Apple has recently been cracking down on iPhone and iPad apps selling content.  Basically, Apple wants a 30% cut of any revenue made through in-app purchases, a figure so high as to wipe out all of the profits of companies who are retailing such content, such as e-book retailers.  If they refuse to pay Apple that cut, Apple forces those retailers to remove, not only any mechanism for in-app purchases, not only any link to a web site where such purchases could be made, but even any mention of such a web site.  Personally, I think this is totally unreasonable.

Amazon complied with Apple’s rules and removed such links from its Kindle iPad app.  But now it has released a web page (rather a web app) for reading Kindle books, which completely avoids Apple’s restrictions and restores the ‘Shop in the Kindle Store’ button.  The web app is entirely written in javascript and HTML5, and is very impressive.  You have to log in and click a button tell the iPad to give the web app some more storage, but that simple process over, you are in.  If you create a home page bookmark for the web page, it feels almost entirely like a native iPad app.  Here’s what it looks like:

All of your Kindle purchases are visible in the Library view of the cloud-based app, and starting to read one of your books is as simple as touching its cover.  The app downloads the whole book, it appears, and it is then available to read even when you are offline.  Using it to read a book is almost identical to using the native app, with clean page turn animation (a simple slide).  All of this is very impressive, is a great demonstration of the power of HTML5 and resolves most of the concerns I had about web-based readers.  Impressive as it is, however, it does omit many of the better features of the native Kindle app such as search, dictionary look-up, annotations, and so on.  I presume this is because there is currently no way to pick up an event when the user holds down their finger over a particular word.

Amazon is clearly sticking out its tongue at Apple here to demonstrate that Apple really can’t control the purchasing process.

But I really find myself wondering just who exactly the cloud-based app is designed for. Why would I, or anyone, use this version of the app rather than the native Kindle app on an iPad?  Just so that we can have the joy of clicking on the Kindle Store button?  It was never a great inconvenience to me to simply use Safari to go to the Amazon site and make my selection that way.  As soon as Apple enforced its rules and Amazon removed the ‘Shop in the Kindle Store’ button, I created a bookmark to the Kindle Store on my home page.  No big deal.  I’d rather have the greater power of the native app, and I really hope Amazon don’t decide to remove it altogether.

Summary and Conclusions

It’s been quite exhausting looking at and writing about these nine e-reader applications, but now I’m ready to draw my thoughts together. I think my major conclusion is that there is no one perfect e-reader app, and further, that the best e-reader to use depends on what you are reading.

For my taste, there’s no question that if I am reading a novel I would prefer to do it with Apple’s iBooks app. It’s by far the most comfortable and well-featured, and its page numbering system gives me a real and natural feel of where I am in the book. But the faux hard-cover book decoration becomes annoying after a while, and I would prefer to be able to see a clean white page and not pretend that I’m using something that I am not. This unnecessary nonsense is particularly inappropriate when one is reading a text-book or reference work, and it does reduce the amount of text you can see at a reasonable font size.

I also greatly dislike iBooks’ PDF mode, and would far prefer to use a dedicated PDF reader like GoodReader for reading office-type documents in PDF format.

When it comes to textbooks or reference works, I would prefer using Bluefire Reader, I think. And I would also use Bluefire in preference to the other apps I have discussed, should I be unable to use iBooks for some reason.

The one e-reader application I would go out of my way to avoid: Adobe Digital Editions on the desktop.  It’s simply terrible to use and ugly to look at.

None of the apps I looked at would let you set layout options, font, and font-size on a per-book basis. I’m still waiting and hoping for someone to introduce this feature. It’s not a big ask, surely, just a small amount of data to be stored with each book, in just the same way that these applications store metadata such as title and author on a per-book basis.

The Elephant in the Room

But there’s an elephant in the room which I have been ignoring up until now.  And that is that which e-reader you use is likely to be forced on you by where you bought a particular e-book.  I’ve been able to ignore this very important issue up until now because I have been looking just at one book to which I own the rights, (my collection of SF stories Islands). This has enabled me to compare the same book in different e-readers without having to purchase, say, the iBooks version, the Kindle version, the Kobo Books version, and so on.

But, short of using suspect software to remove the digital rights management (DRM) from a particular book, the average iPad user is going to be stuck with having to use the appropriate reader app associated with the store where they bought the book.  For example, I bought The Attenbury Emeralds by Jill Paton Walsh from the Amazon Kindle Store.  Regardless of what I think of the Kindle e-reader app on the iPad, I don’t have any choice – I have to read that book in the Kindle app.  Similarly, I bought Beginning iOS 4 in the iBooks store.  If I want to use the Bluefire Reader to read it – nope, tough luck!  And this is probably why we have so many different e-readers available; each e-book retailer cranks out their own version because they want you to be locked into their store.  (By the way, I wasn’t able to review Barnes and Noble’s Nook e-reader app because it’s not available here in Australia).

Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a single great e-book reader for the iPad which was able to read books from every store? Or else if there was complete inter-operability between apps, so that you could read an iBook in the Kindle app if you preferred, or vice-versa?  Alas, that’s not going to happen because of the entrenched interests of the book retailers.

The closest we come to such interoperability are with books whose DRM is based on Adobe’s Adept technology.  Fortunately, outside of Apple and Amazon, most e-book retailers sell ePub format with this version of DRM.  (Actually, I can’t believe I just wrote that – what would be fortunate would be if there was no DRM!)

For example, Kobo and Books on Board both sell books this way, and they are where I buy most of my e-books.  Also, my local library will lend me books with Adept DRM.  This means that, with a bit of work, I can read such books in Bluefire, which authenticates you against your Adobe ID; and you can read Kobo books in Bluefire.  (For some reason however, Kobo refuses to read Adept-DRM books bought outside of its store).  The ‘bit of work’ is that I have to plug my iPad into my computer, run iTunes, and drag and drop the ePub files into the appropriate application’s folder in iTunes.  I’m hoping this will be a lot easier when Apple introduce its iCloud technology, but I’m not counting on it.  And the less said about Apple’s petty insistence that e-book apps remove ‘purchase’ buttons linking to their associated stores, the better.

