In the last post I looked at some dedicated e-book readers. One of the points I made was the possibility that e-book readers could be replaced by other multimedia devices (iPods, Sony PSP etc) and small laptops. This is an addendum, briefly following that idea and looking at the iPod Touch as an e-book reader.

Basics

An iPod Touch is basically an iPhone without the phone.  It is a small multimedia device that can play music and video and do lots of other things (such as display web pages). Click on images below for a larger view of the iPod Touch from different angles.

Cost

Depending on the version and the amount of memory (8, 16 or 32 GB) an iPod Touch will cost between £160 and £270.

Note that although the Apple education online store says there are discounts on the contents of the store, the education discount varies by product and there are actually no educational discount on the iPods (which is not immediately apparent when you first visit the store).

Battery life

This will depend on usage – the biggest drains are the screen display (since it is not a low-energy screen like a dedicated e-book reader) and having the wi-fi connection turned on.  The kind of times given here seem to match my experiences. So without using the screen much and just listening to music you might get 20-24 hours on one charge. But using the screen and wi-fi heavily could reduce that to as little as three hours. Note that if you don’t switch the device off properly (i.e. you leave it in standby) then the battery is drained overnight.

Rechargeable batteries have a limited number of charge cycles and eventually need to be replaced. Note that as with other Apple hardware, the iPod Touch battery isn’t user-replaceable; it can only be replaced by an ‘authorized service provider’, which involves time and cost.

Software

From the manual: “Before you can use any of the iPod touch features, you must use iTunes to set up iPod touch. You can also register iPod touch and create an iTunes Store account (available in most countries) if you don’t already have one.”

So before you can use it you have to download and install the latest version of iTunes. And you have to use iTunes to manage the device, even though iTunes is not to everyone’s taste. There are no other options – it won’t act like an external hard-drive as many PC-based multimedia players will. You cannot use the iPod Touch on a PC where you can’t install software (i.e. most college and institutional PCs).

Actually using the device to read PDFs can be problematic in some cases, since the iPod Touch is somewhat restrictive. See this and this for some discussion of the problems unless the iPod is hacked to make it more ‘open’ (which would invalidate any warranty).

Using it for e-books

RSC Wales added e-book readers to the device, applications downloaded from the iTunes Apps store. See the RSC Wales guide to the iPod Touch, especially the sections ‘Additions and eBook Reader stuff’ and ‘More stuff about the eBook Readers’. I won’t repeat the information provided there, so skim over that for some more information on using a Touch to read e-books.

The video below shows a short demonstration of me using an e-book on an iPod Touch. It includes:

• Turning pages
• Changing the text and background colours
• Using the find option
• Changing chapters

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The iPod plays music, so with a pair of headphones audio books would be an option on this device.

Conclusion

The search for a perfect device continues. This is a nifty multi-function device that is fun and simple to use, with a tactile interface. However for reading e-books the battery life could be a problem, and the small and bright screen could be a bit headache-inducing if used for extended periods. I doubt that I would want to read a whole book on it.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 17th, 2008 at 7:44 pm and is filed under e-book readers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.