iTunes App Store Opens

Apple has opened the App store for business, though the firmware updates for the iPhone and the iPod Touch are still a day away. (iPhones but not Touches can actually get the 2.0 update through a direct link.)

Naturally, after downloading the iTunes update with the App store, my first course of action was to try and find the PDF eBook reader I've been waiting for. A search for "PDF" came up with bubkis, but I did stumble on this App (which has "PDF" in the description -- Apple, time to work on your search functionality). It allows you to copy files, including PDFs, to your device and read them. The only thing missing is the ability to bookmark pages.

I'm not buying the app until I know it can bookmark, but I've sent them an email asking about it. I'll keep you all posted.

Update: I also just found this app, which doesn't read PDFs, but does read HTML and text. If FileMagnet doesn't do the job, this is what I'll probably be using until a proper PDF reader comes along.

Update 2: The makers of FileMagnet replied to my email:

Hi Eric:

Thanks for your interest in FileMagnet. FileMagnet's PDF viewing is identical to the way Safari on the iPhone shows PDFs. There's not currently a way to bookmark pages as far as I know. We will absolutely be looking into providing more powerful PDF viewing in a future update!

Regards,
Ken

So no dice there. Sigh. If only the iPhone SDK were available for Linux, I could really build something (or at least try to)...

The New Wet Asphalt

I'm both sad and somewhat relieved to say that Wet Asphalt is no longer a literary magazine published like a blog, or a literary blogazine. That idea was a good one, even an excellent one, but without much more time and money than I have at my disposal it was never able to be what what we wanted it to be. With my compatriot Quackenbush's contributions dwindling to nil and submissions at barely a trickle, the site increasingly became my own personal blog, which was unfortunate because I already had a personal blog. To complicate things, I increasingly have more and more venues to place reviews and literary essays (ironically, thanks mostly to this site), which has made it harder to decide what I should publish here and what I should save for other places. Also other projects, not to mention my various day-job commitments, continue to take up my time.

The conclusion I ultimately came to was that it only made sense to consolidate my efforts. Wet Asphalt is now my personal blog in name as well as practice. JF Quackenbush is welcome to use it as his personal blog as well. It will still have the kind of link lists and commentary it's had for the last few months, but it will also have personal musings and non-literary content previously reserved for EricRosenfield.com. It will no longer have my essays and reviews (except for very short form and/or personal rambling sorts of reviews), though if possible I will link to where those have been published on other sites. The result will be that this site will be updated much more frequently.

EricRosenfield.com will turn into a portal, with recent Wet Asphalt and Literate Machine posts, my Del.icio.us tags, and so on.

My Live Journal will go dark. I wasn't using it much anyway.

Wet Asphalt is dead. Long live Wet Asphalt.

What We Need From an Ebook Reader for the iPhone

There was some buzz in the lit-bloggy-verse a little bit ago about eReader coming out with an ebook reader for the iPhone/iPod Touch. Let me tell you why this is not a big deal.

eReader's software only reads one ebook format, Palm Doc or "pdb", which was originally developed for the Palm Pilot. As an aside, the help section on the site unhelpfully calls this the "Doc" format, which is confusing since for most people "doc" refers to files with the ".doc" extension, that is, Microsoft Word files. I suppose eReader didn't want to confuse people who might think that the format only works with Palm Pilot, but I think it would have been a much better idea to simply explain that the format originated on the Palm Pilot. As it is it might confuse people into thinking their eReader software can read Microsoft Word documents.

Anyway, the eReader store only offers eBooks with DRM, which is typical for Palm Doc files. (Typically the only way to get a Palm Doc file without DRM is to make it yourself.) I once bought two ebooks like this to read on my Palm Pilot. One was an essay collection, the other a long novel I never finished. Now they are useless to me, because to read them I have to input my old credit card number as an "unlock code". I haven't had this credit card in years. No matter that I paid real money for these books, no matter how much I want to reference that essay collection or finish reading that novel, I can't. The books I bought are useless to me, in striking contrast to, say, physical books, which when paid for can be reread and reread to one's hearts content. (And if I didn't want to be able to reread the books, I would have just gotten them from the library in the first place.)

I will never buy another book in the Palm Doc format, or any other format crippled with DRM.

This shouldn't be a problem. More and more eBooks are being offered in non-DRM'd format, specifically, as reliable, old PDFs. What we need is a proper PDF reader for the iPhone/iPod Touch.

Of course, the iPhone/iPod Touch can already read PDFs. There are, however, two major problems with the way it does so. One, it can only read PDFs that are emailed to the device or that are on a web page, and it can't move those PDFs into the file system for easy access, meaning in the case of web page PDFs one has to be online to read them at all. Two, even more critically for eBooks, the PDF reader can't bookmark pages.

So this is what we need: the ability to transfer a PDF from the computer to the device's file system and the ability to bookmark pages. Solve those two problems and you will have (finally) turned the iPhone/iPod Touch into the ebook reader we've all been waiting for.

And if nobody makes an ebook reader like this in July, when the iPhone/iPod Touch App Store is unveiled, I may just make it myself.