Jeremy Wohl

I've only had it for a week, but already I'm enthralled. I had given up reading ebooks on the iPhone as impossible and now I realize my mistake was confusing the unviability of out-of-copyright "classic" content for its rendered form. Trying to (finally) get through Moby Dick was a no-go, and would always have been. Not having the energy (or moral inclination -- funny it's not the same with movies/music) to pirate more interesting commercial books, I gave up (despite the excellent Stanza app.)

But my McCarthy, McEwan, Amis, Posner and Hass bought and paid for? Sweet mercy!

Grievances are the same Jakob Neilsen has highlighted:

• Lack of a dictionary --- an iPhone lack of course, simultaneous apps would solve the problem
• Publisher-enforced text justification -- where it's turned on, tight columns makes for ridiculous and disorienting word gaps
• Flick to turn pages gets boring -- tapping in Stanza's vertical touch zones is the answer
• Missing hierarchical organization or search -- and this seems to be so on the Kindle itself, how is this possible?!
• No way to annotate/clip beyond roughly-placed bookmarks, unlike the Kindle.

A surprise is the notorious eyestrain of monitor backlights doesn't seem to occur in the mode of tiny screens glowing; hours of iPhone reading remain comfortable.

An aside: my father, his eyes long failing, is again able to read long-form on the Kindle with its high contrast and bigger font sizes. Hurrah!