It’s no longer such a novel thing to read a book on a mobile phone, and on the iPad, it’s practically a requirement to download “The Elements” or open Winnie the Pooh” to give your friends a glimpse of the future of book reading.
The Barnes & Noble eReader iPhone app, left, allows readers to lend a book to a friend, but the Kindle app for the iPhone, center, does not. The company behind the Kobo app for the iPhone, right, says that after users buy a book, they can read it on multiple devices. But for many people, choosing the best book reading app is a challenge, especially for iPhone users, because of the wealth of choices in the App Store from Apple. The problem is not really the small things the differences in how the iBooks and Kindle apps, for example, turn a page, or enlarge the fonts. The better apps are all pretty good in these respects already, and they will all reach parity on such things quickly enough. And they’re all free, so it costs nothing to switch.
Nonetheless, the iBooks iPad app offers a generally better reading experience than its rivals, because of automatic brightness adjustments and overall ease of use. But its store has fewer books than the Amazon Kindle app or the Barnes & Noble eReader app. On a BlackBerry, Kobo was the most full featured, and on Android phones, Aldiko was the best in a sparse field, although it is greatly hampered, at least for now, by a lack of recent titles. But since the reading experience on these apps is not significantly different, the hard choice comes down to differentiating how you select your books, and how you may one day like to use them beyond reading on your Android, iPhone or BlackBerry.
The books you buy from most of these apps are, for now, readable only within the company’s apps. It is as if you have to travel back to the bookstore every time you want to open the book. That is not a major headache, as long as the apps that support your e-books survive forever, with the support of the major hardware manufacturers. But if Amazon folds its apps, or if you decide you want to read your books on another e-reading app, the books will be far less useful. If you happen to have an Android device, or are waiting for an excellent Android-based tablet to rival the iPad, the Aldiko reading app supports another e-book technology, called the Open Publication Distribution System.
That basically means you will, in the coming months, be able to buy books from a broad range of sellers, and, if those sellers use Adobe’s copyright protection software, you can transfer the books to other devices and apps that do the same. That will help address Aldiko’s major flaw at the moment namely, a dearth of books you would want to buy.