It’s the most wonderful time of the year.

Wednesday, September 9, 2009

Written by: Jed

And I’m not talking about the playoffs. Yes I’m talking about back-to-school season.

I don’t know about you, but growing up, I looked forward to the lead up to the start of school. For some reason, I enjoyed the yearly shopping for school supplies. You’d be surprised at how long I could stay in an isle at a Staples or Grand & Toy simply sampling through pens. Then there were the binders, dividers, and everyone’s favourite geometry set (all for that one protractor). Sadly that excitement died down the older I got, until turning into pure and utter dread, having to spend an outrageous amount of money on textbooks during University.

Having to pay for books you’ll probably end up reading through once, isn’t the greatest of propositions. Having to lug them around campus doesn’t help either. But as with most things with the iPhone, there is an app for that – a lot of them actually. The most recent creating buzz is CourseSmart’s eTextbooks application. It’s an online service that streams any of its over 7000 books on a per-book subscription basis. (A glorified online-library?) As expected, eTextbooks cost less, with CourseSmart customers saving just over $60 per book this month. It sounds like a decent enough service, but suffers from its closed eco-system and Internet dependence.

A collection of 7000 textbooks may sound varied, but it isn’t Stanza-varied. Stanza offers a complete experience. It features a library piggy-backing off online bookstores and publishers, not to mention Project Gutenberg. There’s even a standalone desktop application, that allows you to convert documents into a Stanza-friendly one. But it’s still not perfect. Stanza’s selection isn’t Amazon. And from my experience, its PDF converter experienced formatting problems, particularly on pages with images. The best solution to date remains to be downloading an old-fashioned PDF, and using some sort of PDF-viewer on a mobile device.

That’s where GoodReader comes in. The built-in iPhone PDF viewer is fine for the occasional short PDF documents, but it doesn’t scale to a book-sized PDF well, if at all. There’s a good selection of PDF-viewer apps in the App Store, but it stood out with a four-star rating. On-sale for 99 cents (normally 4.99) it does two important things well. It so far, seems to be handling the bigger PDF files just fine. It renders pages rather quickly, and hasn’t had a problem with properly displaying images and diagrams. And furthermore, it has USB sync-capabilities via a free standalone desktop app. This latter feature, was the deal-closer. A lot of PDF-reader apps seem to be Internet-dependent; basically requiring you to plug in the PDF’s URL. Others seem to have implemented a more complex network syncing method, that allows you to wirelessly upload PDFs onto the phone through a computer web browser. Personally, I prefer the old-fashioned drag and drop.

Going the PDF route has also provided me with an almost limitless library of eBooks. Amazon has a decent collection of eBooks for download, and a lot of the more tech-centric publishers provide a PDF download-link directly on their web sites.

But let’s not get carried away here. This method of distribution, particularly on a device like an iPhone, isn’t going to be replacing the physical-textbook reading experience. The Kindle is probably the closest to that now, but it still has far to go. Also while eBooks come with useful features, like search; there is nothing (yet) that parallels the efficiency of flipping through a textbook. What these eBook solutions are, and really always have been, are great complements to their physical real-life counterparts.

It’s an intriguing time for the book. It’s always had alternative forms of distribution. The eBook has been around for years, the audio-book even longer; yet neither have really proved to be viable enough for mainstream consumption. With the rise of MP3 players, Audible has taken the market of audio-books and ran. And more recently, the iPhone and Kindle look poised to do the same for the eBook. The future of the traditional paperback is cloudy. One thing for certain, is that until the price of eBook readers like the Kindle are drastically cut – your college bookstore has nothing to worry about.