How easy is it to read long passages of text on the iPhone? That’s a question I’ve been wanting to answer since the Holy Phone was announced this past January. I’ve long had a reading-related fantasy (trust me, this won’t get dirty) that I could use the iPhone as a kind of auxiliary monitor. Stuff a few software-related how-to doc’s onto the phone, and then perform the actual tasks on my main monitor. I don’t know about you, but when it comes to reading documentation online I always end up printing it out since I can’t stand switching back and forth between, say, Photoshop Elements and the info onscreen that’s telling me how to use the histogram. Once I got my hands on an actual iPhone and saw firsthand the jaw-dropping clarity of its 3.5 inch 160 dpi screen, I couldn’t wait to run a few tests.
I took a look at three different kinds of content: a book from O’Reilly’s Safari online reading library, a Web site whose layout appeared especially readable on the iPhone, and a PDF.
The verdict? iPhone-friendly Web sites are the clear winner. Safari books take second place and are readable for about 10 pages or so at time. PDFs are as lame as ever on the small screen. Pictures, comments, and some suggestions after the jump.
iPhone-friendly Web sites
For this test I used Daringfireball.net. Not a how-to site, I realize, but it provided a good baseline for the kind of reading experience I could enjoy for long stretches of time. In portrait mode the text was readable but still a bit small for my taste; I flipped the phone into landscape mode and found the text incredibly clear and a pleasure to view.
My finger got tired from flicking well before I suffered any eyestrain. (Tip: double-tapping the bottom of the browser window — just above the bottom toolbar — is just like hitting the Page Down key on your regular keyboard: the text scrolls up.) I’ve been a longtime reader of Daringfireball and so I know that the man behind the scenes, John Gruber, didn’t specially reformat his site for the iPhone. He’s been using a simple, one-column layout for at least the past two years. Definitely the way to go if you want readers to consume big chunks of text.
Books on Safari
I really wanted these books to look great, since there are so many titles available for Safari subscribers. The text was crisp, clear…and just a tad too small for me to want to read for more than 10 minutes or so. Using the iPhone’s screen zoom ability I could, of course, enlarge the text, but then I ended up having to scroll left and right to view the text that was offscreen. Each Safari page does offer “+” and “-” text zoom buttons, but the “+” button didn’t beef up the font as much as I wanted. More frustrating was its placement: right next to another link (”Previous”) which I kept accidentally hitting, taking me back to the last page I’d viewed. Apple’s claims that the iPhone provides access to the “real” Internet notwithstanding, these kinds of button placement issues are surely going to start confronting Web designers who want to make their sites friendly to touchscreen users.
PDFs
I looked at two PDFs: A chapter from Access 2007 For Starters: The Missing Manual and a Short Cut (Prototype and Scriptaculous: Taking the Pain out of JavaScript). There are two main drawbacks to reading PDFs on the iPhone. First, the only way to permanently store and view a PDF is to email it to yourself and then open the attachment. Because the iPhone doesn’t have any kind of user accessible folder system, you can’t save the PDFs and view them later, as you might on a regular PC. The second, and more serious problem, is that text in a PDF doesn’t “reflow” to fit your phone’s display. When you first open a PDF all the text fits onscreen as in this picture….
…but the text is too small to read. When you use the iPhone’s zoom-in feature, you’re back in the dreaded, reader-unfriendly land of having to scroll left and right. What a pain. Apple could help solve this problem by letting you change the PDF’s orientation from portrait to landscape (which is what you can do with the Web browser and photos on the iPhone).
Suggestions for a Better Reading Experience
Two suggestions for Web page designers looking to present long chunks of text to iPhone readers: follow DaringFireball.net’s layout…and figure out how to make the text look equally good when the browser is in portrait mode.
Down the road, here’s my second iPhone reading fantasy: Apple cuts a deal with Adobe and features the just-released Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) software on the iPhone. The clunkily named ADE (my acronym, not theirs) is like iTunes for buying, storing, and reading PDFs and other eBooks…with a twist. Any document that’s in the ADE-friendly .epub format lets you change the font size; the text automatically reflows to fit the width of your viewing window. That means no more scrollbar wrestling with PDFs on your PC’s monitor, or on your iPhone.
return to this question in 3 months and
see if anything has improved, please...
