Review: Lexia Readable is for readers of graphic novels, not funny books

Lexia Readable: What happened when Comic Sans grew up. Designed by K-Type as a visually mature version of the comic cliché, Lexia gives your copy clarity and legibility without the now-cloying whimsy.

Lexia Readable and Lexia Bold are available as OpenType, TrueType, and PostScript in the same download. A sans serif typeface, Lexia Readable echos the reasons many literacy professionals like to use Comic Sans: the handwritten lowercase a and g (rather than the letterpress versions); ascenders that equal the cap height, and similarly long descenders; an x-height that is just a hair above the median. These features all make Lexia easy on the eyes—and easy on the brain for early readers and readers with a disability such as dyslexia.

But unlike Comic Sans, Lexia Readable steps it up a notch with asymmetrical lowercase b and d, straightened lines rather than the hand-drawn wobble, and 170 kerning pairs to ensure good spacing and placement.

Keith Bates, designer of Lexia Readable, notes, "Lexia Readable was primarily an attempt at a grown-up Comic Sans that might be more appropriate for use with older readers," he says. "It's an attempt to retain the strength, friendliness and legibility of Comic Sans, and even a slightly marker-drawn feel, whilst tidying up the comic book idiosyncrasies.

"Lexia adds a hint of dignity, a sprinkling of refinement, and introduces elements of designer type to appeal to a contemporary audience." Lexia is designed to be legible, even at small sizes, and looks great down to 8 points. The open lowercase b and p (designed to avoid symmetry and confusion for some readers) make Lexia a poor choice for display purposes—it just looks odd—but it still works, and at least the detail in the uppercase letters adds style that Comic Sans lacks.

Although Lexia Readable tries its hardest to not condescend, still pass this through the suitability filter. While Lexia is great for literacy programs and schools, this font is not appropriate for business letterhead or address labels.

Embedding is installable. Lexia Readable and Lexia Readable Bold are available free for personal use, and also free for use by schools, colleges, other educational establishments, non-profit groups, and charities. The full Lexia typeface (Lexia Bold, Italic, Heavy, Outline) is available for all uses including commercial from K-Type.

Note: The Download button on the Product Information page will download the software to your system.

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Review: Lexia Readable is for readers of graphic novels, not funny books

Lexia Readable: What happened when Comic Sans grew up. Designed by K-Type as a visually mature version of the comic cliché, Lexia gives your copy clarity and legibility without the now-cloying whimsy.

Lexia Readable and Lexia Bold are available as OpenType, TrueType, and PostScript in the same download. A sans serif typeface, Lexia Readable echos the reasons many literacy professionals like to use Comic Sans: the handwritten lowercase a and g (rather than the letterpress versions); ascenders that equal the cap height, and similarly long descenders; an x-height that is just a hair above the median. These features all make Lexia easy on the eyes—and easy on the brain for early readers and readers with a disability such as dyslexia.

But unlike Comic Sans, Lexia Readable steps it up a notch with asymmetrical lowercase b and d, straightened lines rather than the hand-drawn wobble, and 170 kerning pairs to ensure good spacing and placement.

Keith Bates, designer of Lexia Readable, notes, "Lexia Readable was primarily an attempt at a grown-up Comic Sans that might be more appropriate for use with older readers," he says. "It's an attempt to retain the strength, friendliness and legibility of Comic Sans, and even a slightly marker-drawn feel, whilst tidying up the comic book idiosyncrasies.

"Lexia adds a hint of dignity, a sprinkling of refinement, and introduces elements of designer type to appeal to a contemporary audience." Lexia is designed to be legible, even at small sizes, and looks great down to 8 points. The open lowercase b and p (designed to avoid symmetry and confusion for some readers) make Lexia a poor choice for display purposes—it just looks odd—but it still works, and at least the detail in the uppercase letters adds style that Comic Sans lacks.

Although Lexia Readable tries its hardest to not condescend, still pass this through the suitability filter. While Lexia is great for literacy programs and schools, this font is not appropriate for business letterhead or address labels.

Embedding is installable. Lexia Readable and Lexia Readable Bold are available free for personal use, and also free for use by schools, colleges, other educational establishments, non-profit groups, and charities. The full Lexia typeface (Lexia Bold, Italic, Heavy, Outline) is available for all uses including commercial from K-Type.

Note: The Download button on the Product Information page will download the software to your system.

