Little books for little screens
August 19th, 2008Ereading devices are not the right tool for consuming a weighty novel, we’ve established the negatives of reading on your phone/pda already. Electronic book reading devices do have positive attributes however, and it’s these positives which should guide the type of content you read.
Romance and Erotic fiction are popular ebooks (and audiobooks) partly because no one knows what you are reading. The embarrassment of publicly reading a Mills & Boon on the bus is removed because no one can tell. But there are other reasons for reading on an electronic device than camouflage.
Your mobile phone is almost always with you and it’s this ubiquity which renders it perfect for dipping into a book. From a five minute queue in the Post Office through to a half hour commute on the bus, short story collections, novelettes and poetry are ideal mobile reads. These formats were designed to be consumed in small chunks after all.
As usual, a dig around the intertubes unearths an enormous amount of low quality, self published dross to filter, but I have found a few sites with reasonable short-form content.
Little Electronic Reads
There is a wealth of low quality poetry out there (shock), one site I did find was Poemhunter.com which has a fair selection of free ‘classics’ in .pdf format. This highlights, of course, a valid argument against flexible ebook formats for poetry. When a poem relies on format to convey meaning or regulate meter, line length in particular is important. It’s this ‘hard formatting’ which would be lost if the were consumed on devices with narrow screens. As for other sources, both Ebook.com and Manybooks.net have dedicated poetry sections with reasonable, if not exactly modern, selections.
As for short reads; I stumbled across some Harlan Ellison short story collections on websubscriptions.net which fit around fifteen stories into a £3 download. Each story is about 50 pages of Mobipocket on the N95, a perfect length for mobile reading. Manybooks.net and Fictionwise have short story sections of their site (though most of Fictionwise appears to be erotic short stories).
There is a bunch of short-form content out there. It may not be modern, but short-stories and poetry ebooks are ideal content for ereading devices.
Add to Del.icio.us
What you end up with at the end of a session is a video file with a picture in picture display of the iSight recording (you can set the size and position, but it’s set for the duration of the recording). The video quality isn’t amazingly smooth, but you don’t need HD quality when you’re gathering usability feedback. You also don’t have any of the post-recording controls such as cropping, zooming, highlighting etc which Screenflow is oozing with. 
Geeks on Bikes returned with their first ‘proper’ release, a jaunt from 


Progress has been slow, so far I’ve completed 21 titles (two audio books and nineteen ebooks) in a variety of formats (pdfs, Mobipocket and HTML) and the overwhelming experience has been frustration. Not frustration from the devices, 

The first “