If you can get hold of DRM-free books from legitimate sources, or if you do somehow (illegally) remove the DRM from a book, then of course, the world is your oyster.  DRM-free ePub books will open in iBooks, Stanza, Bluefire, Nook, Kobo apps on the iPad, or in Calibre or Adobe Digital Editions (yuk!) on your computer.

All of this just demonstrates to me how annoying digital rights management is to the normal, honest, customer.  I’m sure it doesn’t bother pirates in the least.  One day, perhaps, the publishers will realize this, like the record companies have done, and free us up from all this nonsense.

Previous article in this series: Adobe Digital Editions
First article in this series: Introduction

Adobe Digital Editions

And so we come to Adobe Digital Editions. Most e-book vendors release their books in ePub or PDF formats which have been protected by Adobe’s Adept DRM technology, and so usually require you to have Adobe Digital Editions on your PC or Mac to download and read the books you have bought.

Considering this, and considering the fact that it is produced by Adobe – maker of Photoshop, InDesign, AfterEffects and all such high level design tools – it is astonishing to me how poorly designed and non-functional Digital Editions is.

I should perhaps emphasize that Adobe Digital Editions (let’s just call it ADE from now on) is a desktop application, not an iPad app, unlike most of the other e-readers I have been discussing in this series.  Its prime function is to act as an e-book manager and reader on your computer.  I won’t discuss the downloading and library management aspects in this post, but will concentrate on its use as a reader.

Reading Comfort

For a start, I hate the customized Adobe ‘chrome’ in this application, which makes it feel not in the least like a Windows application, and is also (to my taste) very ugly – beige text on a browny-slate background. I checked it out on my MacBook as well, and it’s as bad, if not worse, on that platform. We get the same look with the Mac title bar and status bar glommed on the top and bottom.  You could argue that I’m being too tough here – in my last post I discussed Calibre, whose interface design is fairly pedestrian.  But at least Calibre fits within most Windows UI conventions.  And this is Adobe, king of design applications!

As in Calibre, we get no margins, and no way to create them.  I find this uncomfortable for reading, I don’t like the way the text completely fills the reading pane.  This is even more uncomfortable once we move away from a chapter heading.

Page turning can be done by using the right and left arrow keys, but there is no transition at all, just a straight cut.  You can also scroll the text continuously with the up and down arrow keys, or ‘page’ with the PageUp and PageDown keys.  All this is fine, I guess, but you lose any sense of reading a book with individual, separate pages. Page numbering, because of this, is only very notional but at least the location numbers shown fall within approximately the right range for a book, unlike the crazy high numbers you see in Kindle locations.

All of this makes for uncomfortable reading, even on a mobile computer like a laptop or netbook.  I would hate to have to read a long novel in ADE.

Controls and Settings

It seems that what you see is what you get in ADE.  Here are the controls at the top of the reading window:

Here we have Library View / Reading View / READING menu / Location / Print / Bookmark this page / Reduce font size / Enlarge font size / Search .  These should all be self-explanatory, though I will discuss Search in more detail later.

The drop-down menu under READING gives you these choices:

Again, the function of these should be fairly obvious.

There appear to be no hidden controls or settings.  In fact, there seems to be no way to change any of the layout, such as margins, line spacing, paragraph spacing, and so on.  You can’t change the font.  I can forgive this in Calibre, but not in a product from Adobe.  It is true that the layout, font, and so on shown in this example (my collection of SF stories Islands) are true to the original ePub settings.  But most e-reader apps allow the user some control over layout aspects to suit their personal preference.

I thought for a second that I had found a settings or preferences function.  I right-clicked on the text and up came a context menu with one item – Settings.  But what you get in fact is the crazy-mad Adobe Flash settings, which must be completely confusing to the average user, and have nothing to do with the reading application:

I can’t see what this does except to act as a poor demonstration of the Flash technology.  In fact, the Flash nature of the whole application is a nuisance, because there are no right-click context menus anywhere in it.  All you get when you right click on anything is this silly Flash Settings dialog.

Navigation

You can type a location number (with some difficulty, it must be said) into the location indicator at the top center of the window to go to that ‘page’.  Or use the Table of Contents. That’s it.

Searching

You type your search term into the search field at the top right, and you are taken to the first instance, and can move between found instances using the tiny left and right arrow controls next to the search field.

While this is functional, it’s also pretty pedestrian.

Table of Contents

The Table of Contents is always visible at the left of the reading pane. I actually don’t mind this, and it works well.

Library View

This is ADE’s library view. The point I would make here is not so much about Adobe, but perhaps about the way some ePubs are formatted to yield very ugly covers:

I’m not sure if this is down to ADE or the formatting of the books, but compare this ugly, ugly view of most of the books with what you see in Calibre, or in the Kobo or in Kindle library views.  I think ADE is just picking up the first image in the books, rather than the image which has been nominated as the cover in the metadata.  What’s the point of seeing the Penguin Books logo as the cover of ‘The Complete Novels of George Orwell’ ?

Extra Features

Zip. There aren’t any.  You can highlight a word or phrase, and then go to the READING drop down menu to copy or print it, but that’s about it.  No dictionary, no means of permanently highlighting, no means of making notes, nothing.

Conclusion

As you can probably tell, I really dislike Adobe Digital Editions.  It seems to me poorly designed, badly thought out, and imposed on us by the widespread use of Adobe’s Digital Rights Management scheme (which I hate anyway).

Reading a long book in ADE would seem like a penance rather than a joy.

Previous article in this series: Calibre Ebook Viewer
Next article in this series: Summary and Conclusions

Calibre

Calibre is a Windows desktop application, not an iPad app, and its prime use is not as an e-reader, but as an e-book library manager and converter. It’s a great and very useful application, written by Kovid Goyal, and regularly updated by him. I urge you to consider donating something to him if you use this application.

One of Calibre’s great strengths is its ability to open a very wide variety of (non-DRM-protected) e-book formats, ranging from simple text, through formats like Microsoft Reader, Mobi, Palm, Sony, Kindle, and of course ePub, which is becoming the e-book standard. And it can convert back and forth between those formats, though that is not relevant to this post about its e-reader functions.

