Two simple questions
1. What is your favorite E-Book reading app
2. Why is it your favorite?
I am going on vacation in a couple weeks and would love to take some books with me, with out having to carry books with me lol.A good library of free books is appreciated, but I am not opposed to paying a reasonable price for good books.
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I just switched to Android (Motorola Droid) after several years of using uBook on the Win Mobile platform. That powerful e-reader can view virtually any format you throw at it, is full-featured, and highly configurable. But it's anything but pretty.
So with that experience in mind, I tried to find an Android e-book reader which had similar features. The three which seemed most widely-used are:
FB Reader 0.5.27 (FBReader: FBReader for Google Android)
Aldiko 1.2.5 (Aldiko - eBook Reader Application for Android)
Books WordPlayer 11.0.1 (WordPlayer:Reading Released)
Each of them open epub files, but only FB Reader would open any other formats (oeb and fb2). However, thanks to the genuis of calibre (calibre - E-book management) a free e-book management and conversion application which can convert between almost any format invented, having a reader which can read a specific format is less important - simply use calibre to convert it to epub.
Each of the readers has the following features:
-- Configurable fonts (color/style/size)
-- One button toggle for day/night mode
-- Bookmarks
None of them has annotations/highlighting, which is the feature I miss the most from uBook (Word-Player apparently does, per its home page, but per the devs, that feature is not working in Droid).
FB Reader
This is the oldest of the ebook readers, with versions available for multiple platforms. It is also butt-ugly, with an interface that makes my trusty uBook seem spiffy by comparison. (e.g. you have to select books from a list, not icons). And the cover displays in only 1/3 of the screen, in the top left corner (presumably FB Reader is not yet designed for the hi-resolution Droid).
FB Reader was also the buggiest of the three readers. It crashed frequently when trying to change font size, only curable by rebooting the phone, and froze up randomly. Also the Table of Contents was faulty - it would only show one chapter. Another quirk - the menu system appears to be in flux - the font settings was buried in a menu called "Settings (Old)".
Two pluses - (1) the FB Reader's bookmarks feature was the easiest to use of three. Selecting "Bookmarks" brought up one screen at which you could both see a list of recent bookmarks, and add one with one-touch. But the ease of use comes with the loss of flexibility - the bookmark is named after the first few lines of the page, w/o the ability to override it, and (2) it has the option to show/hide the status bar while reading.
WordPlayer
This one seemed promising at first, if only because it interfaced with calibre directly. It was also the only ereader to have text-to-speech, but with a voice that not even a mother could love that also read formatting, it was too distracting to use. One other plus - you could point it to any folder on your SD card to find an book, and it would import it.
This reader was the slowest of the three - chapters took forever to load, and switching between day/night modes was just as painfully slow, as if the entire chapter had to be reloaded.
A couple of other quirks/bugs - a single italiziced letter would often not display, and it added several white blank pages to the end of each chapter.
Aldiko
This is certainly the prettiest of the three ebook readers. It also has agreements with various download sites to enable downloading of something like 10,000 ebooks, but the selection was poor, seeming to consist primarily of sex stories (or erotica). However, since I simply use the reader to view my own epubs, this feature didn't matter to me. And it also was easy to download epubs from the web - clicking on an epub file would import it into Aldiko.
This was my favorite of the ebook readers - the devs put a lot of thought into the interface and usability, and I found no bugs. Chapters loaded quickly, it was the only reader which supported css (though not the @font-face attribute), has fully-configurable gestures, and even an option to brighten/dim the screen by swiping the screen w/o leaving the page you're on.
The bookshelf has to be seen to be believed - beautiful icons, intuitive, and the ability to sort by author, tag. Finally, you can share books via facebook, twitter, e-mail, or even SMS(?).
This would be the ideal ebook reader, and a great replacement for uBook if only it had annotations & highlighting (dev says "we will definitely add in the near future", though there have been two updates in the month since then, and still no dice). And I miss the customized status bar that uBook has, with page number / total pages, and the time.
Does anyone know if the Barnes and Noble book reader will work on the Android system? I only see downloads for Iphone and Blackberry, yet somewhere on their site it says it works on Android.
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and where can i downloads the books for it.
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View 2 Replies View RelatedRecently I'm in use of Laputa.I find it powerful and amazing.It's a free offline book reader.I can read thousands of books wherever and whenever for free.It's easy to operate and have a especially friendly inteface.What' more ,you can have your own library and bookshelves.I'm sure you will like it.
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Any good ones out there? No preference free/pay, my main preference is that it is a good program.
I use Newsroom but would be interested in one that directly sinks with Google Reader. What do you guys use?
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View 1 Replies View RelatedIf there is a useful pdf reader. i've tried one - it's great - it opens pdf's but is useless for reading as u have to scroll right and left. I would imagine that 99% of the time the pdf reader is useless! is there a pdf reader that forces all of the content to fit your screen width - similar to how they do on browsers.
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View 3 Replies View RelatedBeen looking through all the readers & have yet to find one that supports this format.
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View 6 Replies View RelatedMy mother recently indicated that she's considering being in the market for an ebook reader. However she is, bless her soul, firmly insistent on open format, DRM-free, and the ability to "really own" a book she's downloaded. She doesn't even want the potential for a Kindle-1984-type remote-wipe or an inability to move a book to another device later. (Yes, my mother has grown up to be a Free Software evangelist. I'm so proud of her. *sniff*)
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1) Are there any ebook stores or services available for any device that don't treat customers are criminals waiting to happen, and use a DRM-free format without revocation ability? Are they bound to a given device, or are there any that work on an arbitrary Android device? A good ebook reader app or use of the open ePub format (for which I understand there are several readers available) is a plus here.
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An ebook reader app that has an integrated (or anyway a very handy) dictionary or translation feature.
I'm tired of switching app and type the word when i should just hold on a word to directly access its meaning.
Does anyone have a recommendation for a RSS Feed reader similar to the Google Reader for the Android that they like?
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