I’ve been playing with some of the eBook offerers more and more lately, and things are getting better. But they’re still far from perfect.
I’ve written some about ebook readers before, specifically the Kindle. But the success of the Kindle has led others to get into the mix. Right now, the forthcoming nook (yes, no capitals) from Barnes & Noble looks very promising. I really like the minimalist design of it, particularly the color touch screen as the navigation UI. This, to me, is brilliant, as the UI can change to suit the situation. Excellent!
But I am still on the fence about purchasing an ebook reader. They’re all a one-trick pony, and expensive ones at that. Whereas the prices are falling (the cheapest appears to be Sony’s mini reader at around $200, but most are hovering in the $250 range these days). So what’s a cheap geek to do?
Of course, the iPhone is a great substitute, with a variety of ereader applications, including a Barnes & Noble app as well as a Kindle app. But this is a blog by geeks for geeks, so I have to take a geek-oriented stance on this.
Which means, I have to look at what’s important to geeks. And that means programming books!
Every geek with a geek job (programmer, software engineer, etc.) has a glut of manuals and other books. Where we can get them in electronic format, they are in a variety of them, everywhere from PDFs to CHMs to HTML, to ePubs, and so forth. So what’s the best way to get all of our required geek books into a portable fashion?
Well, so far there isn’t a Holy Grail for this yet. The iPhone Kindle app is good for acquiring content. The Kindle itself allows you to browse for content and then select what you want and then it wirelessly appears on your Kindle. No muss, no fuss. But the iPhone Kindle app only sends you to the Amazon store. In recent months, there has appeared an iPhone-formatted version of the Kindle Store, which is great. And they’ve even added in a “Try a sample” button. That didn’t used to exist. Once you make a purchase or select a sample, a button appears that even allows you to go right back to the Kindle app, where your purchase appears almost immediately. Samples even say “sample” on the cover art.
Selection of geek content is getting better rapidly. O’Reilly and other tech books are becoming more and more prevalent in the Kindle Store. And Amazon has even heard my prayers about ebook costs… since it’s just a bunch of bits, the books should cost far less than the “dead tree” versions, right? Well, Amazon has dropped the prices considerably. For instance, the book Automating System Administration with Perl is $31.99 form the O’Reilly store (ebook version, but you can get it in 3 versions: ePub, PDF, or Mobi… more on that later). From the Kindle Store, the same book is $17.59.
But there are a few shortcomings here… and they’re big ones. First of all, there is no way I can find to get non-Kindle content onto your iPhone. Owner’s of an actual Kindle get a special email address where, for a tiny fee, users can email attached documents in a variety of formats and they appear on their Kindles. However, if you’re like me and only have the iPhone Kindle app, you’re SOL. There’s no way to get other content available. As well, there’s no search function on the iPhone Kindle app. No find either (I’ll describe the difference between search and find shortly).
Last I heard, there is a Kindle application for desktops coming soon, but as of this writing it still isn’t out yet. No idea on what functionality this will afford.
In the end, the Kindle App rates 3 stars for the geek solution. It’s a poor reader, but the available content is pretty good and reasonably priced.
Next, there’s the Barnes & Noble iPhone app. This is a pretty good offering, although it has many shortcomings. First of all, it’s not very easy to navigate, nor is it intuitive. The app comes with a handful of books, including a dictionary (excellent!) that opens up with a search box for looking up specific words. The other books were not any that I was interested in, so I tried to delete them. Well, apparently there are 2 lists… your downloaded library and your online library. Deleting items from my downloaded library worked fine, but they would magically (and frustratingly) reappear. In the end, the best way for me to handle this was to go to barnesandnoble.com, sign on, go to my online library, and archive the books I didn’t want.
The app has a “shop for ebooks” link, which like the Kindle app takes you to the B&N store in Safari. The offerings are slim, it seems, but the “get free sample” button is available. But this works mysteriously. Leaving Safari (there’s no link, like on the Kindle Store, although sometimes a “back” button appears which confusingly takes you back to the reader app, when you might think it should take you back to a previous list of purchasable books) to return to the B&N reader app, frustrates me no end. Not only did the sample not show up right away, but many of the books I’d archived came back, like undead zombies holding bad pennies. One of these is even a sample. I guess the idea is if you got a sample of a book, they really want you to get the book.
There are a few niceties in the app. The list of downloaded books shows a pie chart for each book that’s been opened, which shows how much of the book has been read. There’s also a find feature, but no search. In other words, if you want to find a word or phrase, it will find it for you, but your only option is to “find next”. A search function would display the pages (and context) where the search word or phrase is used. More on that in a bit.
On the bad side… there’s no easy way to tell if a book in your library is a sample or not. As well, the geek selection is horrible. Searching for “programming” brings up Glenn Beck’s book, The 21-Day Consciousness Cleanse, and Atlas Shrugged as the first three choices. Searching for “perl” yields Fritz (whatever that is), and a bunch of non-English texts. That doesn’t bode well at all for a geek looking for content!
In the end, the B&N iPhone app rates 1 star for the geek solution.
Finally, there is the Stanza app. This app is a dedicated reader and has no single store behind it. However, there appears to be many stores behind it, not the least of which is the “O’Reilly Ebooks” store. Clicking through gave me many choices, the best of which was the option to sign into my O’Reilly Online account and download my previously-purchase ebooks. Wonderful! It’s a little klunky, but seems to work well.
The Stanza reader handles a variety of ebook types, including PDF and ePub (both of which are available from the O’Reilly online store, and when you purchase from them you can download any version at any time).
The reader is solid and has a search function, which is excellent. For instance, say you’re in a Perl book and do a search for “CGI”. Stanza returns a list of where the word/phrase is used as well as the chapter in which it was found. Clicking on any entry takes you right to that page with the search word or phrase highlighted. Returning to the search function brings you back to the searched list, with the last one you clicked on highlighted (so that you can click on the next one if you wish). This is excellent functionality for this.
Stanza has a desktop app, which isn’t the best reader, in my opinion, but it allows for translating ebooks from many formats to many other formats. It also allows you to download ebooks to your iPhone app via wi-fi. This is a little kludgy, and is totally non-wireless (over 3G, I mean), but it’s functional. Apparently, the Stanza app can read mobi files, which I believe is the Kindle format. I could be wrong though. And even so, I’m not sure how to get the Kindle ebooks out of the app, or even download them to your PC.
All in all, the Stanza app is an excellent ereader with a ton of great geek offerings (O’Reilly is almost a one-stop shop for geek fare). I give it 4 stars. It’s not perfect, but it sure seems to be the best iPhone ereader out there.
In the end, I may break down and buy a dedicated ereader, but I’m still unsure if that money might be better spent on a cheap netbook, which can not only host my ebooks, but also do an infinite number of other things, not the least of which is allow me to test out the code I’m reading about right there.
