The Skim
Commercial Books
Yes, indeed, Apple has missed the boat. It could not have possibly missed the boat any worse if it were standing at a bus stop. In a city where there's no bus system. Y'see, a book reader is every bit as key to the iPhone and iPod Touch experience as almost any other kind of media reader. Yet there's no built-in support for it.
The iPhone is designed to be the computer and the media library that you carry with you when you don't think you'll need 'em. Is Apple suggesting that America's transportation system is now running at such stellar peak efficiency that we're never stuck somewhere waiting for either (a) a departure announcement or (b) the cold, sweet kiss of death, whichever comes first?
(In case someone from Apple is reading I should make it clear: this is most assuredly not the case.)
The iPhone has a brilliant big crisp screen and the ability to turn pages with just a flick of the finger. It's a natural for reading books. True, if I'm going to be reading for a few hours, I'd rather curl up on the sofa with a thick paperback than a slim iPhone. But when I have 20 minutes to kill in a dentist's waiting room, or I want to proofread a long report on the train ride to work, the iPhone is an ideal tool.
Well, Apple might not be interested in making money by selling books for the iPhone. But others are certainly eager to stick their hands in the till. And it's easy to convert both the free books you can download online, as well as the big documents you have on your hard drive, into formats that can be read in the cushy comfort of an iPhone book reader.
Electronic book distribution hasn't achieved even a fraction of the escape velocity of online music sales. It's sort of a famous uncracked nut of marketing, although apparently every media and tech company worth mentioning is striding toward it purposefully with a freakishly big hammer.
Tip
Amazon.com isn't the least bit shy about taking full advantage of its power and reach. Sure, you can shop for books on the iPhone, but you can also make purchases from any Web browser. Your Amazon.com store account knows that you have a copy of the Kindle app. Any time you view a Kindle e-book from your desktop Web browser, the item's Web page gives you the option of purchasing the e-book and sending it to your iPhone. It'll be downloaded directly to the device once you launch the Kindle app and tap the app's Refresh button.
Electronic publishing is the obvious future of the business and plenty of companies have convinced themselves that they've found the right combination of pricing, convenience, technology, and marketing to finally convince consumers that dead trees are best left dead. But so far ... well, the huddled masses must be afraid of dropping their BlackBerries and Palms and laptops in the tub or something. Or maybe they just don't want to spend $250 for an electronic device that will allow them to spend $14 for a downloadable version of a $22 Danielle Steele hardback.
So will Apple ever start selling e-books via the iTunes Store?
Mmmmmaybe. Possibly. Who knows?
For now, it isn't, and Steve Jobs is on record as pooh-poohing the entire market. Which natcherly leaves the market wide open to other players.
Amazon.com has made the showiest attempt at creating "the iTunes Store of e-books." It started off by creating "the iPod of e-book devices" — the Kindle — and over the past three years it's sold so many of them that if you ask the folks at Amazon. com how many they've sold, they mutter something into their shoes and finally say that it's not important how many they've sold, really.
Still, Amazon.com is by far the strongest mover in this market. It's a natural extension of its business, and the Kindle e-book reader has an advantage that no reader from Sony or any other company has: It's the pet project of the company's crazy billionaire CEO, Jeff Bezos.
(Bezos is also bankrolling the research, development, and construction of his own private space fleet. You tell me if he's going to run out of funding, or bull-headed determination.)
The Kindle app is a free download from the App Store. It acts both as a tool for finding and buying e-books from Amazon. com, and as a reader. Tap on the Get Books button to open the front door to the online bookstore. You can browse on any datum you desire: title, subject, author, the works.
When you find a title you like (see Figure 9-1) you can either buy the book immediately, or tap the Try a Sample button to download a free taste (usually the book's intro, and then the first chapter or two).
Either way, the title will appear in the Kindle app's bookshelf, shown in Figure 9-2. Amazon has a very friendly attitude toward your purchases. You can remove titles from your iPhone once you've finished reading them, but the app and Amazon never forget what you've purchased. If you get a hankering to re-read this book in a few months, you can re-download it right from the app itself.
Tap on any title to start reading. It's a fairly muscular reader that works in either portrait or landscape mode, and it allows you set bookmarks and take notes as you go. Kindle presents you with a clean, uncluttered screen of resizable text. Figure 9-3 shows you what you'll see if you give the screen a tap to expose its function buttons.
