Introduction
Though I usually read books on my iPad through Apple’s iBooks app, I have been using several different e-reader apps recently, and I thought it would be instructive to compare them. Each of them have their own strengths and weaknesses. Some of them are good, some of them so bad as to be useless.
The main reason that I have been trying different e-reader apps is that all of the apps seem to share a common weakness – if you adjust the settings for font, font-size, background and foreground colors, and so on, those settings apply to every book in your library. Yet different books often demand individual settings. For example, I was trying to use iBooks to both read a mystery novel as well as to read a textbook on iOS programming. The novel required a nice, readable, serif font, at a comfortable size. The textbook needed a larger font applied, and looked best in a sans-serif font. But iBooks doesn’t let me store these settings on a per-book basis, so each time I switched books I had to go through the process of changing the settings. Read more…
Categories: Digital Life, Reading Tags: adobe, app, bluefire, calibre, e-readers, goodreader, iBooks, kindle, kobo, review, stanza
The Origin of Life / The Fifth Miracle by Paul Davies
E-book on my iPad
Paul Davies is a great science writer, able to discuss complex issues in both understandable and engaging terms.
The Origin of Life (previous edition was titled “The Fifth Miracle”) is no exception. He demonstrates how much science has discovered about life and its origins, but also makes it clear how much is still shrouded in the deepest of mysteries.
In fact, in reading this book, I came to realize how wrong my casual assumptions about the issue have been. I had thought that the problem of life’s origins was now largely understood, with only details to fill in. And I had believed, equally casually, that somehow life is built into the cosmos, that, given the right conditions on a planet, the development of life is all but inevitable. But in fact Davies shows that there are some deep fundamental issues with this kind of belief, and that much about the origin of life remains inexplicable. After reading this book, I’m no longer certain about how common life might be in the universe. Read more…
What an amazing resource this is, delivered up free to us on our iPads.
The British Library has developed this deceptively simple app in association with BiblioLabs. Assistance was also given by Microsoft, which provided resouces to the Library for the scanning process.
Here the genius is not in the interface, which is fairly pedestrian, but in the concept of providing astonishingly direct access to a thousand books from the Library’s 19th Century collection, exactly reproduced from scans of the original works.
Full high-res scans of 1,000 books would of course eat up way too much storage on the iPad. Part of the genius is the way that you can search for and select works and only then begin a progressive download. Only if you place a work on your “bookshelf” is it retained locally. Read more…
Bellwether by Connie Willis
E-book on my iPad
I have been reading my way through all of Connie Willis’ books, having so much enjoyed what I have read so far. She has a real lightness of touch, a great insight into character, and a wonderful sense of humor, which I find very appealing.
Bellwether is quite a slight book by the standards of Willis’ novels such as Doomsday Book and Blackout/All Clear, putting its emphasis on humor and quirkiness rather than deep characterization, but it was nonetheless very entertaining.
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