Open letter to O’Reilly : Your iPhone apps suck
12/12/2009Update:I’ve had feedback on this post from O’Reilly both by email and in the comments. Both Andrew and the other O’Reilly representative I’ve been in contact with seem sincere when they say that these apps will be updated with fixes for the downright broken content and that they intend to invest in further development for the mobile platform.
Since this was pretty much what I’d hoped to hear, I’m going to say that this little outburst served its cause.
To whom it may concern.
I have for years been a satisfied customer of O’Reilly. I’ve bought and enjoyed several books from you both as dead tree paperbacks and downloadable PDFs.
To my chagrin I also bought a number of titles on the iTunes app store once I found out that you publish a selection of your books as standalone apps there. I’m sad to report that I found these apps to be rather disappointing. In fact they are complete and utter crap.
It’s apparent that what you have done is to adopt the Stanza engine and stripped it down to contain one book per instance. Unless you’ve reinvented an already triangular wheel it also seems that you simply process your Safari PDFs through the downloadable helper app and then push the results to the app store.
Look; Stanza is a great e-book reader when it comes to downloading and reading “Frankenstein” as a Public Domain EPub book. And if you have some totally-not-copyrighted PDF you want to get onto your iPhone the desktop Stanza app does a tolerable job of ripping the file to HTML and reflowing it to read nicely on the small display, but converting PDFs with Stanza in this manner is, undeniably, a hack. It’s a workaround to get a PDF meant for a big screen unto a small screen, no questions asked.
Stanza is admittedly a pretty good solution to get a book onto the iPhone, a few formatting issues aside. There is however a considerable difference between reading a novel and feeling slightly irked because the chapter titles don’t show up in bold and reading a book on programming where half of the code is illegible, broken, or overflows beyond the page and into oblivion.