iLounge

You already know all about The Free iPod Book 3.3—our massive tutorial guide for iPods, iTunes, iPhones, and Apple TVs, released yesterday. This morning, we’ve debuted a special version of the Book that’s optimized for reading on the iPhone itself, so you can access everything, including its newly added Free iPhone Book accessory guide, from your pocket.

Our iPhone version of The Free iPod Book 3.3 attempts to make maximum use of the device’s basic PDF reader, rendering individual pages for the full iPhone screen rather than attempting to squeeze two page spreads together side-by-side. Consequently, header text is generally readable without zooming in; you can use pinch and expand gestures to focus on text and graphics that interest you. Additional technical details can be found by clicking on this article’s headline above.

You can get the iPhone version of The Free iPod Book 3.3 here.

(9.3 MB PDF)

(6.6 MB PDF)

The full-sized version of the Book 3.3, available in widescreen (2-page-wide) or printable (1-page-wide) editions, is available here.

(For those interested in the technical issues surrounding the iPhone version of the Book, note that we optimized the book at a resolution such that photos have enough detail to be acceptable when scaled to nearly the full size of the screen. However, for sake of fitting the whole book in iPhone’s limited PDF storage capacity, not as much detail as the full-sized PC and Mac version of the Book. We ran up against page and file size limitations when creating the iPhone-readable book, as the device wasn’t displaying PDFs larger than 10MB, or, when the book’s resolution was dropped to squeeze it into 10MB, it apparently wasn’t ready for all 244 pages.

One current compromise that we’re not totally happy about: page-by-page scrolling, with no apparent ability to skip pages, or create navigation links from section to section. A widescreen edition would have cut vertical scrolling in half, but increased the need for constant horizontal scrolling. One possible alternate way of releasing the book would be as a continuously horizontal-scrolling document with two-page spreads preserved intact.

Your thoughts on how to optimize future iPhone-ready editions of our guides are of course appreciated.)