After months of waiting, it’s back!

Was it worth it?

Booklorn — of the Booklorn website — sent me some screensnaps of Stanza Reader displaying the PDF of Black Silk on an iPhone:

Aside from some funkiness — hyphenation breaks and lack of italics — the text can be made bigger and it reflows. This is superior to reading in Safari, even with the evident problems.

As I understand it, moving eBooks from Stanza on the desktop to Stanza Reader on an iPhone/iPod Touch requires syncing via WiFi — cable syncing is not (yet?) supported — so if you don’t have a wireless router, get one first.

Right now, I’m reading a PDF I converted to MobiPocket to read on my LifeDrive. It’s horrendous looking, with headers and gaps and no italics and footnotes mashed into the text. This actually looks better than that. When the text is what matters, we’ll settle for rotten presentation — sometimes.

Previously here:

PDF On The iPhone

Someone asked me on Twitter yesterday if a Sony Reader PRS-300 would be good for reading books that have been purchased in the PDF format.

Given its slow processor, I can’t imagine it being a good experience. And using text reflow would make it an aesthetically tormenting experience.

I haven’t bought an iPhone. With the word of AT&T’s bad service, I’ve held off — and now there are rumors of it being liberated from AT&T and perhaps landing at Verizon in January, so I’m holding off. I don’t want to lock myself into a two-year contract with rotten cell service.

I’d hoped to get one of the new iPod Touch models, but Apple disappointed me by not including the camera I wanted in it.

All this is preface to explaining that I thought an iPod would be a better reading experience for PDFs than a Sony Reader PRS-300. But I needed to see this for myself, so I stopped at the Apple Store in SOHO this morning to do some tests.

All PDF display is done via Safari. I’m unsure if this requires a persistent wireless connection, however.

FeedBooks:

That’s Black Silk. In portrait mode, the text was too small for me. Tapped-in and in landscape mode, the text was crisp and readable.

Cliff Burns:

His short story, Least, at this post.

Again, portrait text was too small. But even landscape was too small for me. Zooming in gave me a comfortable size (ie, book-size text) but would require scrolling side-to-side. Cliff could easily fix all that, however.

Google Books:

That’s Success: A Novel.

Google Books PDF was a real pain to use. First, it seemed to require a persistent connection and even at that early hour, the WiFi at the Apple Store was laggy. Second, even with the iPhone 3GS’ powerful CPU, there were delays in moving from page to page. On top of all that, the text was too blurry to be enjoyable. I held up the iPhone screen to the screen of a MacBook right next to it. Weirdly, the Google PDF wasn’t easy to look at on the MacBook screen, either — I was seeing the pixel grid of the screen!

All of this did teach me one important thing, however: Apple really, really needs to do a tablet with at least a 6-inch screen. And, ideally, bundle a PDF reader with it. I think the higher pixel density of such a screen would make it an incredible eBook and PDF reading device. It would top everything out there.

Castle returned to ABC in style …

Hulu today announced ABC had put up an eighteen-minute preview of the first episode of FlashForward. I went to Hulu to try to play it and again this crap PC let me down.

I don’t think I have to tell everyone how incredibly hyped this series has been. Just about every promo from ABC in the morning and afternoon seems to be for this series. I’ve yet to see any promo for the season premiere of Castle!

So, after my PC frustrating my desire to see this, I turned to the DarkNet and lo, there was a leak of the entire first episode.

It was a crap copy:

It used a codec I’d never heard of before. trying to play it in vlc was problematic, so I tried a program I use for converting video. Even that was troublesome but I dealt with it.

Everyone knows the premise of the series: all of humanity blacks out simultaneously for two minutes and seventeen seconds and WTF happened and is there a why too?

Given that — and the hype (which, as it draws closer to the series debut, has begun to give off a reek of desperation) — I didn’t expect much from the pilot at all.

Up until very close to the end, I was unconvinced that I’d want to watch another episode. But they snagged me with this:

I’ve cropped that image to prevent a spoiler. What I want you to concentrate on is the expression on his face. That is a man being squeezed to death by Fate. He is suddenly realizing that there is no exit ahead. My God! I’m a sucker for stories like that: predestination and fate versus free will and self-determination.

But then there was a scene after this that really grabbed me. They snagged me and then reeled me in.

Writing credits:

Brannon Braga is a name Trekkies will immediately know.

And here’s a name worth watching:

Ramin Djawadi. The in-episode music is nothing particularly special or memorable. But the music over the end credits is a hell of a thing. It’s just incredible. Unfortunately, I doubt most people will get to hear it as ABC will likely run a promo voice over on top of it. They should release it on the iTunes Store. It’s really that good.

The one thing that really pissed me off was this:

The guy whose novel is the genesis of this entire big-budget hyped-to-hell series gets a shitty little title card like that — as an afterthought?!!? That’s bullshit! His credit should be on a card of its own at the start of every episode along with the producers, writers, and director! I hope they will correct this.

I’m hooked at least for one more episode. I hope they’ll continue hooking me with that one too.

Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, which single-handedly revived prime-time game shows, came back for a rare 10th-anniversary outing.

For several years, I visited a site called TV Gameshows.net. I looked forward to the analysis and coverage of these new games. So after last night’s Millionaire debacle, I called up the site. And was shocked to find out it died last August! Even worse, it prevented the Internet Archive from making a backup copy! Webmaster Steve Beverly would have covered last night’s horror, but his site is gone. So this is for him as much as for me.

Most, but not all, of these images are hidden in the nine-minute trailer AMC released for San Diego Comic Con this weekend. Some of the images go by in a fraction of a second and it was difficult to grab them all. I don’t claim comprehensiveness here. Non-hidden images are ones I personally found interesting.

This has been a highly-anticipated series although most of the buzz has been of a derogatory nature. I’m not sure this trailer is going to do anything to counteract that except among those who don’t hold the original series as being brilliant to begin with. As much as I’d like to reserve comment about this, some of this material just really deserves some snark — and I will give it that.

Also, if you do not want any part of the series spoiled, do not read past the spoiler warning at the end. Beyond that will be my speculations of what I think the series is about, having studied the images.

I just saw this on Drudge about five minutes ago (July 10, 2009, 8:35PM EDST):

No I did not click through. Are you insane?

From the introduction of the iPhone in 2006: