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