-bowerbird
Would people really want to read a book on their phone?! Looks like a prescription for a stronger glasses prescription and a headache!
Very interesting. Of course, you could have bought a second computer monitor for far less than the iPhone, but I haven't got around to that yet either, despite my eye doctor's raves about his dual-monitor setup.
Anyway, I wondered if it's possible to load PDFs into the iPhone through iTunes yet. Make predicted that would happen a while back.
You've ever tried textoniphone.com ?
The double tapping on the bottom of the safari screen doesn't actually behave like paging down, but rather refocuses the center of the screen to the area tapped. While more pleasant than endless flicking, its still a poor substitute for what should be a more graceful piece of the UI.
I use Amar Sagoo's brilliant Tofu - http://amarsagoo.info/tofu/ - for reading most long texts on my monitor and its a dream. I think having something very much like this native on the iPhone would be a godsend.
I recommend the Sony ebook reader, which is superior
for this particular purpose.
It uses the e-ink technology, which (i) is visible
in sunlight (ii) does not use up the battery to
keep the page on the screen.
@duke: Yeah, textoniphone.com looks promising...I'd love to see more text on a single page to cut down on the number of Next button clicks, but it looks like a nice implementation. Thanks for sharing!
@ t o n x: Right you are about the double-tapping...I fixed the text. Thanks for the correction.
Actually both main drawbacks with PDFs on iPhone can easily be overcome with the help of a Safari browser hack using the almost forgotten data: URI schemes. Here is the how-to: http://pimm.wordpress.com/2007/07/18/how-to-read-pdf-files-on-iphone-via-safari-instead-of-lame-email-attachments/
From now on you can store and open your PDF files (and many others) in the iPhone's Safari browser even in the Wi-Fi- and EDGE-less airplane mode and you can read PDFs in a landscape mode with only 1 one pich (that fits a column) and significantly less left-right scrolling in a much more satisfying, although not yet perfectly manner.
I know this sounds obvious, but I've just been saving pdf's in landscape and this has been working fine (until they deploy Google Gears on the iphone).
In case anyone missed it, David Pogue has a nice collection of iPhone tips here: http://missingmanuals.com/david_pogues_favorite_iphone_tricks.csp
I've been using various hacks to read novel-length PDFs on the iPhone and Mobile Safari, and like Attila above, I've found the experience to be pretty satisfying. The one major irritation is the lack of bookmarking. Even when I leave the Safari window open between reading sessions, it occasionally loses its place and I have to do some tedious scrolling to get to the right page.
I put together a video demonstrating PDFs on the iPhone here:
http://wowio.wordpress.com/2007/08/01/iphone-and-ebooks-the-video/
One other significant hurdle for PDFs on the iPhone that I neglected to mention in my earlier comment... Mobile Safari seems to have a file-size limit in the vicinity of 10 MB. PDF files larger than that do not open. Thus, graphics-heavy titles such as some comics or books containing scanned text pages (like those provided by some publishers) do not work.
I've been reading books on my Treo phone for a couple of years now and have loved the experience. I download most of my books from Fictionwise.com, which offers several formats. I use the Mobipocket mostly. It is great on the Palm operating system -- resizes the font to your choice of size, reflows the page so it fits within the screen margins and -- my personal favorite -- offers a scroll tool so that I can eat my sandwich with both hands and still continue to read. Until iPhone can beat this, I'm not counting on it for anything other than being a pretty gadget. I'm looking into electronic readers (Kindle is a new one that is promising; I'll ck others) but unless I find something that is so appealing that it makes it worth it to me to replace my Treo with an iPhone and still have to carry around a reader for the other main function my Treo fulfills right now -- that is, two gadgets where I get by with only one right now -- then I'll stick with my Palm op system on my Treo. I'm open to suggestions -- I just haven't found anything yet that quite measures up.
a pretty easy way to read pdf's on iphone offline
http://georgfankhauser.blogspot.com/2008/04/perfect-way-to-read-pdf-doc-offline-on.html