The Washington Post for iPad

The Washington Post App for iPad (iTunes link)

I’ve used this a bit in the past few days and like it a lot. It feels snappier than The New York Times’s iPad app. I find it easy to browse through the sections and read stories I’m interested in. Easier than using the webpage.

A few niggles:

• I think prefer pagination to scrolling for long articles on the iPad (as opposed to on the Web), but here I don’t mind it much.
• They’ve locked out copy and paste, which is silly.
• The ever-present ad bar at the bottom seems like wasted space. Maybe the ads could float in/around the articles instead? Worse is the floating social media bar thing. It’s a lot of pixels at the bottom of the page I’m just ignoring. It’s early, though. Maybe they’ll make good use of it.

How Star Trek artists imagined the iPad... 23 years ago

To understand the thinking that lead to the design of the Star Trek PADD, we spoke to some of the people involved in production of ST:TNG (as well as other Star Trek TV series and films), including Michael Okuda, Denise Okuda, and Doug Drexler.

Ars Technica

iPad and Kindle Reading Speeds

A study of people reading long-form text on tablets finds higher reading speeds than in the past, but they’re still slower than reading print.

iPad and Kindle Reading Speeds

DC iPad App

Following up from last week, DC Comics has now released its own iPhone/iPad app, also powered by comiXology (iTunes Link). Newsarama has the full list of its launch titles.

Recommendations:

• All-Star Superman
• Green Lantern
• Batman starting with 655
• Action Comics starting with 844
• Tiny Titans, especially for kids
• Sandman
• Planetary

I Spent Some Time Reading Comics on the iPad

Runaways by Brian K. Vaughn is a series I always meant to read but never got around to. Last week Marvel posted the first issue for free on its iPad app, so I figured I’d read it to see if the series was as good as I’d heard (short review: not as good as Vaughn’s Y: The Last Man, but good enough that I bought the rest of the issues Marvel had online). It gave me a chance to see how reading comics on the iPad is.

Marvel’s app is done by comiXology, which also has an app called “Comics” and one for Boom! Studios. The basic principle is this: you can read the comic page-by-page, or you can double-tap on a panel and enter “guided view”. The iPad’s screen is about 80% the size of a standard American comic book, which makes the size of most letterers’ text just a smidge too small for my eyes to comfortably read. For some it might be great. If you hold the iPad sideways and and stretch the image to fit its width, it’s a nice large size. You have to scroll up and down to read the bottom half of each page, but I don’t mind. Unfortunately, Marvel’s app doesn’t remember your zoom level, so each time you turn the page you have to zoom in again. (Marvel: Comic Zeal does this perfectly.) In “guided view”, the app zooms in to show you just one panel at a time. It ends up feeling halfway between reading a very, very long newspaper comic strip and watching a slow-moving cartoon. Guided view by default “letterboxes” the rest of the page, so you only see the one panel you’re reading. I prefer to see the neighboring panels, so I turned letterboxing off.

Design-wise, Marvel’s app places too much focus on its store and not enough on reading the comics you’ve already bought. There’s a “Browse” button in the upper-right that lets you navigate by series or authors, but the main pane needs a few options for sorting by read/unread status, publication date, etc. Marvel oddly requires you to sign up for a free account with them before you can buy anything, despite transactions themselves being made as in-app purchases with your iTunes account. I assume Marvel wants you to make an account so it can track your reading habits more precisely than whatever Apple provides. You have to buy issues individually and can’t subscribe to a series. The app claims that it will send a push notification when new issues go up for sale but I haven’t seen one so far. The ability to download a batch of issues at once would be very nice.

Comics cost $1.99 from Marvel’s app. That’s one or two dollars cheaper than new comic singles, but if you consider that most storylines run 4-6 issues, the digital price winds up being about the same as buying the trade paperback from Amazon. Indie publishers in comiXology’s Comics app charge $0.99 for some books. Comic retailers are terrified that readers are going to stop going to comic book stores and go digital. Rhetoric from the publishers to retailers is that the digital copies will help get new readers interested in comics and drive them to stores, but I can’t see that happening all that often. Maybe people will sample an issue online and decide to buy paperback or hardcover collections, but are they going to pay full price in a comic book store, or get 35% off and free shipping from Amazon?

In general, the comics industry doesn’t know exactly how to react to digital distribution. It’s sort of fun to watch all the different publishers play around in this new frontier. Smaller publishers are more willing to experiment. DC doesn’t have any digital offerings at all. Marvel has a few hundred books in its store, but it’s still experimenting. One of the big debates is around how quickly new comics should show up online. Personally I don’t think it’s a big deal for there to be a lag of six months or so (like DVD releases vs. movie theaters), but so far Marvel is just publishing older stories from a few years ago. Ideally they’ll start a regular publishing schedule so people can start following ongoing series. In time the publishers really need to make sure all of their output is online, not just a few flagship titles.

Verdict: I don’t personally intend to stop buying physical comics, but if you’re someone who has interest in a few series, iPad reading will be great for you. No need to go into a specialty store every week. Quick gratification. The art looks nice on the iPad’s bright, colorful screen (though I wouldn’t complain if both the artwork and the screen itself had more resolution).

