2008-08-14
Some thoughts on mobile reading
A couple of things to do with mobile devices and book reading came up in discussion yesterday that have cropped back up this morning, so instead of just posting a collection of links I’ll try and tie them together a bit more explicitly here.
A discussion on gadgets started with mention of an ebook reader (I suspect an Iliad), and turned to Amazon’s Kindle. Of course, this is still US-only, because it uses EVDO, but Jack Schofield still posted a small story on it in today’s Technology Guardian, asking if it’s becoming Amazon’s iPod. Yes and no, he says; it’s going to do fairly well, but not that well, and goes on
My contrarian view is that just as most digital cameras are now smart phones, most ebook readers are also smart phones. People have been reading books on tiny screens since the days of the Psion and Compaq’s iPaq, and it’s common on Windows Mobile and similar phones.
Given that, maybe the UK model will be “an ebook device tethered to your phone with Bluetooth”, as Tom said on IRC. Meanwhile, on the iPhone (which Schofield mentions in the next paragraph), the screen is a little small, but that hasn’t stopped a crop of ebook readers (and indeed ebooks-as-apps, but let’s not go there).
Meanwhile, Giles Turnbull’s list of desired iPhone apps over on TUAW includes AvantGo, a survivor of the days when everyone had a Palm V and synced every morning before their commute. Now, it turns out that the two major iPhone RSS readers, Byline (£5.99) and NetNewsWire (free) both support downloading content then going offline, but conceptually, there was something very nice about AvantGo’s proper indexes, and of course providers typically produced full feeds, something still missing from many commercial news provider’s RSS/Atom news feeds.
AvantGo, however, is a shadow of its former self, and when I last looked at the service, it seemed fairly threadbare. I expect a lot of companies have left their feeds there to stagnate since 2002, so it might not be the best place to get data anyway.
There’s still no non-US Kindle. In the meantime, Sony and Iliad will provide big-screen readers, but they look niche, and the iPhone (and other smartphones) could come in and steal their thunder, but the software’s not there yet, and possibly the dominance of the current feed model is a problem, not a solution.
