Barnes & Noble has just debuted their digital bookshelf of over 500,000 eBook titles, and I thought I would try them out on my new iPhone (a 3GS).Too many "libraries" make for a confusing experience on Barnes & Noble's Website
GETTING THE BOOKS
found the process of shopping for an eBook on BarnesandNoble.com pretty confusing On the iPhone, you simply download the Barnes & Noble "bookstore" application as well as the Barnes & Noble "eReader" application. Both are readily available from Apple's iPhone AppStore.
The Barnes & Noble website made everything more complicated, however.
For one thing, it's unclear where to go. The B&N Website bookstore has several similar components, incuding "MyBarnes&Noble" and "My LIbrary" and "My eBooks Library." B&N works hard at making sure you buy the books, but once you do, it simply wasn't clear where to go to retrieve the books to read both on my iPhone and on my Mac. Once a B&N title is in your library, clicking on the on the eBook title merely takes you to a description of the book rather than the ability to read it in the desktop eReader software. What I finally discovered after considerable effort was that you have to download the books and open them on your hard drive, with all the navigation that's involved.
READING THE BOOKS
Once I got that cleared up, I went on to read a couple of books on my iPhone. Would the screen prove too miniscule for reading a book?
I have been putting off buying a Kindle because of the price, so I was hopeful that my iPhone could become a "do everything" device, including acting as an eBook reader.
My initial experience was that it wasn't bad. I had tried this same kind of thing on my other small screen PDA a year ago (the Palm Treo 750), which was more or less a failure (see "E-Books and the Virtual Library"). The iPhone is much better, although definitely not perfect.
Here's what I liked about using the eReader application on the iPhone:
1) There is an appropriate amount of type to read in either the vertical or horizontal position of the iPhone. Although you can change the font size on the iPhone, the "medium" setting produces a reasonable amount of text at a reasonable size right out of the box (so to speak).
2) You can easily jump around the book once you learn how to access the contents (a left-right swipe motion on the screen will bring up the navigation controls).
3) You can set different ways to go forward or back. I don't want to sweep constantly, so I chose a tap on either the right side (for forward) or left side (for backward) to "turn" the pages of the book.T
The big downside of reading B&N titles on both on the iPhone and on a computer is:
1) Images. Little illustrations (at chapter headings), photos, and small tables of data (such as you find in trade books) are relatively low resolution. This is passable on the iPhone itself, because of its small size (although the small tables really are very hard to read), but unacceptable if you're trying to read the same book on your desktop computer. When you compare this to some of the digital scans of older books that result in PDF eBooks it's a little tough. I'm sure it's a file size issue (smaller is better?). But I think they should have upped the ante a little and gone for quality on the imagery.
Still, for books that are largely text, the B&N eReader is nice and legible. Not to mention handy for reference books you can take with you anywhere (and - best part - you don't need a dedicated device.)
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