A little assistance....

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I'm working on a site called 217 Babel Street, which consists of a group of published novelists creating a new work for the web.

I love the iPhone's screen and think that it could turn into the eBook reader there never was. Because of that, I really want to format the work for iPhone. In Japan whole new genres of fiction have emerged via people reading new work on phones, and I'd like to think iPhone-style devices open up the same sort of opportunities here.

My only problem has been that a) I don't have an iPhone yet, and b) my Mac OS is 10.3.9 so I can't use the iPhone emulator iPhoney, so I've had to write the pages' code blind.

I think I'm 99% there, but I'd be really grateful at this stage for some feedback. There are a few specific questions I'd like to ask kind iPhone readers:

1) How does it look and feel generally?

2) Does the "doorbells" page work OK?

3) How do the margins look, both in landscape and portrait mode?

any feedback would be gratefully received...
 
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I also am a big fan of reading on portable devices, and have immensely enjoyed reading with my iPhone on the iPhone-specific websites readdle.com and textonphone.com. The latter, in particular, is superb, and I would recommend it as a model for anyone constructing a reader site for a portable device.

Your site was Ok but I wouldn't be tempted to use it as a recreational reading site for the following reasons:

1. No "page forward" function - "Readers page, browsers scroll".
2. Remember where I stopped reading and take me back there when I return.

The doorbell page was ok although I had to double-tap the page to zoom it up in size to make it readable on the phone's screen.

The pages themselves were readable in both portrait and landscape modes, although, once again, this required a double-tap to zoom them up to comfortable reading size.

Two additional observations:

- I was in landscape mode when I first loaded the site's main page, and the formatting was a bit confusing - switching to portrait mode made the page's purpose and function clear, but the layout isn't great for iPhones in landscape mode.

- maybe it's just a test version of your site and you didn't actually intend to have the full works available, but I couldn't figure out any way to read past the first page of any of the works on the site. Once I reached the bottom of the page, there were only links to take me to a previous page (wasn't I already on the first?), the home page and an author's page.

Hope these comments are helpful - we can use all the reading sites we can get. With that said, I don't think there will be any way for you to produce a really proper iPhone site unless you beg, borrow or steal a real iPhone somehow.

Best wishes.
 
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Thanks so much... that's really useful.

1. No "page forward" function - "Readers page, browsers scroll".

Ah... well, that's because it's hypertext fiction, and there isn't a simple page forward.

2. Remember where I stopped reading and take me back there when I return.

This, likewise, is a problem with all hypertext fiction... not sure how I'd get around this.

The doorbell page was ok although I had to double-tap the page to zoom it up in size to make it readable on the phone's screen.

The pages themselves were readable in both portrait and landscape modes, although, once again, this required a double-tap to zoom them up to comfortable reading size.

Dang... The doorbell is a jpeg and whatever I do, Safari for iPhone seems to want to resize it. If anyone knows a way around this, I'd be grateful... The text pages should have a css stylesheet which works for iphone formatting so you don't need to resize them. This is bad news that it's not working for you...


Once I reached the bottom of the page, there were only links to take me to a previous page (wasn't I already on the first?), the home page and an author's page.

Ah... that's interesting. The links from each page to new pages should be obvious in a different colour. It seems to work ok on conventional browsers... Are those links hard to see on an iPhone?

Thanks again, this is so very useful.
 
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Regarding your hypertext only comment:

I agree - you'd have to give that notion up to make a true iPhone-specific site - the iPhone webapps are written using AJAX. I will say that, using a site like textonphone.com, I am now a believer in the idea that webapps can rival desktop apps in terms of usability and functionality. It's so close to using a real ebook reader app that, for me, there is really no difference.

As far as not being able to find page forward links - maybe I just don't understand your website concept. When I click on a doorbell button and I am taken to a web page of text, it seems like there should be more to read than just the text on that page, right? Or is this some kind of serialized fiction, where more content will be posted later, and I can only read a part of a work at a time? I'm confused. I visited the site with my Macbook Pro's Safari browser, and it looks just like on the iPhone - I still see only "Previous Page", "Home" and author's links. I took a screen shot of one of your pages and hosted it on my website's Photos page, so you could take a look at it:

http://www.zarkware.com/Photos/BabelScreen.jpg
 
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Never mind - I just got the fact that your next page links are the hypertext links embedded in the text of the current page.

Unconventional - and that's what threw me. First rule of website design - don't surprise your users. Just give me a conventional link to go to the next page. I would much prefer to read (again - *read* - not *browse*) without having to think how to get to the next page. I guess I'm not a fan of hypertext fiction where there might be more than one thread moving forward from a page. I like my fiction to be fully sequentially readable.

Just my .02 worth - I'm sure many would disagree.

BTW, regarding the margins on the text pages - I wouldn't worry about my comment that I double-tapped them to resize them. They were fine without the double-tap. It's just that double-tapping made them a small bit larger (by zooming the page so that the text margins were right at the edges of the iPhone's screen). At my age, the larger the text is, the better I like it, as long as I don't have to drag back and forth to read text (which I didn't with your site).
 
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thanks

... screenshot very useful too.

Yes... I think that eBooks are going to arrive by stealth thanks to the iPhone - certainly not via Amazon Kindle.

What bugged me about the Kindle is they claimed they were following the iTunes model, but you still had to pay through the nose for a digitised version after you'd bought the book. The iTunes version would be that you're entitled to a free eBook version if you've bought the paperback.
 

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