As I have a pretty hideous commute to Oxford several times a week, I’ve been attempting to get some ebooks onto my iPod Touch. Without jailbreaking the iPod to install the books.app, the options are pretty limited. You can import pdfs into iTunes, but I’m after something with a few more bells and whistles. I don’t want to have to scroll through an entire book and I want to be able to bookmark my place. There are a few applications that let you access ebooks. But, on the whole you need to be connected to the internet to get any real benefit which isn’t ideal.
Scrollbox enables you to download a few books and save them as bookmarks as a data:URL so you access them offline, but there is no way to mark the place you’re at, or jump from chapter to chapter. It’s not suitable for reading an entire book, but you can upload documents to the site and access them which is pretty handy for reports and shorter documents.
Readdle lets you upload documents to their online storage so you can access them on the iPod/iPhone, it’s limited to certain file types but it does support ebook format Plucker. Plucker lets you mark your place and is great to use, but you can’t store the files offline on the iPod. So unless you’re on an iPhone and have uninterrupted connectivity, it’s not much use other than reading short documents.
Manybooks.net has a really good section on reading books on the iPhone, and has created a boomarklet so all of its ebooks can be saved onto the iPhone as a data:url and viewed offline. Every time I tried to save one, safari crashed on me though. I attempted some smaller files, but it didn’t make a difference. Once I’d installed the January software upgrade to enable bookmarks to be saved to the home screen, it worked. In terms of content, Manybooks.net has a great selection and it’s all very easy to find. But still no bookmarking within the document!
Textonphone enables you to download pages for viewing offline, but only in chunks of 50 pages. It’s also the only option that lets you turn pages rather than continuously scrolling through an enormous chunk of text. If you’re reading while connected to a network you can turn the pages with a tap of the screen. You can change the font, font size, text and background colours and you can even add notes to the page you’re on which can then be viewed by other users. They have a great selection of titles, I managed to find Marukami, Agatha Christie, Lee Child, P. G. Wodehouse and they have 20,000 titles. It offers foreign language editions too. You can also upload your own texts to the site so there are plenty of pirated books on there (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire anyone?). My only gripe is that they don’t seem to have thought about the user experience enough. I’d like to be able to browse by genre, interest, popularity and period. The ability to just browse full stop rather than having to search for an exact title or author would be good. Aside from that, it’s a great app.
The browsing experience of manybooks.net with the content and UI of textonmyphone.com would be just peachy.