Although not its prime use, Calibre does include a fairly comprehensive e-book viewer, and that is all that I will focus on in this post.

Reading Comfort

In a section of this post titled ‘Reading Comfort’ it’s probably worth me declaring at the outset that I find reading anything lengthy on a desktop computer an extremely uncomfortable experience.  However, you could imagine using Calibre on a small laptop or netbook computer, though I still don’t think this would be as comfortable as using an iPad.  But then, I admit that I am biased.

The e-reader view of Calibre is fairly basic, but functional:

The reading window is readily re-sizable on the desktop, either horizontally or vertically, but I have adjusted this view to be roughly similar to the view you get in e-readers on the iPad. Certainly the reading view is far too wide if this window is maximized to fill a typical computer screen.

You can see immediately that there are no margins.  I find this quite off-putting while I am reading.  Without margins, I feel kind of claustrophic, crammed in.  There doesn’t seem to be a way in the settings to provide or adjust margins.

There are confusingly several ways to move on to new material while you are reading.  You can use the scroll bar at the right to scroll through the book as though it were one long document.  But this is awkward at best, requiring careful control of the mouse.  You can alternatively use a scroll wheel on your mouse to scroll through the text, but again this requires careful control so you don’t skip too far too quickly.  The up and down arrow keys also work to scroll through the text a line at a time.

The Page Up and Page Down keys, however, do move a ‘page’ at a time, with a swift page-sliding animation (though with the default settings this is far too slow for my taste, and I reduced the animation time to the minimum in the settings).  You can also do a ‘proper’ page change by using the purple arrow keys on the left-hand control bar.  I really don’t understand why these buttons aren’t somewhere more sensible, like at the top left, or at left and right top or bottom of the window.  The greyed-out arrows at the top left do something else, but I’m not quite sure what (their tool-tips say ‘Back’ and ‘Forward’).

It does seem to me that this is a very weak area of Calibre when you think about reader comfort, and given where users place their hands while reading.  I would have thought that left and right arrow keys would be the most sensible page-turn controls on the keyboard, or else a mouse-click on the right or left margin of the page would work well, simulating the touch-controls on tablet devices.  Admittedly you can change keyboard shortcuts in the Settings, but I would have expected these to be set by default along the lines I have suggested.

Controls and Settings

All of Calibre’s e-book viewer controls are visible along the top and left of the window during normal reading mode.

At the top, we have a location indicator (the ‘location’ figure isn’t tied to actual page numbers).  Changing this figure and hitting the ‘Enter’ key takes you to that location.  The ‘Go to’ field is related to what Calibre calls ‘Reference Mode’, which turns on a display of section and paragraph numbers as you mouse over text.  Even in this mode, I couldn’t get the ‘Go to’ field to work.  Then we have the Search field, and the two green arrows move through found instances of your search text.  More on search later.

At the left, we have these controls.

As mentioned above, I can’t quite figure out the top two arrows, but perhaps I’m just missing something.  Beneath those we have an ‘Open File’ control.  Confusingly, this doesn’t let you pick from Calibre’s library, but is a standard Windows file open dialog.

Then we have a ‘Copy to Clipboard’ function, then ‘Increase Font Size’ and ‘Decrease Font Size’.

Next is a button to take you to the Table of Contents, of which more later.

Next is the ‘Full Screen Mode’, which is fairly useless, as the line lengths are way too long for reading in that mode unless you set a maximum text width in the settings.

Now we have (finally!) the ‘Previous Page’ and ‘Next Page’ controls.

Then a control to place a bookmark at the current location.  You are able to name the bookmark, which is useful. This is then placed on a drop down list beneath the ‘Bookmarks’ control.  I would have preferred to see the Bookmarks list as part of the Table of Contents view.

The colorful paint-pot control next is actually a toggle for Calibre’s Reference Mode.

Finally, we have ‘Preferences’, ‘Information’ and ‘Print’.

Navigation

Navigation is very basic.  You either just keep scrolling through the text, or you can try adjusting numbers in the top-left location control.  This is very hit or miss, because there is no relation to anything like actual book pages.

Searching

Searching is fairly simple: type in your search term in the search field at the top of the window and hit the ‘Enter’ key.  Calibre scrolls to the first found instance and highlights the text.  You can move through found instances by using the green down and up arrows.

Table of Contents

Again, the Table of Contents view is very basic.  The control just slides out a separate panel with the chapter headings on it.  Clicking on these takes you to the appropriate location.  The Table of Contents panel steals room from the reading panel, squeezing it up.

Library View

Not surprisingly, in many ways the Library View is where Calibre excels, since one of its prime functions is to act as an e-book Library manager.  There’s a nice Cover Flow view (though it doesn’t animate anywhere as neatly as iTunes’ equivalent), and a table view giving you plenty of information about particular books.

You can search through your library by title, author, or other fields.  Part of Calibre’s other functions allow you to change or add metadata to books, including your own tags.  It really excels at these Library features.

Extra Features

Double-clicking on a word in the text highlights it, and then a right-click on your mouse brings up a small context menu including a dictionary lookup.  This comes from the web site dict.org, and uses 1913 Webster’s Dictionary, which presumably is used because it is out of copyright (only reasonable given that Calibre is free software).

Other choices in the context menu are ‘Copy’ and ‘Inspect’.  The latter would be only of interest to developers creating formatted e-books, as it brings up a ‘Web Inspector’ view showing CSS styles and so on.

Conclusion

While I personally can’t imagine feeling comfortable using Calibre for reading a long e-book such as a novel, perhaps that’s because I have been spoiled by my iPad.  But I do find that it is extremely useful for quick looks at the contents of e-books in my library.

If you don’t own a dedicated e-reader device like an iPad or a Kindle, and are using Calibre on some kind of semi-mobile device such as a small laptop or a netbook, you might well find it a very good way to read e-books.  And Calibre’s other great features for managing my e-book library, and converting e-books into different formats, mean that it is a must-have application for me.

