem’s new book. Find a great “captain” Ahab or Poe tee shirt over at Novel-T.
For fun this week: Ugliest Tattoos is funny stuff. Until 10/25 you can get the awesome World of Goo (Mac/PC/Linux) legally and name your own price. This Brit video is pretty funny/clever.
And, finally, if you are the Russian spammers overloading our comments, please stop. It’s really annoying. (We’ve been scrambling to get the spam cleaned up, so we apologize to any commenters if your post gets deleted by mistake. Feel free to email us if this happens to you and we’ll get your post reactivated.)

Barnes & Noble eReader Device Revealed (sort of)

Sean Clark — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 11:00:36 +0000

Photo credit: Gizmodo

There have been a bunch of images and rumors floating around over the weekend about the soon-to-be released Barnes & Noble ereader device, and they’re some pretty slick images and rumors.

If all is to be believed, the machine–maybe named the Athena–is designed by former Apple designers (who also worked on the original Kindle?) and will feature two screens on a single plane. The main screen is black and white, utilizing E-Ink, and the second, smaller, navigation/data entry screen features full color multitouch LCD.

Pretty awesome and innovative. Such a combination could possibly obviate a lot of the discussions on the disparities between the various ereaders’ screens in the current generation. The machine supposedly runs on Google’s Android OS, meaning it could stand well above the rest in the firmware department as well.

Barnes & Noble has been selling ebooks at competitive prices in eReader format for some months now. They are clearly aiming to take a big bite out of the Kindle’s (not entirely deserved) pie. No word yet on whether they will take a similar propritary format approach as their competetion, but it would definitely be interesting if the device remians open to other formats (particulary if it can handle library books).

There will be a press conference on Tuesday–most likely a full, official reveal with specs. We’ll know more then. Check back later in the week for the skinny.

via Brighthand, DVICE, BusinessWeek, Gizmodo

Stanza Maker Gobbled Up By Amazon

Sean Clark — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 15:00:38 +0000

image credit: notempire.com

In what could be terrible news, Lexcycle, the producer of the best (by far) reader app for the iPhone, Stanza, has announced their sale to Amazon. If Amazon uses this move to try and strangle the market and push their proprietary Kindle format on mobile devices, this could be very bad news indeed and indicate a big step backwards for mobile device ereading. If however, they stick to their claim to leave Stanza unchanged, or better yet, they open Stanza to the Kindle format without locking out other formats, it could be a step forward. We’ll have to wait and see, but don’t hold your breath.

via Apple Insider.

iPhone Readers: Wattpad

Sean Clark — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 13:00:54 +0000

I’m finding it pretty hard to understand why people are still churning out clearly sub-par reader apps for the iPhone, and harder to believe that they’re seeing any sort of profit from these programs. Wattpad brings one innovation to the mix, but its humdrum presentation and centralized online library prevent it from being close to a contender for the go-to reader app.

Wattpad’s innovation is the ability to share. You can tag books you like which will in turn recommend it to readers with similar tags and libraries as you.

Some of Wattpad's suggestions are unhelpful at best and obviously done by title words.

There are also other sharing options such as emailing recommendations through the app, but Wattpad can hardly be granted credit for letting readers emails someone about a book. The recommendation system seems to work a lot like those of Netflix and Pandora, clearly controlled by an algorithm of some sort and therefore every interesting recommendation that shows up bring with it four duds. It’s also obvious that the back up plan for this is to send similar titles, as my recommendations based on the pre-populated Curious Case of Benjamin Button suggest. It’s certainly nice to see someone trying innovation out though, and it’s a commendable move to try book-sharing integration into readers.

Books are all free which is nice, and you can upload your own documents (from ebooks to fanfics) to Wattpad’s website. The downside to this sharing system is that texts don’t download to your iPhone, rather your library is merely a collection of bookmarks to the Wattpad database. Therefore how long your books actually remain available cannot be certain (Twilight was at the top of the What’s New list, and I imagine it’ll be gone the second Little, Brown and Company’s lawyers find out). This also means no service, no reading. So Wattpad’s probably pretty useless on an airplane.

Requiring service to access a book is sucky.

The presentation is where Wattpad really sucks. The texts aren’t cleaned up very well, and so often the screen is filled with messy formatting. Font, text size, color and background color are all customizable. Landscape reading is available with a twist of the accelerometer. Rather than turning pages, books are presented is a single scrolling page which can be set to scroll automatically if you’re too lazy to swipe your thumb (page up and down buttons are available so simulate page turns). There is no bookmarking capability, but Wattpad seems to remember your place in multiple books. There is also a rather unhelpful (because it changes with text size) page number listed in the top corner of the screen.

There's so much crap on the screen that won't go away.

And oh, is the screen real estate is poorly utilized. The header bar, menu bar, useless scroll speed bar and more useless vertical position-in-the-book map take up a solid chunk of the small screen. They go away if you tap the center, but come back 2 seconds later for no good reason. I couldn’t find a way to get them to stay away. When navigating the menus, ugly popup ads clutter things, which is especially annoying since utilizing the full capability of this app requires you to visit their website and presumably see plenty of ad exposure in the process.

So while Wattpad brings a few good ideas to the table, its poor execution makes for an unpleasant reading experience. Reading is an inherently peaceful experience, and any reader app that can’t capture a sense of the comfortable is a failure. Clutter and disorganization don’t make for a comfortable read.

Script Format on an eReader

Nico Vreeland — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 14:45:25 +0000

A printed script page

I’ve been working on a play lately, so I got it into my head to see how well script formatting worked in various file formats on an ereader. Turns out, not that great.

It’s a bit of a moot point anyway, seeing as nobody reads scripts without needing to take notes on them, and no current ereader can satisfactorily do that, so consider this purely curiosity.

The long and the short of is that PDF is the only readable format for scripts. Hit the jump for a complete breakdown, pictures, and more details.

The picture above is of a printed script page. You can see the four primary formatting elements: character names, dialogue, parentheticals, and descriptions of action. This is what it should look like.

I began with the original file, created in Open Office, and then I exported it as an .rtf and a PDF. I converted the .rtf to ePub and LRF using Calibre. Below is a gallery of the results (click on thumbnails for full-size pictures).

Worst was ePub, which is entirely unusable, obviously.

Next most useless is LRF, which was stripped of all its formatting, including the Courier font.

The original .rtf file displayed fairly well on the ereader, except there’s something a little wonky. You can see it in the parentheticals: some formatting rule is set wrong. The character names are also off-center. When the size is increased to large, these problems become much more noticeable.

PDF is more promising. Everything’s in its proper place, but it’s quite small. Bumping the size up doesn’t help. Whenever you change the size of a PDF, the formatting has a conniption fit; this is my biggest complaint about reading PDFs on a dedicated device. However, you can change the orientation to “horizontal” and the text becomes at least readable.

You could theoretically increase the font size before exporting a PDF, but that would throw off the pagination, which is, after all, the reason people use script formatting.

In any case, the horizontal PDF is readable, which is about as good as we’ll get.

(Note: it could well be that using Calibre to convert to LRF and ePub is what stripped away the formatting. I’ll try to find a different ePub creator to see if it makes a difference. If it does, I’ll post again.)

I realize that all this affects probably less than 1% of readers, but I think preserving this kind of little-used format will be crucial during the conversion to digital reading, if we’re to convince non-believers (and ourselves) that converting to ereading involves only aesthetic and nostlagic drawbacks.