Re: [NTLK] Newton Book or Newton Paperback, which is better

From: DJ Vollkasko (DJ_Vollkasko_at_gmx.net)
Date: Wed Apr 21 2004 - 10:22:47 PDT


>From a user's point of view, which has a better interface for reading
>texts on a Newton? Newton Book or Newton Paperback?

Cheers Eric!

Paperback is cool, because it allows to freely switch to your fave font and
font size, also making a Paperback document is very fast. It automatically
adapts to the available screen size, so it's one size fits all, also does
landscape-orientation like a breeze.

On the down side, Paperbacks are mostly pretty artless documents (which
sometimes appalls me - somebody put years of their lives into a book, so why
not treat the book with some respect - but that's just my personal bibliomanic
itch, I guess), they have no table of contents, no links, no illustrations, no
bookmarks, after a reset Paperbacks forget where you stopped reading...

Newton ebooks proper can have illustrations (pics that're larger than the
display get their own scroll bars for free! ;=} ), links within the book,
nice table of contents and even multimedia-content (there's some demos
around for commercial software to include animation, movies and audio in the
Newton book-format). Page breaks, formatted paragraphs, different fonts,
styles and sizes. You can always get right back to where you stopped reading
the book. You can create as many bookmarks as you want with XNewtBook (where
you just need to scribble on the page to create a bookmark - plus you can
add a comment/title to the bookmark! And search in the open book or all
installed books! Really brilliant stuff! Freeware, too! Get it already:
http://www.modasys.de/htmls/newton - Only downside: The backup of the
bookmarks-soup works nicely, but the restore doesn't - huh?). That little
extension makes the built-in ebook reader even better.

Admitted, a reader is totally at the merci of whoever created the book. But
if that person sticks to a few rules (12 pt fonts, avoid italics, one
package for every format, nicely legible layout) and isn't stark raving mad
about switching fonts and sizes all the time, you won't find this so hard. -
Simply put: The creator of the package has a lot of control over what the
product will look like, and should not take that responsibility lightly.
People will like to read a well-done book, but not one that makes the eyes
squint. With this format, you can produce both.

Importing formatted RTF-documents to Newton Press 1.1 retains most styles
and pagebreaks, etc. It's very good to load etexts into a text editor, clean
'em up, format as desired incl. pagebreaks, import to NP, scroll through to
check + create the table of contents ("New Topic"), and churn them out in
the Newton-format you want. I always do all eight formats (Universal,
Classic, MP 2x00 Portrait, MP 2x00 Landscape, MP 2x00 2UP, eMate Portrait,
eMate Landscape, eMate 2UP), so all Newtonians can profit from my labour (I
usually ship a ZIP-file with all the eight formats plus the original
Gutenberg source).
   And recently the secret of creating multiple-format books has been
unraveled... It creates books that are of course larger than just a
single-format book, but can suit as many Newton formats as you want.

So, yeah, I guess I'm all for the original book format. It's not better than
Paperback, it's just different with more options, and that suits my needs
as a reader and Newton
ebook editor much more, and I believe it creates the nicer product.

Sincerely

DJ Vollkasko

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