On 23 February 2011 14:10, Sivan Greenberg <si...@omniqueue.com> wrote:
> Feedback? > As requested, a list of things that I think are important for an ereader. I am only really interested in the case of reading novels on a tablet device, so this may not be applicable to comic books, magazine, technical reference material etc. A lot of the points will be applicable to desktop readers but some are purely about tablet interfaces. The UI is not very important to me. I think it should be as unobtrusive as possible. Some points: * Efficient use of screen space. This means showing a single page in fullscreen portrait mode and absolutely nothing else on typical 7" tablets. 2 pages side by side has value on an ipad sized or bigger tablet, but single page is more practical for a device that is the same size as a paperback book. * Simple UI. Gestures are OK but add a fallback such as touch the bottom left of the screen to go back one page, or the bottom right to go forward one page. The buttons for this should "fade out" after a couple of seconds of entering fullscreen mode or if you detect user is confused (eg touching the screen but achieving nothing.) * Page transitions should be as fast as possible, but not so fast that I can turn two pages without noticing. Much more important to me: How the actual text of the ebook is formatted: * Decent sized margins on all sides - text all the way up to the edge of the screen looks bad and is hard to read. * Don't make me scroll around pages, unless I have zoomed in (which I would never want to do when reading a novel.) * No scrolling between pages, "page 23.5" or any of that nonsense. * Similarly, don't move stuff between pages if at all possible. (The only reason to do it would be because I changed font settings) * Do put a nice big space between paragraphs. * Do indent the first line of the paragraph. * Start a new page for a new chapter * Handle window/orphan control properly. Make sure the margin is big enough that you can put in an extra line, rather than put the last line of the chapter on a page all on it's own. * Put the page number at the bottom of the page. Basically, if you have a 7" tablet, it should look exactly like what you see if you open any paperback novel on a random page. Formats: Unfortunately reformatting of the text is problematic for some formats, notably PDF - even if you can change the font, you cannot necessarily reflow the text (in particular, identifying paragraphs is often extremely hard). And that is assuming the PDF is not just a sequence of bitmaps. The irony though is that most e-book software available does an awful job of reflowing the text. The best way I have found to actually read ebooks is to convert them to plain text, typeset them properly in open office, print to PDF, and then view in Adobe Reader on Windows (the only PDF viewer that I could find to simultaneously support fullscreen mode, portrait mode, and going back a page using the touchscreen.) So in short: PDF format is the best format if the PDF happens to be typeset exactly the way you like, otherwise it is the worst. Basically all the other formats you might want to use support reflowing: ePUB seems like the one to support. It's an open standard and used on apple's bookreader software (although with DRM) but it is also used by project gutenberg. It seems to have all the necessary metadata to allow a good automatic reflowing. Then you have things like html, rtf, plain text. All of those have shortcomings, but are better than a PDF. And finally you have all the proprietary formats. It seems like most of them are various types of compiled HTML. It seems logical to say that PDFs should map 1:1 to the "virtual" pages of the reader software, while the other formats would have to have this format imposed (no pun intended) upon them when they are loaded. Anyway, there wasn't any real point to this, it's just some things to keep in mind while designing the software. -- Alistair Buxton a.j.bux...@gmail.com
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