Dead Ink Vinyl

Somewhere in the last six months, the iPhone overtook the MacBook Pro as my primary computer. I don’t know when it happened—it was an imperceptible, gradual shift in the way I organized my life. I intended my iPhone to be used as a lifeline for those times I didn’t have WiFi for my laptop. I knew this included all of the time I spent at work, but I’d gotten along fine for the prior three years being disconnected from my personal communications during the business day. I thought would be using the iPhone’s email capabilities for “emergency” communications: last-minute Toastmasters meeting coordination and the like¹.

Now, I use the iPhone every day and it handles my the majority of personal computing needs. It’s convenient and (generally) a joy to use. I don’t appreciate being sent to my secondary computer for tasks I should be able to accomplish on my primary device. I don’t like opening my MacBookPro to surf the Web. Or to read email, record appointments, update contact information, or even to tweet. In fact, I only look forward to using my MBP for coding, blogging, writing documents, and image manipulation. For my everyday online activities, I far prefer using my iPhone. When I have to use my MBP for an “iPhone activity”, I get irritated.

The irritation has been increasing over the last couple of months. Mostly, my irritation is incited by Web sites that don’t lend themselves to ease of use on the iPhone (for example, my beloved Highrise)—or worse, completely disrespect the fact that I’m on a low-bandwidth EDGE connection (for example, Grub Hub, which I saw advertised on the CTA but had to dismiss because the home page took more than three minutes to load).

With the release of the SDK, the iPhone is graduating to become a full computing platform. It will move beyond email and Web sites². I anticipate that the coming year will see the release of all the applications I need to avoid cracking open my MBP for any of the mundane stuff. Finally, I’ll get to use my iPhone for instant messaging, enjoyable Twittering, Highrise, and WordPress.com administration.

Even if I have to build those applications myself.

¹ Of course, looking back on it, I note that my first mobile phone was purchased “for emergencies”, but very quickly became my primary phone service. Perhaps this is a general pattern for adoption of new technologies.

² To be honest, Web applications have really carried the iPhone farther than I expected. There are some very talented and dedicated people out there who pushed the Web on MobileSafari far beyond what I imagined possible.

On the eve of Amazon’s announcement that was entering the ebook reader market with its Kindle device, I wrote an overly long article examining the reasons why I felt the concept of reading books on an ebook reader wouldn’t gain broad acceptance. During that discussion, I made the assumption that most digital books are either little more than raw text and images (I’m including HTML here) or were PDFs of the print edition.

The “raw text and images” approach is fine for shorter content—blogs, newspaper articles, and the like—but I’ve found that for longer content, real attention to typography and page layout is needed to make the experience enjoyable for me. (This is also why the current implementation of O’Reilly’s Safari service doesn’t work for me.) However, it never occurred to me that PDFs could be made specially for the ebook reader screen—complete with appropriately sized text and all of the traditional design touches normally reserved for print. Now I’ve learned that Rosenfeld Media’s PDF edition of Indi Young’s book Mental Models is designed to be read on the 4×6 screen found on many popular ebook readers. From the screenshot provided in Jorge Arango’s article, I have to admit: that looks like an ebook I would be happy to curl up with for hours.

In hindsight, it’s really obvious that publishers could design PDF ebooks specifically for consumption on ebook readers. In fact, it’s so obvious that I believe PDF books designed primarily for viewing on an ebook reader is the future of digital publishing¹. It certainly is a prerequisite for me to embrace reading books on a digital device.

¹ The technical implementation doesn’t have to be PDF. Any format that tightly defines the typography and layout of pages will work.

Tim O’Reilly responded to my article on Friday. He confirms that he is the source of the quote and that the quote was used properly. (Thank you for that!) He also had significant feedback about the content of my article. Based on his response, I have added a comment to clarify my intent and position.