Previous article in this series: GoodReader
Next article in this series: Adobe Digital Editions

GoodReader

GoodReader isn’t specifically an e-book reader; it’s a fully-featured general purpose PDF reader. These additional features, and the fact that its developer doesn’t make money from selling books, means that of all the e-readers I am discussing in this series it is not free. It costs $4.99 in the US Store. But if you already have it, GoodReader is an attractive app to use to read e-books in PDF format and that is how I am going to treat it here.

Reading Comfort

As with all PDF readers, what you see is (or should be) an accurate reflection of the document which was used to create the PDF. So all of the layout here, the margins, the font, the line-spacing, etc, are in the original document.

However, one great feature is that GoodReader supports pinch and zoom, so you can readily enlarge or shrink any area.  Double-tapping in the text will also zoom, and repeated taps continue zooming.

Touching the right or left margins turns the page in that direction.  So does touching the top or bottom of the page.  The page transition is a simple cut, but you do get a brief flash of the page number, which helps reinforce the fact that a change has occurred.

Controls and Settings

Touching the center of the page brings up a heap of controls both at the top and bottom and at the right of the screen:

At the top we get a button to return to ‘My Documents’ – the Library View in other e-readers.  We also see the page number indicator, with progress through the book.  With a PDF file, this is a no-brainer, and of course you get accurate page numbering.  But it would be nice if there were a setting to leave this indicator visible while you are reading.

At the right we have a heap of tools which allow you to add various kinds of markup such as highlighting, underlining, adding notes, drawing arrows, and so on.  Most of these tools are of course designed for working with office-type documents and would not be very useful when reading a work of fiction, though a student studying a work of literature would no doubt find them helpful.

I won’t go into detail about what all of these do, except to say that the pin at the top allows you to force these controls to remain visible in normal reading mode.  The next button down allows you to place a bookmark on the current page.  I like the fact that you can give a name to this bookmark.

At the bottom we have Brightness / Go Back / Pure Text Mode /Rotate the view / Double-Page Layout / Crop Margins / Bookmarks / Go to Page / Search / Horizontal Scroll Lock / Actions / Orientation Lock. Some of these are self-explanatory, but a few need a bit more description.

‘Pure Text Mode’ attempts to extract text from the PDF and display it in a plain vanilla format.  It doesn’t have much value when reading a work of fiction, but I’m sure there are cases with some documents where it would be valuable.

‘Crop Margins’ essentially lets you zoom into the page and crop out unnecessary white space around the text.  Functionally, it’s like a font size increase, or a margin decrease, in some other apps.

‘Bookmarks’ not only pops up a list of the named bookmarks you have created, but also gives access to ‘Outlines’, which turns out to be essentially the Table of Contents, as well as any annotations you have made.

‘Horizontal Scroll Lock’ basically locks horizontal movement of the screen when you have zoomed in to a particular column or article, say.  Useful with some documents, but not when reading most e-books.

The ‘Actions’ list has some features not relevant to reading e-books, but does include Email and Print.  Presumably these don’t work with a DRM-protected PDF file.

Navigation

With controls showing, you see a progress slider just above the bottom controls.  As you slide it to move through the book, you get a nice little call-out with the current page number.  You can go direct to a particular page by using the dedicated control at the bottom, or by touching the page number display at top left of the screen.

With a PDF file, of course, there is no issue about ‘real’ page numbers.  What you see is what there is.

Searching

Touching the Search button brings up a huge panel which is presumably where you see a long list of saved previous searches.  It’s a bit big for my taste!

Search is not progressive – you type your search term and then touch ‘Search’ on the keyboard or on the panel. And it doesn’t give you a list of found results with context, just jumps to the next instance. There is a little call-out dialog on the Search control to take you to previous or next instances, or clear the search.

Table of Contents

This is accessible via the ‘Bookmarks’ control, and just pops up in a small dialog. Simple but effective.

Library View

GoodReader’s ‘My Documents’ view is comparable with other e-readers’ Library Views. But because of GoodReader’s orientation, it’s really a fully-featured file manager. You are able to create folders, move files, delete files, etc. But the Preview mode does give you the covers of documents in the library:

Extra Features

As mentioned earlier when I was discussing the wealth of controls available, there are a whole bunch of tools in GoodReader for highlighting or annotating text. There’s no dictionary lookup, however, which is probably understandable given the PDF-document focus of this app.

Conclusion

You probably wouldn’t use GoodReader for preference in reading a novel, but if an e-book you’ve bought or borrowed is only available in PDF format, it would be a better choice than the PDF mode of iBooks, because it includes features such as search, better navigation, highlighting and annotation tools.

Previous article in this series: Stanza
Next article in this series (still to come): Calibre E-Book Viewer

Stanza

Stanza is a venerable e-reader now. There was a time when it was the ‘go-to’ app for reading e-books on your iPhone, and it did a great job. I read quite a few novels that way.

Then the company which produced it was bought out by Amazon, and for a while it seemed as if there wouldn’t be an iPad version of Stanza. Perhaps Amazon were holding it back so that it didn’t compete with the Kindle app, with books sourced outside of Amazon’s store? I don’t know the answer, but thankfully Stanza eventually came up with the goods, and their iPad version stands up tall compared with most of the other e-readers I have been discussing in this series.

Reading Comfort

Normal reading mode in Stanza is very clean. There’s no book title shown, only the chapter title. No page or progress indicator is visible in this mode, which is a pity, I think.  As you can see, its default mode is for block paragraphs with no indent, overriding the settings in the source ePub file (my collection of SF stories Islands), which are for indented paragraphs with no space between paragraphs.  All of this, however, is adjustable in Stanza’s settings.

There are three page-turn modes: ‘None’, ‘Turn’ and ‘Slide’. I much prefer the ‘Slide’ animation, which gives a positive sense that something has happened. ‘None’ is a straight jump cut to the next page, too sudden for my taste. Stanza’s ‘Turn’ animation is of a stiff, cardboard-like page, which just feels unnatural and wrong. However, in Stanza’s favor, you can set the speed of the animation by adjusting the Settings, of which more later.

