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. Read more…
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.
Read more…
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.
Read more…
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. Read more…
