phone browsing

[julesjones]

My site logs often offer interesting little snippets of information. Apart from the usual collection of strange search strings, this week's log has the first appearance of the iPhone browser. Yes, someone out there was looking at my website on their iPhone, and not just the front page.

I've also seen the occasional Symbian phone (mostly Nokias). If this turns into a trend, I'm going to have to think about catering to the mobile phone users, even if it's just offering a selection of the free short stories in a format they find easy to use. Any of you smartphone users got an opinion on this? rpdom?

ETA: Don't think I can really slant the website design itself towards phone users (especially as it's already heavily biased towards accessibility for disabled readers), but if there's anything on my site that causes serious problems for phone users, speak up. As an example, the free shorts (beware of the gay smut) index page is here:
http://www.julesjones.com/fiction/downloads.html
and the book reviews, con reports and essays (mostly work-safe) are here:
http://www.julesjones.com/misc/misc.html

Comments

[the-hunter.livejournal.com]

I have ITRO 40 books on my 'phone at any one time. I would never be without it now. So much more convenient than carrying 40 seperate paperbacks, and I know that when I am at a loose end i have something to read.

[julesjones]

Since my books are pretty much all ebooks, there'll be some of mine on smartphones anyway, but those get sold through the publishers and places like Fictionwise. This looks as if I should be thinking about providing some free sample content in a format that's easy for smartphone users to use. Just not sure what that is, given that my preferred phone is a phone, without anything else...

[the-hunter.livejournal.com]

Ah!
Well, I have books in Word format, also pdf, and Lit, which uses, in my case, Microsoft e-reader software to view. Word files on 'doze smartfones are perfectly acceptable to read as books. PDF sometimes less so, as occasionally they require considerable side-to-side scrolling to read, and the E-reader format is obviously designed for the 'phone, and makes reading on the phone a delight.

[julesjones]

Thanks, that's very helpful.

Symbian phone here ...

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

... I use both the P910i and the P990i SonyEricsson Symbian UIQ phones ... they have a Word compatible editor as well as a notepad editor and a PDF viewer.

There are ebook readers available too I believe.

Re: Symbian phone here ...

[julesjones]

So it might be worth providing a plaintext or rtf to download, as well as the html version? Though I suppose anyone who can work out what to do with an rtf can probably do a conversion from the html into their preferred format anyway.

There's been a strong preference for html and pdf when I offer copies of the novels as contest prizes, but that's probably going to be for reading on desktop/laptops or dedicated ebook readers. No idea what the phone users are going to go for.

Re: Symbian phone here ...

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

Oh, they both have HTML webbrowsers as well, just keep the html fairly plain (no great demands of CSS and fancy fonts) and the HTML version will be fine (I can read LiveJournal on my P990i but it has a more recent webbrowser on it)

It depends how much you want to control the layout of what is being read ... certainly plain text will be fine, or RTF (though I think keeping an individual file down under 64k is probably a good idea ... using HTML it's easy enough to add "chapter forward/backward" links

Re: Symbian phone here ...

[julesjones]

The site's already set up so that it's usable in things like JAWS (I even look at it through a LYNX emulator every now and again to check), so I think the HTML on the site should be fairly reasonable in a browser that wants something simple. Looks like one thing to do is to keep an eye on the size of the files, and offer an html version broken into chunks if necessary.

[da-pol.livejournal.com]

If you're willing to put a little legwork in, I'd suggest the following:

LRF - MS Reader - available for all WinCE devices including smartphones
iSilo - Fairly standard pocket device reader format
RTF - almost entirely standard rich text format
HTML - You know this one :)
PDF - Pretty standard, albeit not for most smart phones in any form you'd want to use
TXT - absolutely bog basic
PalmDOC - almost the definitive Palm reader format
BBeB - Sony LiBriE format - also works with PRS500/505

[julesjones]

Ta. Probably won't do all of that, but a couple besides html might be good. I should probably wander over to Lulu.com as well and take a look at what conversion tools they offer.