This week Amazon announced that, for the first time ever on Amazon.com, ebooks had outsold hardbacks, proving that whilst some of us are reluctant to part with our beloved bound volumes, there is an ever increasing number embracing the concept of electronic reading.
And with Apple‘s much heralded iPad finally launching on these shores, we decided to take a look at some of the various apps available for reading books on your iPads, iPods and iPhones, and determine which, if any, are worth their salt.
All reviewed Apps are available for free on the iTunes App Store. Our thanks to O2 Ireland for lending us an iPad for testing. We downloaded our books & apps using their 3G simcard.
App: Kindle | Developer: Amazon | Rating: 2.5/5
A version of Amazon’s popular Kindle reader, this app’s great strength is undoubtedly its selection of titles. Using Safari it links directly to your Amazon account, offering a choice of over 400,000 books, and allows you to download sample chapters before you buy.
Kindle has one of the most appealing interfaces- they’ve recognised that swiping seems to be the most intuitive way of turning a page, a feature which some developers have criminally failed to include.
As far as features go, it sticks to the basics, with the ability to bookmark pages, search text, and change the font size and colour. As a basic eReader, Kindle does the trick nicely without many frills attached.
App: iFlow | Developer: BeamItDown | Rating: 2/5
Produced by one of the lesser known developers in the field, iFlow apps come as individual books or collections. So rather than having your library stored together under one neat icon, each title takes up its own space on your browser.
Furthermore, the iFlow range is rather limited, covering primarily classics, and educational texts (philosophy, psychology, etc.). What the iFlow reader does have in its corner, however, is its unique interface.
Utilising the accelerometer, the app scrolls the text along the screen, with the degree of tilting determining the speed of the scrolling. For ease of reading, this this method is by far the most natural. I’ve already gotten through two novels…
App: Stanza | Developer: Lexcycle | Rating: 5/5
When it comes to customisation, Stanza is king. No other app offers the sheer range of options to make your reading experience exactly the way you want it. As well as the basics, Stanza goes a step further- offering almost as much options as a word processor.
Don’t like the line spacing? You can change it. Margins irritating you? No Problem. The somewhat frustrating problem of automatic page rotation is dealt with (why Apple never considered that someone would look at their iPhone while lying down is beyond me), with the ability to lock the page in landscape or portrait mode.
Social networking fans can immediately share what they’re reading through facebook or twitter via a menu of shortcuts which, of course, you can customise.
Arguably its most convenient addition is the concept of assignable hot-keys. The user can designate an action to a particular touch or movement- for example, using the classic pinch and spread motion to adjust font size.
With a wide selection enabling downloads from a variety of eBook retailers, Lexcycle seem to have covered all the bases, providing one of the best eReading apps available. (Lexcycle was acquired by Amazon in 2009)
App: Kobo | Developer: Kobo Books| Rating: 3/5
Kobo opens not with a list of names, but with a bookshelf, providing one of the most visually appealing interfaces of any reading app, and one which lends itself well to browsing multiple titles.
The experience of Kobo holds up well beyond the opening screen, with a number of ways of going from page to page. This seems to be its main area of customisation, with the other options being quite basic (font size, brightness, etc.).
In offering extra page turning options it pushes itself ahead of basic reading apps, but some of these choices are impractical to the degree that they become useless (manual scrolling??). As far as selection is concerned, Kobo fares very well, and once you’ve created a Kobo account you can purchase and download titles directly through the app itself.
App: Marvel Comics | Developer: Marvel | Rating: 4/5
While Dostoyevsky is all well and good, an occasional foray into some lighter eReading might be needed to clear the head. For those moments, there’s a wide selection of comic reading apps available, and Marvel has produced one of the snazziest.
Comics, quite simply, are amazing to read on an iPad. The screen lends itself fabulously to the images, and the technology offers a number of interesting ways to get through the story. For example, this app offers animated transitions, where the panels are displayed one by one, offering a dynamic reading experience well suited to the subject matter.
The app also capitalises on the periodical nature of comic books, offering an update service similar to podcast management, where new issues of subscribed series are automatically downloaded and added to your library. As far as the iPad is concerned, this is one area where the full potential of the medium is explored, and to great effect.
App: ibooks | Developer: Apple | Rating: 4/5
Apple’s own reading app is cosmetically appealing, offering a bookshelf interface similar to Kobo, but endeavors to offer a customisation level similar to Stanza. Unfortunately, it doesn’t quite manage to win out in either category, but provides a solid app with several interesting features nonetheless.
Its actual reading interface is one of the most appealing available, particularly when viewed on the iPad, and provides one of the most generally pleasurable reading experiences. Among its attempts at offering functions beyond the basics, iBooks offers a dictionary, accesible through double tapping a word.
