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Read the rest of this articleNook and Kindle 2 safe for now, reading on an iPhone is painful
The entire sales pitch behind eBook readers like Amazon’s Kindle 2 and the Barnes & Noble Nook is their paper-like reading experience. Without that piece you’re left with a limited functionality device that can slowly access text and image content with black and white rendering. Apple’s iPhone on the other hand does just about everything with the right application – except display text and images like paper.
That’s not stopping some people from using the iPhone as an ultra portable, multi-function reading device, but overall it doesn’t solve the eyestrain issue. Still, Flurry reports an uptake in the amount of applications being designed for the iPhone that provide book content on the device. Are iPhone users following suit?
That part is less certain because measuring which apps users are accessing how frequently gets into some stickier privacy issues. Flurry shares that around 500,000 people use their applications more than 100 times per month but doesn’t break that down in any specific fashion.
From a green perspective convergence is a good thing because it reduces what would normally be the carbon footprint of several devices to that of a single device. Conveniently that works for users to because they have fewer things to lug around.
But, that only makes sense if the convergence maintains at least a majority of the functionality from the original device. In this case the single most important quality of an eBook reader, a paper-like reading experience, is eliminated by using an iPhone.
E Ink Co. plans on pushing out color screens with lower costs before long, and competitors to E Ink are joining into the fray fast. That may mean that the Kindle 2 and Nook only have a bubble of time before mobile phones start to invade their fledgling industry.
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Comments
Excuse me! The iPhone was never meant to be a e-book reader. There is no comparison and the Kindle was never meant to be a phone or more than what it is.
While smart phones are a neat toy, the idea of reading books on a portable electronic device of any kind is about as nonsensical as watching movies on your computer. Yes, you can do it but why would you want to?
You'll see more people needing reading glasses sooner in the next couple of decades than at any time before then.
Why are you elevating a "paper-like reading experience" to a must-have status? I have read more than two dozen books using the Kindle software on my iPhone, and I don't know that I enjoy it any less than my wife does her Kindle. I do know that I have my books with me all the time, whereas she has to remember to bring the extra gadget along.
I read books on my iPhone all the time. I use it as a dictionary. I read manuals on it. News, etc.
There are no clinical studies published that I can find that say that reading the e-readers strains eyes less. In fact there are blogs out there that are saying Kindle 2 strains their eyes. So, I'm skeptical. Why is it the single most important factor?
I would think that the single most important factor is how many people actually read the books that they buy on the platform. Or maybe the proportion of people having the software who continue to buy books, or some algorithm like that.
Two comments --
1) I'm posting this from an iPhone and I find your site hard to read and hard to post to (low contrast design and slow key response).
2) I have about 300 books on my phone, mostly in Stanza and the Kindle Reader. I use the phone in landscape orientation and find the text just as easy to read as a magazine column of text.
i love my iphone for books so much, i feel a real sadness to think i'll probably never buy a physical book again...and i usually bought 2 or 3 a month. i read on the kindle for iphone or b&n's ereader without any eyestrain that i can notice. the text is also not too small. after all, i can only read one paragraph at a time, regardless of what size screen it's on. the iphone size is fine, and like the poster above said, it's always with me. finally! my books in hand at all times!
I haven't touched a book in years but have started reading again since I discovered Stanza on the iPhone, I find it perfectly comfortable due to the adjustable font sizes, contrast, etc and the best thing is that the device s always with me so I have it handy when in a queue, on the train.
No eye strain detected so far and I can't see the point in buying another device for functionality already present in the phone.
I just started using QuickReader on the iPhone and I think it could be the future of mobile reading. It provides a reading experience that is better, in its own way, than paper. E-Ink technology will never be able to do this because of its slow refresh rate.
I have been using reading devices for more than ten years now, starting with a Rocket Book.
From my point of view, both the Kindel and Nook are missing an important feature; neither are backlighted. For me, lacking this feature makes them less than functional.