iPhone as e-Reader? I get the picture...

An Article in GigaOm arguing that the iPhone is the Next e-Reader:

Yesterday at the urging of a friend, I ordered “Your Brain at Work” by David Rock on my iPod touch via the Amazon Kindle app. In doing so, I became one of many people who are helping the iPhone become more than just a phone. It’s latest role: e-reader....

Apparently this is because "Book-related apps saw an upsurge in launches in September, according to a survey conducted by Flurry, a San Francisco-based mobile application analytics company. So much so, that book-related applications overtook games in the App Store as a percentage of all released apps. The trend isn’t an aberration. In October, one out of every five new applications launching on the iPhone was a book, Flurry said". Furthermore:

The sharp rise in e-book activity on the iPhone indicates that Apple is positioned to take market share from the Amazon Kindle as it did from the Nintendo DS. Despite the smaller form factor of the display, we predict that the iPhone will be a significant player in the book category of the media and entertainment space. Further, with Apple working on a larger tablet form factor, running on the iPhone OS, we believe Jeff Bezos and team will face significant competition.

As with all pronouncement from Planet Mobile, it is best to divide by 2 and only then take a long, hard, sceptical look. I have an iPhone. I read webpages on it, and that does (it is true) replace time reading books on shorter train journeys.

Now maybe its just me, but I find the ergonomics of reading long text on a c 2" x 3" screen quite hard (and I have very good eyesight, still). Twitter is ok, email is ok, and I can even read Powerpoint slides - in fact slides work quite well because the writing is big and they have pictures. So I'd make a guess that the books that will read well on iPhones will be books with big letters and pictures on them, like cartoons (or Graphic Novels if you are an adult) and kids books (rolling them together, I have a - timely - cartoon above by Dr Seuss, who was also a fairly satrical cartoonist in his youth), and of course Manga, which is read on mobiles in Japan.

But War and Peace? No way, unless, of course, it is in pictures.....actually, this means there may be a space for Classics Illustrated, a feature of my not entirely mis-spent youth

But realistically? I suspect e-Reading will be for devices with screens of at least double the length and breadth, and this will be a "good enough" for short form text for a short time, as it is with video.