Con: Anything you buy is locked in the app, so your ability to read the comics again in a few years hangs on how long Marvel keeps the service going. Record companies eventually agreed to do away with copy protection, but I don’t see publishers just offering PDF copies of their books. Personally this makes me very wary of investing in the platform heavily, but for light, casual reading, it’s probably okay.

Recommendation: Immortal Iron Fist by Ed Brubaker, Matt Fraction, and David Aja. Doesn’t require much foreknowledge of the character, has lots of kung fu action.

Recommendations for Marvel's iPad App

Marvel’s entry onto the iPad, powered by Comixology’s software, works pretty well. The pages are about two-thirds the size of a normal comic page but are quite readable, and you can double-tap on a panel to make it it zoom in for a closer look. (By default, the app blacks out other nearby panels when you do this. I prefer to see the art in the context of the rest of the page; you can turn off this “letterboxing” in the settings.) At present there are a few hundred titles in the store, from what I’ve seen all at $1.99 aside from a handful of free samplers. Purchasing seems to be through your preexisting iTunes account, so it should be easy, but you do have to create a free Marvel account first (which the app tells you in a warning message, but doesn’t offer to send you to the signup page—un-Mac-like). $2 sort of seems pricey to me, but it’s dollar or two cheaper than what new titles cost in a comic book store. Marvel’s already under intense pressure not to ruin its own print business, so in that context it makes sense. Still, ten issues for $20 is the same price as a nice hardcover of that same book, but maybe it’s time to stop comparing print to digital.

Here are my recommendations of what I’ve found in Marvel’s initial offering:

1. Astonishing X-Men by Joss Whedon and John Cassaday. This run was very fun, the art is solid, and the story doesn’t require much foreknowledge of prior storylines. It has some good Whedonesque dialogue, as expected. (They have issues 1-24, but I don’t see the Giant-Size finale, oddly.)
2. Captain America by Ed Brubaker and Steve Epting. This volume started in 2004 and has run for sixty-odd issues by now. When Brubaker’s done telling his whole story I have little doubt it will be regarded as among the best Captain America runs in Marvel’s history.
3. Civil War by Mark Millar and Steve McNiven. This was the biggest “event” Marvel did last decade. It poses interesting questions about how law & order would be possible in a world with super-powered vigilantes, and Captain America jumps out of a helicarrier onto a jet airplane.
4. Invincible Iron Man by Matt Fraction and Salvadore Larocca. This series is going on right now and deals with some of the fall-out of Civil War, and the events that followed it. Not quite as friendly to new readers, but the recap pages explain the basic status quo and it’s been a fun ride.

I also saw two issues of The Immortal Iron Fist up. If they go back and put the others in, Ed Brubaker and Matt Fraction’s fun kung-fu story ran for about 15 issues and was a lot of fun.

Am I going to stop buying print comics in favor of digital ones? Doubtful. I’m going to sample a few different apps and see how good the reading experience is, and while I like the idea of saving a bit of money, I have serious worries about the longevity of the platform. All of the files you “buy” from Marvel’s app, and likely from other competitors’¹, are locked in that app. Your iPad’s files are backed up by iTunes, but the files themselves require the app and will disappear if its provider leaves the business. If Marvel were just selling PDF copies of its comics, I’d be able to back them up and read them in other software theoretically forever even if the iPad turned out to be a flop. I hate using the term “collectible”, because it conjures up images of comics as investments and not stories to be enjoyed, but I’d like to think a kid buying comics online now will be able to read them again in twenty years. (Won’t somebody please think of the children!) Then again, I had comics at 10 I’d love to read again but can’t find. So while there’s no guarantee of permanence no matter what you do and what format you choose, publishers did start using acid-free paper when they learned that old books were disintegrating. It’d be nice if the iPad offerings were doing something more future-proof since we know it’s better to have an unprotected file than one locked in a particular app in a particular kind of tablet.

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1. Marvel has its own app, and the Comics app by Comixology contains books by IDW and other publishers. DC has nothing right now and hasn’t said anything concrete about its digital plans. This seems profoundly stupid for the company, but potentially it can wait and see what success Marvel has at getting people reading comics on their iPads and then launch its own app in a few months. ↩

Real Comic vs. iPad App

Marvel has a few free issues in their app. I read New Avengers 1 and found it to be a great experience. It’s a little small but readable. Higher-rez scans would be nice to make the lettering smoother. You can double-click a panel and it’ll zoom into that one panel (which must be a lot of work for Comixology to put together for every issue). I prefer to turn off the “letterboxing” feature so that you can see other nearby panels as you zoom into one. It feels more like reading the real issue that way.

Comic Zeal for the iPad Looks Great

Preview: Instapaper on iPad

Marco Arment shares the thinking behind the design of his upcoming Instapaper App for the iPad. His design philosophy has always been to make something for himself to use, and in that vein, he writes, "an iPad without native Instapaper Pro is not a device I want to own."

I absolutely agree. As I've said before, I think that Instapaper will be the iPad's killer app. As much as the Web can do multimedia, the thing I do most is read text. Instapaper lets you turn the entire web into a cleanly-designed newspaper with just one click of a bookmarklet. That, on a handy tablet? It'll be the first app I install.

Amazon Kindle Apps for Tablet Computers

Assuming Apple doesn't reject it, this should mean you can read Kindle books just as easily as Apple's iBooks. Be interesting to see reviews of the reading experience on both apps.