Controls and Settings

If you touch the center of the page in Stanza, the whole page rather dramatically dims, and we get not only control bars at top and bottom of the screen, but a progress-type indicator in the very center of the screen. The progress indicator, however, shows only pages read or to come within the current chapter, and a percentage of the whole book completed. I’ll rant a bit about this when we get to the Navigation heading.

At top we have the book title and even the author’s name. A left arrow gives ‘Back to the Library’ and at the right the ‘Info’ button just gives us the cover image, title, author and file size.

At the bottom we have a cornucopia of controls: Table of Contents / Settings / Night-Day Toggle / Search / Increase Font Size / Decrease Font Size / Share / and a More button which gives you Delete Book / Find Next / Book Rotation / Downloads / Dictionary and Edit Info.

Mostly these controls should be self-explanatory, so let’s look at Settings.

I thought that Bluefire Reader was well-provided with adjustable settings, including being able to change the margins, but Stanza outdoes it by a couple of orders of magnitude.  You can, it seems, change every aspect of the appearance of the page – margins, line spacing, paragraph spacing, paragraph indent. You can choose any font installed on the iPad.  Want to read Raymond Chandler in American Typewriter font on a crumpled carbon-paper background?  Go ahead!  A Georgette Heyer romance in purple Snell Roundhand over a parchment background? Enjoy! And there are a swag of preset ‘Themes’ including a variety of background colors and textures, most of which, I must say, I would never dream of actually using while reading a book.

Navigation

Underneath the bottom set of controls is a progress bar slider.  This, like the center page number indicator, only shows page numbering within the current chapter as you slide it, though you do also get the chapter name.

By now you’ll know that my hobby-horse with e-readers is that they mostly lack a good natural indication of how many pages there are left to read in the book. Alas, Stanza fails this test like most other e-readers. All its navigation is chapter-oriented rather than book-oriented. A percentage number for the whole book is better than nothing, I guess, but if I’m reading War and Peace then I really want to know simply how many more pages – how many more taps on the right of the screen – are there left in the book.

But at least the page numbers shown in a particular chapter are based on real pages, not some pseudo-page location indicator as in the Bluefire and Kindle Readers.  The page numbers are re-calculated when the font size changes.  If only Stanza would show me (as an optional setting, perhaps) page numbering within the book as a whole, I would think Stanza was practically perfect.

Searching

Stanza’s search is reasonably good, but not quite as good as that in the Kindle app or in iBooks.  It’s not progessive – you type your search term and then touch the Search button on the keyboard.  But at least you do get a list of found locations, with a small amount of context, including the chapter name:

Table of Contents

Stanza’s Table of Contents view is fairly ordinary – a small dialog box with a list of chapter names.  But I thought it was useful that the current chapter was ticked, and that Bookmarks and Annotations are available from the same little dialog.

Library View

Stanza’s Library is neat and effective, though it might be cumbersome if you had a few dozen books loaded.  I like the clock-face indicator of how far you are through a particular book. Stanza also picked up the cover of my book correctly, unlike some of the other e-readers.

Note that down the bottom we have instructions on how to get books into Stanza. This is an important issue which I have not addressed so far in my reviews of e-readers. It’s a big issue which I will tackle in a separate post.

Extra Features

Touch and hold a particular word in Stanza, and something weird happens. The whole paragraph highlights in yellow for a moment and then this little dialog pops up with the text of the paragraph, with your selected word highlighted. This is just plain odd!

If you choose the ‘Define’ option here, you get definitions from two separate dictionaries, plus related entries in a Thesaurus. ‘Share’ lets you tweet, Facebook or email your selected text.

Conclusion

Stanza, because of its long history and the large number of happy users it gathered in its iPhone days, has learned a lot of useful lessons.  I always liked it on the iPhone, and I like it even more on the iPad.  With its huge flexibility in terms of settings, it compares very favorably with all of the other e-readers I have discussed so far, even with iBooks.  Now if only Stanza would give me the sensible page number indicator I’m looking for (and make it always visible in normal reading mode) then I might even prefer it to iBooks.

Previous article in this series: Bluefire Reader
Next article in this series: GoodReader

Bluefire Reader

Bluefire Reader is an ‘independent’ e-reader app, that is, it isn’t tied to a particular e-book retail company in the same way that the Kindle App is tied to Amazon’s Kindle Store, or the way the Kobo reader app is tied to the Kobo Books web store. It is, however, affiliated with several e-book stores, including Books on Board, which is probably my favorite store.

Although it isn’t tied to a particular store, Bluefire can read books protected by Adobe’s DRM mechanism, which is how most ePub books are sold.  (I personally particularly dislike DRM on books, but that’s another story).  To do this, you need to enter your Adobe ID and password, which you have to create when you first download Adobe’s Digital Editions software.  But, that done, you are free to read any book protected in this way.

One of the advantages of this is that Bluefire is great for reading books you have borrowed from a library service.  My local library service, for example, has an extensive range of e-books on loan for periods of up to 28 days.

Now let’s look at the reader itself:

Reading Comfort

The first thing I note here is that compared to other readers viewing the exact same book (my SF short story collection, Islands), I get more lines of text, even with the font size adjusted to match the line length in the other apps. I get 29 lines of readable text at the start of this chapter compared to 26 in iBooks and as few as 20 in the Kobo app). A little investigation turns up the fact that in Bluefire you can adjust margin size in the settings, the first such app that does so amongst the ones I have so far discussed. Like all the apps so far, however, this setting is global, not specific to a particular book. There’s no ability to adjust line spacing, either. I’m still looking for this feature!

A couple of other minor points: the book title isn’t visible in normal reading mode, just the chapter title. Next is the tiny number at top right, I’m not sure if you will see it in the screen grab. This is the ‘page’ number, of which more later. But there’s no indication in this mode of how far we are through the book.

Page turning has four separate settings in Bluefire, but I found only one of them – Slide – to be comfortable enough for regular use. We get a clean slip-away of the current page to the left or right. It’s fast and smooth, but enough for us to get a good sub-conscious feeling that the page has changed. Of the other settings, ‘Flip’ does a rather stilted animation which makes it feel as though the page was made of a stiff card. I didn’t like it much, but at least it’s smooth. ‘Fade’ is a simple dissolve, too fast for my taste, and the way the old text blends with the new is off-putting. ‘Cut’ is just as fast, but the old text goes to white first, so you have more of a sense that something has happened.