While convenient, the strength of this app lies in its style, and its selection, which offers tens of thousands of titles through Apple’s iBookstore (though the selection for Ireland is currently only Public Domain works, this should change soon).
News
Using Ereaders And Ebooks In Ireland: The 2011 Edition – Part One
The rise of Interest in Kindle over the last year. Note the spike, now surpassed, from last Christmas
2011 has seen an upsurge in interest in ebooks and ereaders in Ireland. IPN started to notice a huge spike in search traffic for Kindle’s, ebooks and a number of other devices in November. In an effort to help people make decisions in the run in to what looks to be the biggest ebook Christmas in Ireland so far we decided to write about ebooks and e-readers in Ireland, where to get them, how to use them and everything else. If the piece doesn’t answer your questions, comment below and we’ll respond asap.
The Basics
The best place to start is to set down some glossary terms that people should have a grasp of when it comes to ebooks.
The first of these is the difference between ebooks and ereaders. Ereaders are the devices one reads on: Kobo, Kindle, Sony eReader, iPad, iPhone and any of the myriad other devices one can read a book on in digital form. The ebooks are the actual digital books themselves.
There are two basic ebook formats azw (Amazon’s Kindle format) and epub (many other outlets). There are several others, but these two are the ones you will most likely encounter. If you need more information about formats, Wikipedia has a good summary here.
Irish customers can buy ebooks in either format. What’s more for epubs, Irish customers have a considerable choice in who they buy their epub ebooks from and in the type of ereaders they use to read them on.
Most dedicated ereaders have an Eink screen. Eink screens only use power when they change page or perform some other action. They use small electrical charges to change the orientation of white or dark pigments contained within tiny capsules. Between them, the white and the dark capsules spell out the words on the screen.
These screens come very close to replicating the visual landscape of a paper page in a paper book. Combined with the form factor for most readers and their weight this makes them akin to holding either a medium-sized paperback book or a small hardback, and often even lighter.
Devices that are not dedicated to ebooks, like Apple’s iOS devices, the Kindle Fire, the new Nook Tablet and the new Kobo Vox tend to use backlit screens which some people like and others don’t. They are also multi-functional devices with many uses.
Some devices have slick end-to-end platforms in place to sell you ebooks for your device. Examples of these platforms include Amazon, Apple and Kobo.
Ebooks attract a 21% (soon to be 23%) VAT rate a complication that presents problems across the EU (for more on the VAT issues on ebooks in Ireland, read this post on VAT and ebooks by Zoe Faulder).
The Platforms
This section will cover in detail may of the platforms Irish people can buy ebooks on. This post covers Amazon’s Kindle and the post on Wednesday will deal in-depth with other platforms like Apple, Kobo and Easons.
Amazon
Irish customers must buy Kindle ebooks from the Amazon.com site too*. This wrinkle means that although there are now four Euro denominated Kindle stores (Spain, Italy, Germany and France) Irish buyers purchase their ebooks in Dollars and with a slight price disadvantage.
Despite that however, Kindle is a comprehensive platform with significant features. It offers cross-platform, and device, syncing, samples, wi-fi and 3G downloads, a social network for Kindle users, and a new Cloud Reader that allows a user to read a book online. They also compete heavily on price and encourage lower pricing. Finally it has an impressive (probably the best) selection of titles.
Device Types: The Kindle range is increasingly diverse, starting with the basic option which features neither a keyboard nor touch capabilities. The mid-range options include a touch based pair and another featuring a keyboard. The new Fire tablet breaks quite dramatically with the existing form factor. Not all options can be purchased in Ireland through Amazon.com and retail stores. Most stores will only offer the basic version and the Kindle Keyboard 3G.
Device Pricing: Basic, non-touch device €109-115 in store or around €125 via Amazon.com. 3G device with keyboard €179-195 in stores like PC World, Tesco and Currys and around 220 via Amazon.com (Amazon price includes shipping, taxes etc.).
Ebook Pricing: Huge selection of free ebooks, both classics and self published titles. Many mainstream-published titles from 2l.99 to 9.99 especially from second-tier publishing houses (ie not the big six publishers). Bestsellers trending towards 60-80% of print price especially from big six publishers. Some specialist titles have either parity or more expensive ebook editions. Irish publishers are well represented in the Kindle store.
Other:
One of the major reasons why Kindle has prospered has been its Kindle Direct Platform, a way for writers and publishers to self publishers their content directly to Kindle and most importantly to sell it. Buying ebooks through Amazon.com is a bit irritating especially as the pricing is in Dollars. Even so the selection is huge and well priced (mostly). You can complain about Amazon for many other things but their platform is easy to use, filled with good books and makes sense for most readers.
IPN Rating: 4.5/5 (loses .5 for the Dollar pricing)
*Of course assuming you follow the correct set-up and don’t a UK address and a UK credit Card which allows you to open an Amazon.co.uk account.