I buy all of my e-books from Amazon. com for a simple reason: I also own an actual hardware Kindle reader. An iPhone makes a marvelous companion to this (yoiks — $259) reader. I bring the Kindle with me on trips, or when I know I'm going to be hanging around somewhere waiting for a good while. And when I launch my Kindle app on the iPhone, not only can I download an iPhone copy of the book I'm reading on the "real" Kindle, but the app is also smart enough to pick up at the page where I left off on the other device.
But despite Amazon.com's brand-name and its crazy billionaire CEO's commitment to The Cause, it's hard to label one company an outright winner in the e-book market. Amazon.com does have the largest e-book library (about 300,000 titles) but that's a little like being the best surfer in Minne-sota; 300,000 e-books are a mere bookbag compared with the millions of current and out-of-print paperbacks and hardcovers you can order from Amazon.com.
So eReader (made by Fictionwise) is still worth a mention. It's another free app that encourages you to spend money at an external service. In this case, (you guessed it) the online store at www.ereader.com (see Figure 9-4).
The store attracts top books by top authors, often selling the e-book edition on day-and-date with their hardcover release. If you do Thenjoy the Long-Since Lapsed Into Public Domain genre — I suppose this Dickens fellow sort of knew what he was doing — there are also plenty of free and cheap-as-free public domain titles available.
eReader.com works just like the main Amazon.com store page. Click, search, browse, click, buy, after you've created a free account on the site, of course. As with the Kindle app, your books are delivered in the form of DRM'd (copy-protected) files that can be read only by eReader-compatible reader apps. There are versions for just about every desktop and mobile OS out there.
After you've bought your books from eReader, you can install them on your iPhone directly from the device.
Launch the eReader app and tap the + (plus) button on the Bookshelf page. Tell eReader you want to download books from eReader.com by tapping the eReader Sites button.
Enter your eReader.com login information. A list of your purchased books appears.
Tap the name of the book you'd like to download and eReader confirms that you really want to grab it (see Figure 9-5).
The download begins automatically. When finished, the new book appears with the rest of the titles in your Bookshelf.
The first time you open a purchased book, eReader confirms that you bought it legitimately by asking for the credit-card number you used to purchase it. Which seems squirrely, I know, but if eReader were out to commit card fraud, it hasn't made its move yet — I bought my first title from them a year or more ago, with no nefarious results.
The reading experience is nice. You're presented with a full and flush page of text, and the eReader app's buttons and user-interface elements don't appear unless you tap the screen to call them into view (see Figure 9-6). You can adjust font sizes and page flow, and make other adjustments to make the experience more comfortable.
Otherwise, you turn pages with a careless flick of your finger. Like all friendly iPhone apps, the screen rotates as the iPhone does.
I like the overall eReader experience. Its prices are no bargain (I've no idea why an electronic edition should cost the same as the "dead trees" edition) and usually aren't competitive with what you'll find in the Kindle Store. But unlike Amazon.com, eReader.com often offers pretty hefty store-wide sales.
I do wish its library of titles was as large as the Kindle's. But both the Kindle app and eReader offer you a much, much wider range of titles than most corner bookstores do. You're likely to find any book of note published in the past five or so years, all new bestsellers, and any book by a prominent author.
Which frankly is the best that we can hope for before Apple enters the e-book market, partners with Amazon.com, and utterly crushes eReader and all other competitors. (Fingers crossed on that one.)
These online stores bring a friendly, iTunes-ish (well, more like "iTunes-ish-y") face to the e-book experience. But as indicated above, there are hundreds of thousands of books out on the Internet that are free for the downloading. To say nothing about all the documents that you come across in your professional and personal life that begs for a more luxurious reading experience than the bare-bones Microsoft Office reader that's baked into the iPhone OS.
LexCycle (www.lexcycle.com) seems to have applied both lobes of their collective brain to the problem of iPhone e-book reading because they've come up with a total slam-dunk of a solution: Stanza, acommer -cial desktop e-book reader app (available for both PC and Mac) and a free iPhone edition that complement each other wonderfully. It's such a killer desktop and iPhone app that (get this) Amazon.com bought the company.