Controls and Settings

As in the other e-reader apps, touch the center of the page and controls pop up at the top and bottom of the screen:

At the top, we get the book title, and only one control, Add a Bookmark.

At the bottom, we have a page number indicator (we’ll discuss this further under the ‘Navigation’ heading), left and right page turn arrows, which seem superfluous to me, and a progress bar slider.

Below the slider we have buttons to go to the Library, the Table of Contents, the Bookmarks page, or to call up Search or Settings. More on Search later.

Settings is an area where Bluefire excels. As I mentioned above, it includes a welcome ability to change the margin size. For a little while, though, I thought that you had no control over font and colors. It took me a while to spot the ‘Formatting’ option toward the bottom of the settings dialog, which opens a large range of settings:

This is all very admirable, but you only get two fonts, a serif font and a sanserif font. It’s also a little annoying that you have to click the ‘Save’ button before you see any changes (and if you forget to touch it, your changes are lost).

Navigation

Navigation seems straight-forward. With the controls visible, you get a progress slider. As you move your finger over this, the only thing which visibly alters apart from the slider itself is the page number. It works, but it’s not as nice as the little call-out balloons you get in some other apps.

However, there’s a trick about these ‘page’ numbers, and that is that they are not page numbers, but some kind of location indicator as in the Kindle app. These are not re-calculated as you change font size or margin size. The ‘Twist of Fate’ story always starts on ‘page’ 87 of the book. I’m sorry, but a page number should be a page number in my view – it should indicate how many times you need to tap the right-hand margin to turn pages to get to that location. Otherwise, it’s just plain confusing. At least Kindle’s ‘location’ navigation, though I dislike it, is honest about this. The downside of iBooks’ page indication is that you have to wait a moment or two for it to be recalculated after a change of format, but that’s a small price to pay for a real feel of where you are in a book. Again, it may be a personal thing, but this is really important to me.

Having said all that, however, with the default margins and font, Bluefire’s page indicators are close enough to reality not to bother me too much in practice.

One last thing, and that’s to say that there appears to be no way in this app to go to a location by just typing in the page/location number.

Searching

Search is very straightforward in the Bluefire Reader, but also very limited. When you touch the Search icon, you get a field at the top of the page where you can type in your search term. It’s not a progressive search, you have to hit the Search button on the keyboard before search commences, and Bluefire just jumps directly to the next instance of your search term.

Table of Contents

Again, this is very straightforward and simple, but clean and effective. Nothing to complain of here. Note that we get some other controls at the top of the screen, to view an overview of the book, or to view bookmarks.

Library View

Again, pretty simple but workable. Note, though, that there seem to be great variations in whether a particular reader is able to pick up the cover of a book, depending on how the book is formatted. In the case of my own book I can see that Bluefire is just picking up the first image it finds within the book, rather than finding the actual cover and using it to fill the icon. We also get controls down the bottom to go back to the book we are currently reading, to look for more books (note that with Apple’s new rules, this button may have to be removed), or to go to an ‘Info’ page which tells us about the reader, its version, and allows us to authorize or deauthorize an Adobe ID.

Extra Features

Touching and holding down a word in reading mode brings up a small call-out which lets us add a bookmark, and that’s all, unless the book doesn’t have any DRM, in which case you also get the option to extend the selection and copy text. There’s no dictionary function.

Conclusion

I started this exercise because of my frustration of not being able to select various settings such as font, font-size etc. on a per-book basis, even though different books often require different settings for comfort. Though I am critical of some of its features, by and large I find Bluefire a very comfortable reader to use, and it is what I am currently using alongside iBooks. I have been using it to read a novel with particular settings while using iBooks to view a textbook. Maybe it would have been more sensible to do it the other way around, but I was forced to use iBooks for the textbook as I had bought it from the Apple store. This is one of the many frustrations of incompatible digital rights management (DRM).

Previous article in this series: Kobo
Next article in this series: Stanza

Kobo

I should start by saying that I really like Kobo as an e-book retailer. I buy a lot of my e-books through Kobo, and I’m continually impressed by the range of books they have available to buyers, like myself, who live in Australia. I like their web site, and the ease of purchasing through it.

Having said all that, however, I find the Kobo e-reader app for the iPad to be a little disappointing.

Reading comfort

A few things to notice here. Firstly, a minor point perhaps, but the chapter heading has been forced into all-caps. There’s no indication of the title of the book (it’s my collection of SF stories, Islands).  Also, the text is now set in block-style, that is, with no first line indent and extra space between paragraphs. The line spacing is also very wide, and in this mode we only get 20 text lines to the chapter start (compare this with 23 for Kindle and 26 for iBooks).

There’s a setting in the app which lets you turn off ‘Kobo Styling’, on by default. Turning this off shows the book more in the format in which I styled it: indented first line, no space between paragraphs, and reduced line spacing.

There are no separate settings for margins or line-spacing, but you can choose between full-justification and left-justified text.

At the bottom of the page is something which really annoys me – not a page number showing how far we are through the book, but an indication of how far we are through the current chapter. I feel lost in terms of sensing how far through the book I have come, and how much more there is to read. I much prefer the way that iBooks shows you a page number out of the total in the book, with a subtle indication when controls are visible of how many more pages remain in the current chapter.

Page turning is, as usual, via a tap on the left or right margin. You can select between a page fade or a page curl. The page curl is much swifter and smoother than the Kindle version, so that is what I normally have it set to in this app. The page fade, to my mind, is too quick and too subtle. I find myself having to double-check to see that the page has actually turned.

Controls and settings

Touch the center of the page, as in all these apps, and controls pop into view. I’m not very fond of the heavy dark borders that the controls live on in the Kobo app, however, and I can’t imagine reading a book with these showing:

At the top we have Back / Table of Contents / Overview / Annotations.

