My iPod has long been a traveling companion, and before that I carried a portable CD player — an expensive fragile piece of equipment that skipped on especially rattly trains and quickly drained its non-rechargeable batteries. Once upon a time I took a night train from Paris to Florence to an unending cycle of George Michael because that was the only CD I had with me. For similar reasons (and to similarly embarrassing effect) I associate Alanis Morissette with the city of Rome, and the soundtrack to Such a Long Journey with the castles along the Rhine.
But music and audio books are not always the ideal companions for a journey, or are not always enough; on loud enough transportation they can be hard to hear properly. Sometimes one wants reading material — but books are heavy and bulky to pack.
Recently I’ve been whiling away a lot of travel time with Stanza, an eBook reader for the iPod and iPhone. On my most recent trip I got through Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth; Gene Stratton Porter’s A Girl of the Limberlost; Balzac’s Petty Troubles of Marriage; Turgenev’s First Love; some dozens of short stories by L. M. Montgomery; Sabatini’s short The Abduction; and (it must be admitted) a couple of romance novels Harlequin was giving away in honor of its 60th anniversary. I also tried, before I got bored with, Stephen Baxter’s Manifold: Time, most of the other Harlequin novels on offer, etc. I would have had to bring a whole separate sack for these books if I had been carrying them in physical form.
There are other advantages: with the built-in catalogs, it’s easy to add to the collection any time I’m on a wireless network, and the screen is readable even at times when a book wouldn’t be, as for instance in a dimly-lit couchette. I wouldn’t mind if I had a larger range of reading fonts available — the installed ones are fine but don’t include any of my real favorites. Then again, I can’t revise the typesetting of a physical book at will, either.
There are a couple of disadvantages as well. One is just an extension of the same old problem: the iPod/iPhone can run out of battery power. But it does so very slowly when doing something so low-processing as running Stanza, I have to say; a single charge is good for a lot of page-turns. I only ran out of reading power once or twice.
The more significant issue is the lack of visual or tactile hints about how far one is through one’s book. The little bar at the bottom of the screen gives some information about position within a given chapter, which is useful, but it doesn’t indicate how long the whole book is. And it turns out that I want to know that more often than I had ever imagined, because in the past it has always been an instant and unconscious matter to check how far I was through the book’s binding.
Still, that’s a small price to pay for the entertainment.
