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Reading books on the iPad
The iPad is not only good for consuming digital media like videos, audio clips, and games. It can also be a great companion for reading and self-education with a whole selection of helpful book-reading apps.
iBooks
This is an official iPad book-reading application from Apple. It is quite unlike other iPad apps in its devotion to visual effects. Apple's developers and designers focused on making the reading experience as close to reading good ol' paper books as possible.
This effect can be felt as soon as the user launches iBooks. It starts with nice shelves with pictures of the books located on them. Then it continues when a book is selected: a user is presented with pages that turn just like those in a real book. Swiping from right to left turns the pages forward, and swiping from left to right does the opposite complete with a nice paper-like sound.
Currently, iBooks is the only book-reading app that allows you to buy books from inside of the application itself. This is due to the fact that Apple wants 30% of revenue from in-app purchases, thus giving its iBookstore quite the advantage since other book vendors are naturally unwilling to pay such a hefty tax.
Other notable iBooks features include:
● making notes and bookmarks in books
● synchronizing book collection with iCloud, which allows you to read the same book on a different Apple device from the place where the user just left off
● integration with Voiceover, the iPad's text-to-speech application
● support for PDF books, which is absent in offerings from other book sellers such as Barnes & Noble or Amazon
● a good selection of book reviews
While you have plenty of opportunities to customize your fonts to suit you better, you have few options when it comes to adjusting the margins of the page or moving away from the "real book" UI.
Yep, and a pleasant note: this app comes with a free "Winnie The Pooh" book.
Kindle from Amazon
One of the leading book sellers in the world, Amazon was one of the first to start selling their books through iPads. It is no wonder that people like it; with over 1000,000 titles available from Amazon, there are choices for all kinds of tastes.
With such a such a wide selection of books offered, Amazon does not think that reading books acquired in other stores is a good idea. That means that what you can read using the Kindle is limited to books you have bought in its store. You cannot use PDFs or other formats.
The Kindle's reading experience on the iPad is quite good. With different color schemes, reading is comfortable in any environment, although unlike iBooks, the choice of font faces is limited; they are preset by the book's publisher.
The integrated dictionary is another cool feature. Just highlight the word, and you do not need to switch to a dictionary application. The Kindle will provide the definition for that term on the same page.
Yet another Kindle feature that deserves attention is WisperSync. Basically, it allows you to synchronize your books with different devices. In other words, you can start reading a book on your Mac that you began reading on an iPad from the very place you left off.
The only downside to the user experience is the landscape mode, which displays one page on the iPad's screen unlike the 2 pages in iBooks.
To buy an eBook on Amazon, you will have to open a link to a book in a web browser.
Barnes and Noble (Nook)
The Nook is another book-reading application from a major international book seller. This time it is Barnes & Noble with access to a mind-boggling number of titles. The Nook offers over two million titles, in fact. These titles include, not only books, but also a whole selection of leading magazines and newspapers sold globally.
The Nook's reading experience is quite good with a decent set of options that make reading comfortable. The primary reason for such comfortable reading is the great set of customizable fonts and themes for reading.
While using the Nook, you may still encounter some performance lags. Another problem is that a significant portion of the Nook's eBooks are scanned out of print books, which can sometimes lead to a downgraded reading experience.
Just like its Kindle arch-rival, the Nook offers only those books that you have already bought in the Barnes & Noble eBookstore. Although, the Nook has one great feature that is lacking in the Kindle: you can borrow a book for free from another Barnes & Noble customer for two weeks.
Stanza
This is the most advanced reader of eBooks for the iPad. When it comes to format compatibility, Stanza knocks out any competitors on the iPad. It supports, not only the EPUB format, but also the Mobipocket, PalmDoc (DOC), and Microsoft LIT formats, as well as HTML, PDF, MS Word, RTF, eReader,CBR/CBZ, and DjVu . This saves you a whole bunch of time on converting your favorite eBooks into a compatible format.
With Stanza, you can read books you already have— just drag and drop the respective book files into the "File Sharing" section of the "Apps" tab of your iPad in iTunes. Besides that, you can also choose what you want to acquire from 50,000 of book titles available from the partner stores.
One of the cool thing about this app is that it provides you with access to a whole range of free books that are (completely legally) available on the Internet. With Stanza, you can browse and download classic books from Project Gutenberg as well as free books from Feedbooks, Random House, Harlequin, Munseys, BookGlutton, Mutopia, and PanMacmillan.
Stanza is also strong in organizing and sorting your books. And with the reading experience, you can set up and tinker with pretty much every aspect of your reading. An especially good feature is the instant "Night" white-on-black mode accessible right from the control bar. Also, if you want to share a thought from a book you are reading now with your friends, with Stanza, you can always do that through Facebook or Twitter.
Google Reader
Google Reader is one more option to consider for reading books on your iPad. Its key advantages are:
● Support for the iPad's "Voiceover" feature (like in iBooks)
● Millions of books, many of which are classic books with original typesetting and pictures
● "Flowing text" mode
● Archiving books in Google Cloud
Among the program's drawbacks is the quality of scanned books, which is sometimes not as good as it is in other applications.
Of course, these are not all of the options for reading books on the iPad. Other apps you might be interested in include CloudReaders, Kobo Reader, OverDrive Media Console, and Bluefire Reader.
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