At the bottom we have a progress bar showing how far you are through the book (hate the magenta color here!) / Return (?) / Social / Font settings / Brightness / Bookmark this page / Settings .

‘Back’ is almost as confusing as in the Kindle app. It always takes you back to your previous view if you’ve used the Table of Contents, Overview or Annotations. Or to the Library. It took me quite a bit of messing about with this button to get out of the book and back to the Library view. I’ll discuss the Table of Contents view below. ‘Overview’ takes you to a ‘jacket blurb’ view (though why you need this once you have bought the book I’m not sure). ‘Annotations’ takes you to your notes and bookmarks. I like these three controls more than the ‘Go to’ popup you get in Kindle, I think.

At the bottom, the ‘Return’ button takes you ‘back to where you left off’, but it’s not all that clear how this is defined.

The ‘Social’ button is worth a look, as it’s a real point of distinction from iBooks and the Kindle app. It takes you to this rather quirky ‘Reading Life’ screen:

I’m not sure why I need to be told all of this stuff, nor why I would bother sharing it with Facebook or Twitter followers. But then, I came very late to the social networking thing and so maybe I still don’t get it.

The ‘Show icons for characters and locations’ selection is intriguing, but I have no idea what it does.

You get four fonts in Kobo (not sure what ‘Default’ font is), and an awkward slider to change the font size.

Navigation

The slider works to move you through the book. Puzzlingly, outside the current chapter you only get the chapter title and a percentage value, but within the current chapter you get a page number within the chapter. Frankly, I don’t understand this chapter-focused navigation business.

Searching

So far as I can tell, there is no means of searching within Kobo books. A big disappointment this. As I mentioned in my review of iBooks, my aged brain often relies on the Search function to remind me who a particular character is when they are re-introduced after a while. I don’t think I could have gotten through A.S.Byatt’s The Children’s Book without this!

Table of Contents

Kobo’s Table of Contents view is neat and attractive:

Nothing to complain of here.

Library

The Library view is neat enough, no fake bookshelves here. Not sure why Kobo failed to include the cover of my book, however, as it is picked up by other apps. You can see that I’m a big Kate Atkinson fan!

Extra Features

Holding down your finger on a particular word brings up a small call-out menu with the choices Dictionary / Highlight / Add Note / Share. The ‘Share’ choice is interesting, and gives you the new call-out menu above.

Kobo are obviously very big on social networking, but I can’t imagine why I would want to tweet a single word out to the world at large.

The ‘Dictionary’ choice from the first call-out gives you a very comprehensive result without having to touch any other controls:

Conclusion

By and large, not a bad e-reader app, but with some serious design quirks. I particularly dislike the chapter-focused paging and navigation. This may not seem like a big deal, but to me it is. I started to read Kate Atkinson’s When Will There Be Good News through the Kobo app, but then shifted it to Bluefire (of which more later) after I became to irritated with not knowing how many pages remained in the book.

Previous article in this series: Kindle App
Next article in this series: Bluefire Reader

Kindle App

It’s worth saying right from the start that I think it admirable that Amazon have made it possible to read books from their Kindle Store on so many different platforms, ranging from desktop PCs through to a wide range of mobile devices, including, of course, the iPad, which could be said to directly compete with their own Kindle device. I imagine that the reason is that Amazon make far more money from selling Kindle books than they do selling Kindle devices, so this just makes good business sense. Whatever the thinking, they have done a really good job with the Kindle iPad app.

Reading comfort

There are a few things to note here in comparison with the reading mode in iBooks.

Firstly, the Kindle app doesn’t bother with the faux hardcover book metaphor, we just get a nice plain, non-distracting page. Personally, I prefer this approach. However, the margins at left, right and particularly the bottom of the page in the Kindle app seem overly generous to me. With exactly the same book (my SF collection Islands) as in iBooks, and a font size chosen to match the same line length as in iBooks, I only get 23 lines of visible text at the start of the chapter, compared with 26 in iBooks. In neither app do there seem to be any settings to adjust margin width or line spacing.

Then there’s page turning. As in iBooks, we tap the left or right of the screen to turn the page. The Kindle app by default also tries to do a fake page curl effect, but it’s very sluggish indeed. Fortunately, you can turn off this animation in Kindle’s settings (accessible from the Library screen, not within the book you are reading) and you get a much speedier page slide effect.

The other issue to do with reading comfort, to my mind, is that in the Kindle app there is no page number visible at the bottom when in normal mode with the controls hidden. If you do call up the controls, what you get is a percentage and a huge ‘location’ number like ’1644 of 2230′, the latter making me feel quite weary! Imagine the numbers you would see in War and Peace! I much prefer the much more natural page numbering like ’138 of 169′ I see in iBooks.

Controls and settings

As in iBooks, touching the center of the page brings up visible controls:

At the top, we have the Home / Library button, and at right a button to add a permanent bookmark to a page.

At the bottom, we have  Back  / Search / Table of Contents / Font Settings / Sync controls.

Maybe I’m stupid, but it took me quite a while to work out what the ‘Back’ button is meant to do.  Back to where? It doesn’t turn the page back.  Does it go back to your last location before a Table of Contents jump? Yes, that’s it.  To me, though, this seems superfluous.  You’d be better off, as iBooks is, with a ‘Resume’ button on the TOC page itself.

I’ll discuss Search and Table of Contents below.

Font settings are pretty basic, but we do get here a ‘Night’ mode, which you don’t get in iBooks. But compared to iBooks’ six available fonts, all we seem to get here is a single font, at six different sizes, most of which are way too big for reading unless you are heavily visually impaired. I would like a size between the smallest (so small as to give you eyestrain) and the second-smallest (comfortable but a tad large). I also find that I have to crank Kindle’s brightness up to the max, anything less is just too dark. In iBooks I generally find myself cranking the brightness down.

They ‘Sync’ button allows you to synchronize your reading position with other devices. I’m not sure why this isn’t automatic, as it is in iBooks.

