How many swipes would it take?
April 10th, 2009
FlyingSinger has a brief review of Anathem over here at his blog. But what caught my attention is that he read it on an iPhone with the Kindle SW?!? I mean WOW that is tenacity, I mean the finger-swipes alone have me thinking that the poor guy will need some kind of joint replacement! But anyway I guess it beats lugging an almost 900 page book around for a couple weeks…
Thanks for the mention. It was actually an iPod Touch (not that this matters), and it was 16,000 “pages” at the font size I was using - so about 16,000 page-turn swipes. Quite a workout, I could really feel the burn. People are somehow amazed by this, but all that flicking doesn’t bother me (easier than holding a full size book), and I find the readability on the Touch’s screen to be quite good, not a hardship at all to read for extended periods. Since the iPod looks like an iPhone or a Blackberry Storm or something, I’ve also expanded my available reading time into certain meetings. I read a lot of Anathem at meetings in China and Taiwan where my Chinese-speaking colleagues were running the show and I was pretty much useless after the introductions.
I skipped the Baroque series due to bulk but now maybe I’ll try that on the tiny display on my next overseas trip.