Wednesday July 28, 2010

E-Reading: A Personal Gadget History

I’ve been using a cell phone for almost ten years. I know this because I didn’t buy one until I moved to New York, and that was ten years ago this fall. I bought it because my only friend in New York told me all the pay phones in the city were broken and/or filthy. I had been entirely functional in Memphis—even as a weekly newspaper reporter—without one. So I bought a Nokia 8260 at an AT&T store near Madison Square Park and used it to find my first Manhattan apartment—a sublet above the Cowgirl Hall of Fame in Chelsea. Here’s what the 8260 looks like, in all its monochrome glory.

I didn’t read books off the Nokia 8260, but since then I’ve had nine more mobile devices—about one a year, tame for a gadget nerd—and I’ve read e-books off six of them. When you look at them in order, it’s kind of mind-blowing how quickly we went from the Nokia 8260 to the iPad. Here’s a personal timeline.

2003: Nokia 3300
I shudder to think that anyone saw me using this beast, but it didn’t seem so crazy at the time—sort of like parachute pants. Nokia’s idea was to create a texting/mp3 playing monster that would become the new Walkman. In my defense, I got this baby for free from some swag pile. And I didn’t read any books on it.

2004: Motorola MPx200
In its day, this phone was the shit. A flip phone running Windows Mobile, its casing was like the plastic around a big rotary desk phone from the ‘50s. I felt like Ethan Hawke in Gattaca using this phone—like a messenger from the Deco Future. I bought it on eBay and—I now remember—I had to buy an external camera attachment for it so I could start a photoblog. Remember how novel that was? I also started reading e-books on it, using the Mobipocket application. Mostly Project Gutenberg stuff. Windows Mobile—like a lot of other Windows products—is such a tragedy. Here Microsoft had a mobile platform and a developer community in 2004, but they couldn’t get their act together in the three years before the iPhone was introduced. Then Apple came along and made the same basic idea so damned consumable that Windows didn’t stand a chance.

10 days in 2004: Motorola MPx
This was the hot phone of 2004. Just check the archives at Gizmodo and Engadget. The cool thing about it was that it had a full keyboard and a double hinge that allowed you to open it up like either a standard clam-shell or like a little keyboard. I got to play with a prototype for ten days in 2004, after I convinced GQ to let me write about it. I didn’t get around to reading any books on it, and the interface seemed a little wonky—but, hey, it was a prototype. The story ran, but the phone never shipped. I felt so bad I never pitched GQ again.

2005-2006: Audiovox SMT5600
Another Windows Mobile phone. I clearly remember showing this to some publishing acquaintances—with real jobs at the Big Six—who were baffled that I was reading books off this thing (again using Mobipocket.) E-books were dead, right? It seemed so. I owned this phone when I first began distributing Single, my first e-book, directly from my site. And if you want a laugh, check out these instructions I posted for reading an e-book using the notes function on an iPod. This was just four short years ago.

2006-2007: Samsung D307
I plead temporary insanity. I think I was seduced by the full keyboard and the dual-hinge design. (Perhaps I was trying to work through the trauma of the GQ/MPx debacle.) In any case, you couldn’t read books on this, so I moved on.

2007-2008: Samsung Blackjack
Back to Windows Mobile and Mobipocket. Now you can say what you want about Mobipocket, but a function it had—that most current reading apps lack—is the ability to auto-scroll. You could get the speed just right and let the words roll by. I liked reading that way. Unfortunately, on the way to the mainstream, e-books picked up some print nostalgia, culminating in the iBookstore’s cloying little page flips. I’ll be glad when those melt away.

2008-2009: AT&T Tilt
It didn’t have a dual-hinge, but the Tilt—an HTC Kaiser in disguise—fulfilled the promise of the MPx with Windows Mobile functionality and a slide-out QWERTY keyboard. But this was the last Windows Mobile phone I will likely ever own.

2009-present: iPhone 3GS
I’m no Apple fanboy, as you can tell by my late adoption of the iPhone. I think their computers are overpriced and that most of the price goes to advertising. (I think they may have more inherent value than Windows machines, but I still feel like you’re paying for more advertising and brand aura in a Mac, which bothers me on a metabolic level.) That said, I do think the iPhone interface is the most revolutionary change to come to personal electronics since the mouse. I have never owned a Kindle, or a dedicated e-reader, but as soon as I got an iPhone, I knew the e-reading revolution was for real this time. (And Amazon did too, as evidenced by their quick purchase of Stanza.) I’ve probably read as many books off the iPhone as I did off all my Windows Mobile phones combined. And, for the first time, I actually started to buy e-books.

2010: iPad
Yeah, I bought one. The day it was released. I may have even delivered the first ever literary reading from one. And I understand how important it is to the e-reading market, since I’ve sat with people who are incredibly tech-savvy who still cannot contemplate reading a book off an iPhone screen. The iPad will bring e-books to them and to a legion of novices who find the device intuitive and, well, book-sized. But here’s my secret. I still mostly read off my iPhone. What do I read, and where do I get it? I’ll break that down in a later post.