The classic way to handle ebooks and, arguably, the most elegant, is to have a 'reader' application (Mobipocket was a well known one, back in the day, eReader Pro still works on S60 5th Edition) and then load in ebook data files, which appear in an 'in app' library. The main benefit of this approach is that you only have one icon to deal with on your phone's application menu - the main downsides are that books have to be 'managed' somehow, to get them into the right folder on your memory card, either through the app itself or by side-loading manually, and that commercial titles have to be somehow encrypted, to prevent people passing copies to their friends, for reading in their ebook readers.
The alternative approach, and one which seems to be picking up momentum, is to package up each ebook as its own application, complete with icon. This has the commendable benefit that each book is trivial to find and download via the on-device app store, and easy to handle in a commercial environment, i.e. you just charge £4 (or whatever) for the app/book when needed. The downside, obviously, is that prolific on-device readers will end up with quite a few ebook icons.
Tempering the downsides of this latter approach, featured below, are that:
- few people will want to read huge numbers of ebooks on the relatively tiny nHD screens used in our modern smartphones. I've only read a handful in two years, for example. So two or three extra icons in the Symbian app menu really isn't going to be a problem.
- S60/Symbian has always made it trivial to organise applications into folders. In this case, it wouldn't take more than a few seconds to make a new 'ebook' application folder and move any downloaded ebook applications into this.
And so to Offscreen Technologies' latest set of releases. Fresh from an extensive range of Symbian touchscreen freeware and paid applications, many of which have been well received here at AAS, Offscreen has started with over a hundred public domain ebooks, i.e. those which are now old enough to be royalty-free - hopefully, they'll move on to some commercial texts as well - it'd be interesting to see how these do in the Ovi Store.
Starting with the 'big one', "War and Peace", shown above, Offscreen has converted each of these texts into its own, neatly packaged application, though sadly the icons used are generic, I wonder how much effort it would have taken to create a different icon for each?
Starting each (in this case, Jules Verne's classic "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea"), there's a classy (though again fairly generic) title screen (below, left) and then you're into the book, neatly converted from the 'HTML' version of the original text, meaning that you get basic bold formatting where needed, plus page breaks, but very little else (i.e. no illustrations). The top bar has the book/app's title (somewhat messily overlapping other screen elements in the case of this long-titled book!), plus icons for the book's 'index' (below, right) and 'exit'.
The index, as you might expect, simply lists the pages in the book which only have one line, in this case those with just a chapter title or number - tapping any takes you to the appropriate chapter.
The text font used (below, left) is just about perfect for my eyes, on the N8, but I can see that it might be a little small on the 3.2"-screened phones - Offscreen, if you're reading, how about a font size control? Pages are turned by swiping from right to left (or vice versa), with a simple page turn animation (below, right) sufficing to confirm which way you're proceeding through the book.
Neatly, when exiting each application, your current place in the text is saved, so that you can keep multiple ebooks on the 'go' and never lose your place in any of them.
For the casual reader (wanting to while away time in waiting rooms and while travelling) these free Offscreen ebooks are a useful resource and it's well worth grabbing a handful that take your fancy. You can view the complete list of titles that have been 'converted' so far here (the ebooks take you through the first nine or ten pages of Offscreen's titles, at the time of writing).
Titles that also caught my eye included Sherlock Holmes, the Adventures and Sense and Sensibility. There are plenty more royalty-free texts available, so hopefully the existing stock of 120 or so titles will rise quickly, in addition to the potential introduction of some commercial, contemporary books.
Happy reading!
Steve Litchfield, All About Symbian, 23 August 2011