goblinbox

In which I’m finally truly in love with an ebook app for my iPod Touch!

First there was this more-or-less useful app called… uh, I forget. BookShelf or something. But I paid for it, and it was what I used to read books from Baen [www.baen.com].

I found it counter-intuitive and a little wonky to use. I read a few books with it, but I couldn’t tell you what they were called or who wrote them because the interface didn’t really show me that info ever again after I’d opened a book. The page-turn function was weird and took me weeks to figure out, and over all the app was awkward to navigate. Since I’ve been using various ebook software for a decade on a variety of platforms, an app has to be pretty convoluted for me to find it hard to use.

I did most of my iTouch ebook reading in eReader [http://www.ereader.com/ereader], an app I downloaded to use with my Fictionwise [http://www.fictionwise.com] account (Fictionwise, recently purchased by Barnes & Noble, owns and operates the eReader site, and I think the app itself is a descendant of the Palm Reader).

eReader is a truly great little app, and it connects directly to one’s Fictionwise or eReader bookshelf to download new content purchased online. The interface is easy to use and makes sense.

I installed the Amazon Kindle app because it was free, and there were free books at Amazon to read with it. I’ll always take free ebooks! The app works well, but of course it only lets you read Kindle content. Not all Kindle books can be read with it, either. But it’s a solid app and every time you open it it uses your wi-fi connection to see if you’ve purchased any new content and downloads it automatically.

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