The last few e-readers I’ve reviewed have been corporate-, or at least company-created—crafted by teams of developers, with a very smooth and polished look to them and, with the exception of eReader, all relative latecomers to the iPhone platform. It’s time to switch things up and take a look at a much older, largely solo effort: Zachary Bedell’s iPhone/iPad universal application BookShelf (v2.3.2968). If any app could be called the original iPhone e-book reader, BookShelf certainly qualifies. A predecessor, Books 1.0 (not written by Bedell), actually pre-dates Apple’s first iPhone software development kit—it was in one of the unofficial...

And now it’s time to review an e-book app that does not have “Reader” in the name. Time to look at the big kahuna of iPad e-book readers, the one that was supposed to change the publishing industry forever: iBooks. There’s quite a lot to like in this free iPad e-reader, and only a few minor niggles. Given that it uses EPUB and is quite easy to load with content, I can use it as a replacement for Stanza on the big machine. In fact, I would say it’s as good as or even better than Stanza in...

PDF is not an e-book format. People call it one, and pretend it is, but it really is not. It’s an electronic representation of a paper book, and that is just not the same thing. Most PDFs are not actually meant for on-screen viewing. When you try to view a portrait PDF on a landscape PC screen, you get the upper one third to one half, then when you page down you get more. This makes reading it fairly annoying, especially for a work published in columns. PDF is simply a “dehydrated” paper book: a precisely-formatted representation...

Hard as it may be to believe, until last night I had never actually read a complete book in Amazon’s Kindle Reader software. I had several on my iPod Touch—freebies that I had downloaded and intended to check out, though not enough to have read yet. But I finally decided to give it a spin when I found a book I wanted on Amazon but not on Fictionwise. Last night I ordered the latest Mercedes Thompson novel by Patricia Briggs, Silver Borne. It was very easy; all I had to do was go to the Amazon page for the...

This review represents an update to the review I posted looking at version 1.3 of the reader back in December, 2008. For the most part, I am copying the text of the eReader portion of that review and changing the parts of it that are no longer true. In this, as in future reviews in this series, I will focus the interview on the iPhone reading experience, then cover how the iPad experience differs afterward. eReader (now in v2.1.1) is the grande dame of iPhone e-reading applications, tracing its lineage back more than ten years to the...