One of the biggest events in computer gaming last month was the long anticipated launch of Valve’s puzzle game Portal 2. After several months of promotion, including an alternate reality game, Valve's Portal sequel was exactly what's a lot of gamers had been waiting for. And after they finished beating the game—which, like its predecessor, did not take very long—some of them might have been curious exactly how the game came about. Enter game journalist Geoff Keighley. Keighley had written a series of articles called "Final Hours” about the production of various other computer games in the ‘90s and...

Since posting my review of Diane Duane’s Young Wizards series, I have been moved to go back and reread the entire thing, including the latest book that was released only recently. And a couple months ago I had purchased a $20 Groupon to Barnes & Noble, which was only good through April. So it seemed like a reasonable excuse to snag the e-books and do some reading—especially since the books were so reasonably priced. Which, in turn, was a good excuse to get around to reviewing the new Nook e-reader for the iPad, iPhone, and Windows Desktop and see...

Paul linked to a positive Project Gutenberg review of Ibis Reader a few months ago, but it first came to my direct attention when I tried out Jolicloud and discovered what it was: a web-based EPUB reader. It was an interesting idea, I thought, but I wasn’t sure what it was really good for. But a couple of days ago, my perspective changed. One of the great things about Baen Webscriptions and the Free Library is that they allow people who have access to Baen e-books to read them on-line as well as download them. Not too many other...

I’ve had a couple of days to play with iOS 4.2 on my iPad, and I can’t deny that it is by and large an improvement. It’s nice to be able to play Pandora in the background while I read an e-book or browse the web, for example. Of course, the multitasking isn’t perfect. Sometimes multitasking apps can crash but hang around zombie-like in the background. TCGeeks has advice for how to deal with that problem if it ever happens to you—go to the multitasking display by double-tapping Home, hold your finger down on a program, and hit...

One of the more controversial e-reading apps to hit in recent days is Flipboard, the free app that aggregates content that friends have shared on social media. I’ve previously reported on the controversy it engendered by its potentially copyright-violating aggregatory nature. Lately, I’ve finally had the chance to examine the app itself. In summary: wow. Flipboard is one of the prettiest things I’ve seen on the iPad yet. And it’s free. If you have an iPad, and are on Facebook and/or Twitter, you have absolutely no excuse not to go and download it. Even if you’re not on social media,...

Well, right now it’s snowing down below and the devil is skiing to work. I was convinced that there was no way a version of Fictionwise’s eReader would come out for iPad, now that Barnes & Noble was busy trying to push the Nook and its own tied-in eReader at all costs. In April, Fictionwise’s customer service outright said there were then “no plans to update the iPhone eReader app for iPad.” But in the last couple of weeks, surprise surprise, out came a new iPad-compatible eReader. I’m still not entirely sure why. Are Barnes & Noble still...

Under normal circumstances, it would take something pretty special for me to recommend more than one app in a particular category for the iPad. Does anyone really need more than one CBR reader when Comic Zeal does the job so well, for instance? Or more than one Twitter app, or RSS reader, etc.? (E-book readers are, of course, a special case, given that so many of them only read their own DRM-laden formats.) So when it comes to PDF readers, why would someone want anything other than the inexpensive, powerful, and fairly easy-to-use GoodReader? Actually, there is a pretty good...

It’s no secret that I use RSS a lot in finding things to blog for TeleRead. Using Google Reader, I follow thirty or forty feeds which pop out hundreds of articles per day, and go through and “star” likely prospects, then go back to my starred list later and write up the most interesting ones. (I also share some interesting articles that I don’t blog; anyone who wants to follow my Google Reader feed can find it here.) When I had my iPod Touch, I at first used NetNewsWire, then I upgraded to Reeder when I read some good reviews...

If you’re wondering whether the iSilo reader (v5.17) for the iPhone and iPad is worth the hefty $9.99 cost, the answer depends on whether you’re within its target audience. If you need to mirror web documents or sites on the iPhone with an absolute minimum of time and effort, particularly those heavy on tables, iSilo is definitely for you. The availability of iSilo reader apps for a fairly large number of other devices and platforms is another plus. Likewise, if you are a member of the medical or legal professions, you will find a considerable amount of useful...

The iPad is a boon not just for e-books, but for comics as well. Or, at least, for comic publishers—comic book stores are starting to get a little worried. With that in mind, this time I’m going to look at Comic Zeal 4, the $7.99 CBR/CBZ comic reader for the iPad. Unlike my other reviews, which covered both iPhone and iPad versions when both were available, I am only able to review the iPad version in this case. (Though you can of course assume the iPhone version is mostly similar.) At the moment, Comic Zeal 4 is an...

I’ve already looked at the other two of the original “big three” iPhone e-book apps. The third of these apps is Stanza, the EPUB reader from Lexcycle. Stanza has a lot in common with eReader. They’re both great apps for the iPhone, their reading models are similar, and Stanza even shares the ability to download and read eReader-format e-books—even those protected by DRM. And like eReader, Stanza’s future in the iPad era is uncertain. Lexcycle COO Neelan Choksi said in a comment posted on Lexcycle’s forum on March 15th, “Currently, there is no work being done to customize...

Classics ($2.99) was a great-looking iPhone app for its day. An extension of the “appbook” concept in which programmers took public-domain books, built an app framework around them, and sold them in the app store (see my review of the appbook of A Princess of Mars from this post), it bundled a number of the most well-known public domain titles together and prettied them up for iPhone-screen reading. As an implementation of that idea, it worked all right. In fact, it looked nice enough that Apple featured it in a TV commercial—and subsequently proceeded to steal its...