A few days ago, I mentioned the WordPress plug-in PadPressed, which makes blogs resemble Wordpad documents when read on the iPad. Now our founder and editor emeritus David Rothman has put that plug-in into use on his own blog about his book, The Solomon Scandals, with an emphasis on the availability of sample chapters and other material from the book in that format.
Visit it from a desktop web browser and it looks perfectly ordinary. But go there via the iPad’s Mobile Safari, and the interface becomes essentially the same as an iPad app. You can even tap the “+” in the status bar to add an icon for it to your desktop, and thus pretend that it’s “just another iPad app”—only the presence of Safari’s status bar gives away that it’s still a webpage.
When reading ordinary blog entries, you can swipe the screen from left to right or right to left to move to previous or next entries (though it does take a second or two to load the new entry). About the only thing you can’t do is widen, pinch, or double-tap to zoom in or out.
David writes that the plug-in may be a little rough now, “but look, in effect, I’m giving you a preview not just of the book but also of the future. To think that I wrote the first draft of Scandals on an electric typewriter.”
I’m not entirely sure I think this is as significant as David does, though. He sees it as be a way to bypass Apple’s app-store censorship. And while that’s as true as it would be for any work published as a website rather than an iPad app, I don’t really see anything new about it.
For a long time TeleRead used a plug-in that gave it a simplified appearance on the iPhone’s Mobile Safari (I’m not sure if we still do or not, given that I no longer have my iPod Touch), but it was just a way to make our blog easier to read on that small screen, not a way to imitate an iPhone application. (Though we later went ahead and did a separate iPhone application.) This is essentially the same thing.
It looks nice, and it’s neat to be able to swipe between entries (albeit at a cost of a couple of seconds of loading time) but it’s not doing anything in terms of bypassing the app store that an ordinary web page doesn’t.
(Thanks to Mediabistro’s EBookNewser for also covering the story!)
Thanks for your interesting observation on Podpressed and the Solomonscandals.com site, Chris.
Even ePub files served up via independent sites are a way of bypassing the App Store. But Podpressed lets you do regular WordPress and keep an iPad-style appearance and interface for the reader. Not just for books but maybe eventually for newspapers.
One interesting possibility, when the plugin and equivalents are further along, is to use Podpressed with posts/files that would be password-protected. So you could sell to readers directly without the Apple App store involved but with an Apple-ish interface and instant gratification. A lot more fun, perhaps, than the usual Web pages.
As both presentation and connectivity improve, who knows what’ll be in store (no pun intended)?
Finally, yes, NAPCO is still iPodding TeleRead, so to speak–using the WPTouch 1.9.16 plugin for WordPress. Seen on my Touch, TeleRead looked great.
Thanks,
David