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Marvel’s New ‘Infinite Comics’ Format Makes Digital Superhero Books More Cinematic

Back at SXSW 2012, Marvel announced “Infinite Comics”,  a new format for digital comics that uses tricks like dialogue box transitions, blacked-out pages, and cinematic cuts to go beyond the simple panel-to-panel experience found in on-screen comics as we know them. 

Today Marvel released the first Infinite Comic, Avengers vs. X-Men #1, through the Marvel Comics app/store. Simply describing the new format doesn’t do it justice so we took a few screenshots on the new iPad’s 2048 x 1536-pixel Retina Display to show you just how Infinite Comics change the reader experience in a way paper comics can’t imitate. 

Most of the tricks in Marvel’s Infinite Comic toolbox involve delaying certain elements of the page layout with a finger swipe. Those elements can be dialogue boxes, foreground artwork, other panels on the same page, or a version of the same page drawn a touch differently.  To launch the next element, users simply swipe forward on the screen.

In traditional digital comics, a books opens to a splash page or a single panel littered with drawn action and dialogue boxes. An Infinite Comic can simply launch on a single panel of a starry splash page, and then add in bits of dialogue, small touches of visual detail, more background panels, or foreground action bit by bit as readers swipe to move forward in the story.

Here’s the opening to AvX #1, a four-part sequence that’s complete after three swipes.

Swipe. 

Swipe.

Swipe.

Visually, that sequence isn’t very interesting, but it is a much more direct and active way to read digital comics. Just look at the way a star suddenly comes to life in the fourth image.

Plus, other Infinite Comic tricks can be used to make the reading experience much more dramatic. Just look at the big reveal where we learn who or what is chasing Nova, the star of our comic, from galaxy to galaxy. To enhance the moment, the comic shows one version of the same page followed by a slightly different version that appears after you swipe. In the first image, the background of a critical panel is completely blurred out, and in the second image, the same background is in total focus.

In standard digital comics, the blurred element wouldn’t exist. Instead, the same image would sit in sharp detail as soon as the page or panel loaded on a mobile device. Seeing the blurred version first adds a hint of mystery (even though any X-Men fan could spot the inescapable Phoenix Force from light-years away) and just a touch of delayed realization, much like the moment before a masked villain or hero reveals his identity by pulling off his mask in a movie. 

According to Marvel, the Infinite Comics format is a collaboration between the artist and writer, giving the foremost creators of a book, not the publishers, the ability to shape their story’s digital presentation. On the other hand, one place publishers were likely involved is the behind-the-scenes controls for Infinite Comics. It takes multiple swipes to get from one page to another, so an option to skip forward or back in a book is a must. Tapping near the bottom of a screen pulls up a menu of options, one of which let’s readers do just that.

Since most of the fun in the Infinite Comics format lies on a single page, so don’t skip too far ahead. Otherwise, you may miss the dramatic pauses or cinema-style transitions that are helping craft a new space in the comic book realm.

To check out the Marvel Infinite Comic’s experience yourself, install the latest version of the Marvel Comics app on either your Android or iOS device and purchase the $1.99 issue of Avengers vs. X-Men #1.

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Let Audiobooks.com Read You Some Books

If you love to read, there's a bitter truth to life. You'll never have enough time for all the books you want to enjoy. Current trends in publishing just make things worse, with endless multipart series and 700-page biographies hanging like ripe fruit in the garden of knowledge. When reading isn't practical, audio books have for years pitched in to help with the next best thing to the written word, but they haven't kept up with the times. Books on disc (or cassette!) just don't cut it in today's podcast- and smartphone-centric media world. Audiobooks.com ($25/month, seven-day free trial) has stepped into this fray with a Netflix-like Web-based streaming service designed to bridge the gap and bring variety and accessibility to the audio book experience.

The Audiobooks.com catalog has some interesting titles, both common and obscure.It's ironic that while eBooks have flourished in the digital marketplace, audio productions have remained largely stuck in 20th century convention. With titles purchased one physical recording at a time, often sporting exorbitant price tags, the majority of the industry resembles the 1970's LP business model. Even DVD distribution seems progressive by comparison. Audiobooks.com does away with à la carte pricing, using a flat fee to provide access to an online catalog of books that are instantly accessible and stream to a variety of devices, including desktop PCs, smartphones and tablets.

