Reading on tiny screens

I've had a chance to try out the new iPod Touch lately, and I'm predictably in love with its combination of usefulness, high-end aesthetics, and ridiculous but cool features (among the apps I've downloaded from the App Store, just for the hell of it, are a Magic 8 Ball simulator and a carpenter's level). The email interface is simple and sensible. I love the fact that if I'm in the kitchen wondering what to make for dinner, I can use it to grab my building's wireless network and surf over to Chocolate and Zucchini in search of a half-remembered recipe. (I like the colossal storage space for music and whatnot, too, but since I've already experienced that with an earlier-generation iPod, it's not as much of a novelty.)

But far and away my favorite application is Stanza, an ebook reader that allows downloading from various free ebook sources, from Project Gutenberg to a few I'd never heard of. The download catalog is a bit tedious to navigate, but reading on the 2" by 3" screen is surprisingly easy on the eyes. Over the Christmas holidays I read an entire short novel, Cory Doctorow's Little Brother, on Stanza. I never saw the appeal of reading on anything as small as an iPod before, but now I do. Carrying a massive book collection on the train or plane in a tiny device that fits in one's pocket is the perfect solution to my perpetual "must bring along a ton of stuff to read" travel quandary.

But the real advantage of reading on the iPod is that it cuts down on the distractions you get while reading ebooks on a computer. Oh, you can still close the Stanza application and fire up Safari or check email or whatever, but the internet access depends on there being a wifi network available, and the process is slower than just opening up another browser tab or a new window. Speaking of Cory Doctorow, he has an excellent podcast on this very subject: the unrecognized usefulness of the codex format for screening out distractions. The iPod doesn't quite screen those distractions out, but it does make it easier to focus on one thing at a time.

So: the iPod is a much better reading device than I'd thought it would be. Though I still wouldn't want to write anything longer than a Twitter update or a quick email on it, because tapping at the screen-keyboard with my thumb makes me feel like the world's clumsiest and slowest hunt-and-peck typist.

6 Responses to “Reading on tiny screens”

  1. Jane Dark says:

    Oh, yes, Stanza is the application through which I found Jo Walton’s “The Prize in the Game.”
    The typing, I’ve found, gets better in time, but no, it doesn’t really compare to a full-sized keyboard.

  2. I’d forgotten your review of that one! Found, and downloaded.

  3. Stanza is keeping me in books while I’m moving. Yeah, Stanza! 🙂

  4. Lee says:

    Hi, glad to read of your experiences. I like to recommend Feedbooks for free ebooks, not just because they carry my own YA fantasy Mortal Ghost, but because they’ve got the formatting for different devices just right (including the Kindle).

  5. Jorge says:

    And casually I was reading this, precisely point #16. Can I recommend you classics?

  6. Wow, that’s a gorgeous interface! It’ll be interesting to see how these kinds of applications develop, and what they look like in a few years’ time. Oh, and I’m liking Feedbooks for Stanza quite a bit.