Locke & Key, Vol. 5: Clockworks

Faultless storytelling, hampered by iBooks

Locke and Key continues to be nearly faultless storytelling.
Having read the first 4 volumes in print, I was tempted by the reduced cost and convenience of buying this one on iBooks.
I'm still not sure whether this was a good idea.

Reading enjoyment is slightly hampered however by the Apple's strange insistence on making comics on iBooks look like physical books.

It it bizarre & distracting to have to read L&K's elegant double page spreads across a simulated gutter between 2 pages, complete with distortion and non registration of the image.

I cannot imagine why anyone would want to retain the look of page edges and the cover surround on a digital medium. Surely the content of the book is what the experience is really about? A simple black or colour coordinated border to the edge of the screen would be far less distracting, also the pages could have been slightly larger without zooming.

The poor interface is doubly odd when you consider that for text based books the app wins hands down over Kindle in terms of configurability with a great deal of thought having gone into user interface design. Hopefully, this will be sorted out in a future update.

I also get the feeling that the image resolution has been compromised slightly in order to reduce file size. It looks great but the text doesn't feel 'retina sharp'.