Following the successful Netflix model, the site provides thumbnail graphics of each book's cover along with user ratings and a brief synopsis of the plot. Titles are grouped by genre, interest and suggestions based on previous selections, all with a heavy emphasis on the lighter side of popular fiction. The audio player is austere but functional, with a timeline slider, play/pause and a 30-second skip function but little else. Performance is snappy and sound playback is crisp and free of artifacts or stutter, even under low bandwidth conditions. Minor glitches in text rendering on the website seem more like growing pains than problems, but mobile site code, as tested on an Epic 4G Android 2.3 based smartphone, has more serious page layout issues that impair function on occasion, including interface elements that scroll erratically or make precise adjustments on the touchscreen difficult. Given the pace of development for the site, expect these wrinkles to be ironed out quickly, however.

Streaming services live or die on the strength of the catalog they offer, and Audiobooks.com does a fair job at keeping things interesting. While popular titles and bestsellers are well-represented overall, there are plenty of omissions, some of them curious. I rarely found exact title matches for my genre queries, but I was able to find similar quality fiction and nonfiction that scratched the same itch. Rex Stout was nowhere to be found in the mystery section, but there was plenty of Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle to stand in. George R.R. Martin was similarly absent in fantasy, but Robert E. Howard was nicely represented with more than just Conan the Barbarian—in fact, with new recordings I'd never heard prior to seeing them listed here. There are also an enormous number of Star Trek books, some four dozen, in the Science Fiction section. That's a lot of Shatner! For Trek purists, this may be reason enough alone to take a look. Non-Fiction books are fairly well represented as well, with a nice cross section of histories, biographies, science books and so forth to keep you awake nights when Ian Fleming won't do. Fewer abridged titles would be appreciated, however.

The biggest hurdle facing Audiobooks.com is pricing. While $25/month is cheap when measured against Audible.com's subscription-plus-payment method and other conventional audio book purchase systems, it's much more expensive than the other comparison people are bound to make, the $7.99 Netflix charges for access to its larger, flashier media catalog. And there's always the public library and Overdrive, which are free. These comparisons are only slightly unfair--the fees could use a trim and the catalog more titles--but they overlook the groundbreaking, consumer-friendly model that's beginning to be employed in a sector of the industry that hasn't enjoyed it before, which is a move worthy of support. Check out the titles on offer; they provide a free trial week of service if anything catches your eye. Audiobooks.com is an interesting experiment. With a little more polish and value, it'll be a winner.

Note: The Download button takes you to the vendor's site, where you can sign up for this service. The $25 price is a monthly price.

--Jim Norris

From PCWorld. Visit Amazon Computer and Notebook Center here

Shelfari Recommends Books, Gives Huge Amount of Detail About THem

If you're a voracious reader, you probably know this feeling: You just finished a great read and are dying to talk to someone about it, but nobody around you ever read that particular book. If this ever happened to you, you may like Shelfari (free), an Amazon-related community for book lovers and authors.

Shelfari exposes numerous details about each book, and lets you add and edit them."Amazon-related" means Shelfari is its own website, but it is owned by Amazon and you need a free Amazon account to log in. Once in the service, you are presented with a bookshelf to which you can add books you have read in the past, are reading now, and are planning to read. If a book came out in several editions, you can pick what cover you want to show on your shelf. I like the shelf interface because I mainly read eBooks, and the shelf gives my books a bit more of a physical dimension.

Individual book listings are where Shelfari really shines. These days, just about every online store features crowd-sourced reviews and ratings. Shelfari sets itself apart by allowing users to add and edit many details about each book, such as a summary, a list of characters with names and descriptions, quotes, settings and locations, and more. There is even a special section for the book's first sentence. The result is almost like a purpose-built Wikipedia just for books: It is no wonder Amazon chose to tap Shelfari for its Shelfari Extras feature in the Kindle for PC application.

Having so much information available about every book can also cause spoilers. Shelfari tries to mitigate the risk by providing a "show spoilers" link next to the synopsis, and a spoiler warning next to the summary. Still, you may not want to delve too deeply into the details prior to actually reading the book. For example, if you look at the listing for Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, you will see that the very first character listed is a bit of a spoiler (don't look if you haven't read the book).

