Earlier this month, I wrote about the launch of Bookish. At the time, their e-reading apps were “coming soon.” And now they are here. Are we impressed?
Not really. It’s a bare bones e-reading app with nothing to recommend it. The Android version isn’t bad. You can override publisher defaults to get some font and formatting choices. There is a night version, if you like that, and you can personalize both background and text colors. The layout on the page is serviceable but unexciting. I’d still say you’re better off downloading the book and using Aldiko, which does work with Adobe DRM’d books.
If you’re looking to read on your iPhone, I’d give this app a skip. Here’s what a page looks like on my iPhone. I’ve toggled settings “on” so you can see where the margins are. That’s as narrow as I can make them, which still leaves pretty wide margins for reading on a phone.
Nothing very exciting here. So far, I’m not seeing a compelling reason to use this over Goodreads or Amazon recommendations. And there’s still some awkwardness in searching for books. The first book I tried to find (because I actually am looking for an e-version of it) was Fortune’s Favorites by Colleen McCullough. It pulled up an out-of-stock audio version instead of the paperback, which is in stock on Amazon. So if I had “trusted” Bookish and not gone hunting on my own, I’d assume it was unavailable in paper. Alas, still no e-version of it. 🙁
Bookish still has a long way to go to be what they want it to be.
Looks like just one more re-branded BlueFire app.
Terrible, no implementation of ePub 3, with Apple and Kobo supporting this standard and Amazon supporting KF8 their well behind the game with the new app. Even epub 2 files with videos embedded do not show the videos in the reader and it renders blank pages everywhere for books that have a large number of images designed into the file. The page swipe navigation is ugly. Not impressive at all!
Brian, I haven’t used Bluefire in a while, but I though I remembered their margins at least being better.
I was so underwhelmed by this. Not that I was expecting much after I’d checked out their site.
@Juli, I can’t remember what BlueFire proper offers, but this is definitely using BlueFire’s white label app according to Ardy Khazaei the Bookish CEO.
Thanks, Brian!