Categories: Digital Life, Reading Tags: adept, adobe, Adobe Digital Editions, Apple, bluefire, calibre, e-readers, goodreader, iBooks, kindle, kobo, review, stanza
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. Read more…
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