Figure 9-7 shows the Mac edition. The desktop edition is itself a stirring testimonial to the credibility of electronic books. It can open just about any kind of text document imaginable — including all the popular e-book formats floating around. It can read the books you bought from eReader. com and can also directly download free e-books from a number of online libraries. But for now, let's look at its ability to convert desktop e-books and docs.
"What formats are those?"
Great. Just great. Okay, you asked for it:
"Open e-Book, Amazon Kindle, Mobi-pocket, HTML, PDF, Microsoft LIT, PalmDoc, plain text, RTF, Microsoft Word, and Fiction-Book."
Yes, even Amazon.com Kindle-formatted books! Alas, it can't open or read Kindle books that are protected by digital rights management, but both the desktop and iPhone editions of Stanza can read any unlocked and unprotected file.
But my little book isn't here to sell desktop book readers. You only care about the iPhone angle, don't you?
Copying an e-book or any other document from your desktop to the iPhone edition of Stanza is so simple, I actu ally found it confusing at first. And it was my fault, not the app's: I kept expecting there to be extra steps!
In truth, there's almost nothing to it:
In the desktop app, open all the books and documents you'd like to load up on your iPhone.
Go to the Tools menu and make sure Enable Sharing has been checked.
Open the iPhone edition of Stanza. From the Library page, tap the Shared Books button (shown in Figure 9-8). Stanza shows you a list of every computer it can see on the local Wi-Fi network running a Sharing-enabled copy of Desktop Stanza.
Tap the name of your computer. Stanza shows you a list of every document that the app has open.
Tap the document you'd like to download. After a quick confirmation (see Figure 9-9), it's sent to your iPhone.
You're finished. The new book appears in your iPhone's library, ready to be read (see Figure 9-10).
Tip
The magical bit where the iPhone simply "senses" the presence of Stanza running on a nearby desktop won't work on your PC unless your desktop has a special system enhancement installed. If the machine doesn't appear on your iPhone, visit the following URL on your PC and download a free installer: www.apple.com/support/downloads/bonjourforwindows.html.
You'll find the reading experience is similar to eReader's. Screen space is at a premium, so the user interface only shimmers into visibility when you tap the screen. But Stanza's developers have made some very good design choices. Stanza's screen is notably more clean and elegant than that of any other book reader I've seen.
The iPhone edition of Stanza contains links to more than a dozen online sources of free and commercial e-books. If you're in the mood for a little Mikhail Aleksan-drovich Sholokhov and can spell his name correctly using the iPhone's virtual keyboard, you can be reading Oni Srazhalis za Rodinu mere moments after the whim strikes you.
The desktop edition of Stanza also can download books. But there's no online store; You need to know the URL of a specific e-book. It's actually much simpler to visit an online book site in your desktop browser, search for titles of interest, and then download them manually. Then you can open them in the desktop Stanza and sync 'em to your iPhone.
Authors all over the world are doing their part for culture and scholarship each and every day, by writing something brilliant and then dying. Wait seven or eight decades and presto: You have a brand-new public domain book that you can install on your iPhone without paying a single corn-whistling cent.
Your go-to sites, as a skinflint literary aesthete:
Google does wonderful things for users, by virtue of the fact that it has all the money and manpower in the world and it can afford to create and give away fantastic services. Even if in doing so, it sort of wrecks things for little companies that don't have any money and are trying to build a business from a neat idea.
Like distributing books online. Google has undertaken the Herculean task of converting entire university and public libraries into e-books; It even converts hundreds of thousands of copyrighted materials, in the interest of allowing Google users to, at the very least, search through every book ever written. If "Apple Pie Hubbub" turns up in an obscure religious tract from 1302, Google Books allows you to read the book online and even download it to your desk-top. If it's a copyrighted book, it helps you find a store that sells it.
Google Books' main portal is indeed at http://books.google.com. But there is a spiffy mobile-studly edition as well: http://books.google.com/googlebooks/mobile. Figure 9-11 shows you the front door. As you can see, it practically rivals the Kindle Store in sophistication, with quick links by subject, new and notable titles — the works.
