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.