Navigation

The navigation slider is similar to that in iBooks, with a progress bar over which you can slide your finger to move through the book. Unfortunately, though, what you see are not page numbers but Kindle’s silly ‘location’ numbers. Good luck finding a particular page with that, all you can do is use a hit and miss approach. Unlike iBooks, however, there is a way of going to a particular page – well, no, to a particular location – by typing in a number. But you get to this by touching the Table of Contents control, choosing Location from the ‘Go to’ menu that comes up, then entering the ‘location’, should you somehow know this.

Searching

Search does what you would expect, but note that you have to enter the full text you are looking for before you can search, it’s not progressive as in iBooks.  But the result is pretty similar to iBooks, and works just as well:

Table of Contents

I don’t like Kindle’s Table of Contents view at all. What we get are a bunch of blue underlined hyperlinked headings, just as though we were on a 1999-vintage web page. Ugly, ugly! And out of sympathy with the rest of the app. Amazon should fix this.

Note also that this display doesn’t include a way of going to previously bookmarked pages. You find these by making a selection on the ‘Go to’ menu which comes up when you touch the Table of Contents control. This whole little menu is very clunky and inelegant, to my mind.

Library

I rather like Kindle’s Library page, with its dark blue background, from which the book covers really seem to pop out. It’s a different approach from iBooks’ fake bookshelf, and I’m not sure that I don’t prefer it. In general the Kindle app gains points from me because it doesn’t pretend to be what it is not.

Extra Features

Touch a particular word on the page in the Kindle app, and you get a small call-out allowing you to make a note or highlight the word, and without asking for it you see a definition down the bottom of the page:

You don’t get to copy a word or a phrase, however, since the Kindle version of my book is DRM-protected. I think it’s a pity that you can’t at least copy, say a paragraph at a time for purposes of discussion. But then, in general I am against DRM, even for my own works. I like to be able to own a book and to be able to back it up securely.

Conclusion

Though I’ve made some quibbles here about the Kindle app, in general I quite like it. If it weren’t for the proprietary DRM-protected Kindle format, and the silly ‘location’ navigation method, I would like it more, I think. As it is, I use it only to look at books I have bought through the Kindle Store, because I have no other choice. And I must say that because of its uncluttered look, I generally prefer it to iBooks for reading non-fiction like textbooks or reference works.

Previous article in this series: iBooks PDF Mode
Next article in this series: Kobo

iBooks – PDF Mode

It may seem like cheating to discuss iBooks’ PDF reader mode as a separate e-reader app. But it behaves and looks in many ways so different from the ePub reader mode that I think I can justify it. This will, however, be a rather shorter review than the previous one.

So how does iBooks in PDF mode differ from its ‘normal’ ePub reader mode?

Reading Comfort

As I’ve mentioned before, in order to ensure a fair comparison between apps, in this series, I’m using my own collection of science fiction stories, Islands as a sample book.

Compared with iBooks’ normal mode, we immediately sense that the PDF mode is a different beast. It’s colder, more clinical. We no longer have the warm colors, we’ve lost the faux hardcover book trimmings. It just feels like this is no longer a mode in which we will enjoy relaxing and reading on the couch, but instead it’s more a mode we would use to look at a report from the office.

The look of the page, its headings, page numbers, the line spacing, margins, and so on, are all those of the original PDF document, and are not modified in any way by iBooks.

Page turning works, as usual, by tapping the left or right margin. But the transition or page turn effect in PDF mode is much more jarring than the swift peel effect you get in normal mode. The whole page kind of judders to the left or right. I don’t know why it’s not smooth, nor really why the same peel effect couldn’t be applied. As I say, it seems like PDF mode is a whole different app.

Controls and Settings

If you touch the center of the page, the controls come up at top and bottom. But rather than seeming part of the book as in iBooks’ normal mode, these controls float above:

The controls at the top are: Go to Library / Table of Contents / Actions / Brightness / Search / Bookmark this Page.

Note that we now (unlike normal mode) have an Actions drop-down menu, which allows us to email or print the document. I suppose this makes sense if you are thinking that PDFs are always ‘office’ documents, unprotected by DRM. I guess Apple don’t want you emailing or printing DRM-protected novels, so that’s why we don’t get these controls in normal mode.

Navigation

With controls showing, at bottom we see just one navigation control – a squidgy array of tiny reproductions of the pages in the PDF, which we can run our finger over to navigate through the book. It’s not as nice as the normal-mode control, though, and there’s no way of jumping back where we came from. Personally, I think the page reproductions are too tiny to be of any value.

Again there’s no way to go to a particular page number directly.

Searching

The search in PDF mode works pretty much the same (and as well as) the search in normal mode.

Table of Contents

The Table of Contents view is plain weird in PDF mode, in my opinion. By default, you get an array of thumbnails of the individual pages:

There is a button, however, to take you to a simpler textual list. Again, though, the colors and background texture are very cold and severe. Are PDFs so much less welcoming than ePubs? Apple certainly seems to want to make it so.

Library View

The Library View is pretty much the same as in normal mode.

Note though, that I had to add the cover back in to the PDF conversion which Smashwords did of my book. Apparently PDFs aren’t supposed to have attractive covers. But regardless of that, notice how iBooks treats the cover image as though it were a spiral bound report, compared with the slight apparent indenting it does to ePub books, making them look like hardbound books. There’s definitely a philosophical issue here at the heart of Apple’s treatment of PDFs. That’s a pity, because some novels still seem to be only available in PDF format – the copy of Outlanders on my shelf, for example, is borrowed from my local lending library, but was only available as a PDF. And a novel with a spiral bound cover just looks odd.

Extra Features

There seem to be none of the extra features of iBooks available in PDF mode, which seems an odd omission. Nothing happens if you hold your finger down on a word in a PDF document in iBooks. You can’t highlight the word, make a note, look up a dictionary definition, or search for that word. Compare and contrast this with the wealth of features available in the GoodReader app when viewing PDFs.

Conclusion

PDF mode in iBooks seems like the poor cousin. It certainly forces the idea on you that PDFs are not for casual reading, but are cold office documents or reports. Yet features which might be useful for such documents, such as highlighting or adding notes are simply not available. Definitely an area which Apple could improve.

Previous article in this series: iBooks
Next article in this series: Kindle App