Ah. But there's one hitch to the mobile experience: It's not a sophisticated, purpose-built iPhone app. Whereas Kindle and eReader offer you tidy formatting and a quasi-luxurious page-turning experience, Google's online-only book reader gives you a slightly funky-looking mobile Web page.
Good for browsing, fine for when you're caught outside your house with nothing to read and no money to spend on a download from Kindle or eReader.com, but otherwise the best use of this resources is to visit http://books.google.com from your desktop, download books to your hard drive, and then add them to your Stanza library.
You can tell that the makers of Stanza aren't too worried about the threat posed by Google Books: The Stanza iPhone app will take you directly to Google Books' mobile page straight from the app.
I can't end this chapter without at least addressing the idea of converting an actual, physical book into an e-book. Here we go:
"You'll probably want to forget the idea."
There. I've addressed it.
Which seems like a pretty glib and dismissive response, considering that I've actually converted many of my favorite titles into e-books. But it's a determination that comes from experience. Digitizing a 300-page book is a hugely labor-intensive process and there are no opportunities for labor-saving shortcuts.
You have two big challenges ahead of you:
Challenge 1: Scan the whole damned book. If it's a 342-page book then, well son, you're going to have to scan allllll 342 pages.
And this actually isn't quite so bad. It's like crocheting an afghan. Its busy-work for your hands while your eyes and your brain can be focused on the TV. I find that I can scan a 300-page book in just two or three two-hour sessions.
The only labor-saving tip I offer is this: Pull the book completely apart and cut the pages free of their binding, so you have nice, clean, flat pages that your scanner can image perfectly from margin to margin. Don't even try laying the whole book flat on your scanner.
Challenge 2: Hand these 342 scanned images off to an OCR program — and fine-tune every damned page by hand. OCR software has made great leaps in the past 10 years but converting these images to text still involves a lot of manual labor. Figure 9-12 shows my favorite consumer OCR app: Abbyy's FineReader Express (http:// finereader.abbyy.com). It's available in both PC and Mac editions at a price that will scare off the punters (roughly $130), but is still within reach of people with a real need to convert printed text into e-books.
You open your entire folder of sequentially-numbered page scans in the app, and it proceeds to munch through the pile. FineReader must do more than just figure out that this word here is "antediluvian"; it also has to get a sense of the layout of the page, and omit things like page numbers, headers, and footers.
I like FineReader Express because it's very, very smart. Still, you do need to go through every page to ensure that the app guessed right. The green boxes in Figure 9-12 denote regions of text. If the app accidentally tried to OCR a little fidgety graphic, I'd have to use a tool to exclude that area of the page. Sometimes I need to expand one of these boxes to include a line of text that got cut off.
It's a very fiddly, complicated process. However, we all have that collection of absolute favorite books. You know: the ones we seem to re-read once a year or even more and which, you reckon, are so far out of print that they'll never ever be made into commercial e-books that you can buy for 10 bucks.
It was worth my time and trouble to convert (say) Steven Bach's incredible Final Cut into an e-book. I'll be re-reading it another 30 or 40 times over the course of my life, I bet; I might as well put in the effort to convert it to a more convenient format. The scanning cost me a couple of afternoons of working the flatbed while I watched TV. The actual conversion and fine-tuning was performed in hourlong chunks spread out over the course of a week or so. OCR'ing another chapter was a task I performed when I had nothing better to do.
Naturally, I've bought a second copy of every book I OCR'd; I wasn't about to cut apart my only copy of something precious ... and please do take me at my word when I remind you that the only way to get the pages to lay completely flat on the scanner is to cut them free from their binding.
But once again: I include this section more as a cautionary tale than as an encouragement.
The case in favor of putting e-books on an iPhone is made by the presence of a battered and tattered but beloved paperback of P.G. Wodehouse's the Code of the Woosters in my satchel. It's never left that bag.
Why? Because I'm a reader and I get nervous if I leave the house without anything to read. With that book in tow, I know that I always have an emergency book on hand.
When you use your iPhone as a book reader, you can always have dozens of books with you wherever you go. You never leave the house without your iPhone and thus you'll never find an idle moment when you can't be reading something. Whew.
I can do without companionship for weeks, food for days, and water for hours. But honestly: My definition of Hell is being stuck in an airport and facing a three-hour flight delay with nothing to read.