Megatheriums for Breakfast

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.

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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?

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iBooks

Apple’s iBooks app is, of course, the definitive e-reader app for the iPad which all others must be compared against. While it has many great features, there is still a lot wrong with it, and areas in which other e-reader apps improve upon it.

In this series, I’m using my own collection of science fiction stories, Islands as a sample. As well as a little self-promotion, this way I can be sure of being able to compare the exact same book in the various different apps, so that there are no differences in format attributable to the book itself.

Let’s look at various areas for comparison between the various readers, to see how iBooks does:
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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…