Every book also features a tag cloud with popular tags shown larger than others. This makes it possible to search for books by tag, something you can't do on Amazon. You can refine results by searching for multiple tags: I browsed "historical fiction" and added "dystopian." The first result was Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, and other results were equally relevant. The interface is not as usable as it could be--the multiple-tag option is hidden behind a tiny link that says "filter with multiple tags," and auto-completion is provided only for the first tag. The site also features a book recommendation engine, currently in Beta, as well it should be: It could find no recommendations for me, despite having 22 books on my shelf. This is in stark contrast to Goodreads' recommendation engine, which had me rate books until it could offer plenty of recommendations across multiple genres.

Every Shelfari user has a public profile page showing books they put on their shelf. This makes it possible for like-minded readers to follow you, talk to you about what you've read, and recommend other books. By default, every book you add is shared publicly, unless you tick the box that says "keep this private" when adding it.

For me, Shelfari is a great way to keep track of what I read, remember books I've read a while ago, and plan future reading. Even without taking an active part in the community, Shelfari offers plenty of functionality in a unique, purpose-built format.

Note: The Download button takes you to the vendor's site, where you can sign up for an account and use the free service.

--Erez Zukerman

From PCWorld. Visit Amazon Computer and Notebook Center here

Access Nonfiction Books and and Video With Safari Books Online

One of the biggest challenges in distributing digital content is to make it easier for people to consume legally rather than illegally. When it comes to e-books, this gets even trickier; e-book files are much smaller than video or music files, so they can be downloaded much faster. Safari Bookshelf (various subscription plans, starting at $10/month) is a bid to make it easier, faster, and more productive to consume electronic books online legally rather than download them.

Safari Books Online offers access to a staggering selection of technical books and videos, and makes it easy to find what you need.Safari Bookshelf (no relation to Apple's Web browser) is a subscription-based service, for which you can pay either monthly or yearly. When users first try to sign up, they are offered either unlimited access for $43 per month, or a 10-slot bookshelf for $20 per month. There is a third option, not shown on the page, offering a 5-slot bookshelf for $10.

"Slots" are basically places your virtual shelf has for books. Once you choose to read a book, it takes up one slot on your shelf, and must stay there for at least one month. Once that month elapses, you can swap it out for another book. Slots are a good way to offer the service at a reduced price, but they also make it much less useful.

The Unlimited Access plan does away with the concept of slots and lets you read any and all books, but you still must read them online, using a browser (Safari also offers an iPad app and a mobile-friendly version of the site). If you're more interested in downloading e-books for offline reading, both the unlimited and limited plans offer download "tokens." You get five tokens every month, which you can use to download chapters (a chapter usually costs one token). You can also buy extra tokens for $2 each.

The catalog of books offered can only be described as staggering. Safari Books Online hosts books by Apress, Adobe Press, Microsoft Publishing, O'Reilly, Sams, Wiley, and several other big-name publishers. Books span the gamut of programming, Web development, computer graphics (Photoshop and friends), and more. Not all books are computer-related: There are plenty of books about photography, for example. No fiction, though.

The search feature is well thought out, and is one of the best parts of using Safari Books Online. Imagine having to leaf through 19,000 books to find the information you need, or even to search through PDF files on your computer. Safari Books Online lets you do a simple text search, but you can then quickly refine results by category, publication year, author, and publisher. You can also search within the results, so you can search for "macro photography" first, and then search for "Photoshop" to further refine.

Safari Books Online is not only about published books, though. The Unlimited plan also provides access to many video courses, and to a section called "Rough Cuts," containing drafts of pre-published manuscripts--the bleeding edge of online publishing. When reading a Rough Cuts manuscript, a Feedback bar appears at the top of the screen letting you comment about the section you are reading. Comments are publicly visible, and cannot be edited or deleted once submitted, so weigh your words carefully.

Safari Books Online offers a great deal, but it is not a perfect service. For video courses, I still find Lynda.com superior, especially given the price ($25 per month, almost half of the Safari price). And if you are looking for pinpoint solutions to specific problems, nothing beats free tech Q&A website Stack Overflow.

The steep price Safari Books charges for the Unlimited plan only makes it worthwhile if you regularly buy more than two brand-new computer books every month--and I don't know anyone who does, really. Apart from this, Safari Books Online is an amazing service, and is probably the best way to read unlimited computer books online today. Highly recommended.

Note: The free trial lasts for ten days or 1000 page views, whichever comes first.

--Erez Zukerman

From PCWorld. Visit Amazon Computer and Notebook Center here