One such app is the Financial Times reader, which launched its HTML5 app last month. And today Kobo announced that it was developing an HTML5 e-reader in order to move toward being an “open platform.” (I reviewed the Ibis Reader, another HTML5 e-reading app, a few months ago.)

I applaud the move toward HTML5, which in addition to bypassing Apple’s controls should be reasonably platform-independent as well. But I find myself wondering just a little whether Apple might not decide down the road to break these apps that are circumventing its own app store moneymaking scheme.

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 sites do that yet. Amazon is working on it with its “Kindle Web”, but doesn’t seem to be there yet. And there’s no equivalent for Nook, or a lot of other places that sell e-books. And lately I’ve been spending a lot of time in a place where I have web access but can’t use an e-book reader, and there are certain non-Baen e-books I’ve been wanting to read to pass the time there.

Enter Ibis Reader. Not only does it allow you to upload e-books to it from your hard drive, but it can also access ODPS catalogs—such as the ones you can make your Calibre catalog into with Calibre2odps and host on Dropbox. Which means I suddenly have access to any e-book I can convert into unencrypted EPUB form, from anywhere on the web.

I’m a little less impressed by the iPhone/iPad mobile web app version of Ibis Reader (it also works on Android, but I couldn’t review it there), but that’s all right—I have better dedicated readers for there. What I didn’t have before, and where Ibis really shines, is a cloud/browser-based EPUB e-book reader. I can see myself getting a lot of use out of that.

Readability

The web version of Ibis has generally spartan configuration abilities. The only things you can really change are whether to use a serif or sans serif font, and increasing or decreasing the font size. As with some other EPUB reading apps, the decision of whether to left- or full-justify the right margin is entirely up to the way in which the EPUB is formatted, which is why I use Calibre to left-justify all newly-purchased EPUBs I can as a matter of habit.

You can also choose between a regular and a “No distractions” display, which removes the website border and allows you to narrow the width of the chapter display—something I find very useful, since it’s easier to read a narrow column of text on the computer screen. When I’ve got the column at the right width and font size, I have no trouble reading it at all.

One minor annoyance: Ibis Reader doesn’t show the cover art for the books in the reading interface itself (though it does show thumbnails in your book catalog list). I’m not sure whether that’s due to a limitation of the version of OPDS used in the Calibre2opds catalog or what, but it’s annoying. I should try regenerating my catalog with compatibility set to OPDS rather than Stanza and see if that fixes it. Edit: Doesn’t seem to. Even when I upload the EPUB directly from my HD, it still doesn’t show me the cover. Annoying, but then I’m reading it for the text anyway.

The iPhone and iPad versions are easy to read textually, too, if you set them to the Georgia font that I feel is the best reading font for iOS apps. (The iPad version does not offer the facing-pages-in-landscape option available in iBooks, alas.) The problem with them involves their overall clunkiness to use, which I cover in the next section.

Ease of Use

The simplicity of the web version of Ibis means that there’s really not much that’s easier to use. You just decide what font size you want and how wide you want the window, and off you go. It does lose a few points for often jumping to the end of the next chapter rather than the beginning when you click the “next” link to move forward, but it’s easy enough to press the “home” button.

On the iPad, the mobile version of Ibis runs pretty smoothly, but it really slows down on my first-generation iPod Touch. As a web app, it has to grind away a little when you turn the page or rotate the device. On the iPad, this is essentially instantaneous, but on the older iPod Touch it takes about a second for each new page to redraw. (Presumably it would take less time on the faster newer-gen devices.) That can be seriously distracting when you’re trying to read.

Once nice feature is that when you load a book you were reading in another instance of the app, it asks you if you want to continue from where you left off. It doesn’t always work, but it’s when it does, because there’s apparently no way to jump directly to any particular part of a given chapter save by paging ahead to get to it. You can see what page you’re in, but there’s no way to jump ahead.

Unlike the scrolling web version, the mobile app uses a page-turning paradigm, which means each time you turn a page the screen has to take the time to redraw before you can move on again. On the iPad this is less of a handicap, since the pages are bigger and the turning is faster, but if you’re halfway through a long chapter on the slower iPod Touch you’re going to be a while.

One nice feature that the iPod Touch version has is that, on the book’s info page, below the table of contents, there is an option to export the book into the much-less-clunky Stanza. Even though Stanza has its own OPDS import option, if you open a book in Ibis and find you’re just too frustrated with the slowness to go on, it’s a nifty escape clause, faster than going and fetching it on your own. Weirdly, the iPad version doesn’t have this option, even though Stanza is fully available in a high-resolution iPad version as well.

Adding Content

The web version offers a number of methods for getting e-books to read. It comes with links to four Feedbooks subcatalogs (Popular Public Domain, New Public Domain, Popular Originals, New Originals), the ability to add your own OPDS catalogs (if you’re adding a link to your Calibre Dropbox catalog, use the URL that ends in the “.XML” suffix, not the .HTML), and the ability to upload an EPUB file directly from your own computer into your library.

Once you’ve got a library set up, you can go in and browse it as usual, and add any titles you want to your Ibis library, one at a time. Once they’re in your Ibis library, you can read them with the web interface, or download them into the mobile apps.

Oddly, you can’t browse or import from your ODPS catalogs using the mobile apps; you’re limited to what you’ve imported into your library from the web—or else, somewhat pointlessly, to e-books for which you can type in the exact URL. (Who’s even going to know the exact URL of any given EPUB book, let alone be able to type it on an iPad?) However, you can still go in from Mobile Safari and import library titles that way, even on the small-screened iPod Touch, if you have a net connection.

It’s worth noting that the iPad and iPhone apps (and presumably Android app as well) do not have to be connected online to read e-books they’ve already downloaded. (They do require a 50-megabyte app framework download to your device the first time you run them to make this possible.) This makes me begin to suspect that, at least for future iterations of the iPad (especially the twice-as-fast iPad 2) and iPhone, an HTML5 web app could well be an answer for Amazon and other e-book vendors to Apple’s 30% in-app purchase tax after all. (Older iterations, like my 1st-gen Touch, will probably still have the same clunkiness issues with such an app as they do with Ibis—but almost nobody designs current apps for older hardware, alas.)

As far as I’m concerned, the mobile apps are pretty much a sideshow at this point. Stanza and iBooks work much better for EPUB reading on iPhone and iPad respectively. But the web version is something I haven’t seen anywhere else. It works well and does everything I need, and gives me a meaningful way to interact with my Calibre catalog on full-sized computers. That’s awesome.

I’ve been playing with Jolicloud as a dual-boot option on my laptop for the last couple of weeks and have found it to be worthy for doing most of the things I need to do, save gaming. It comes with the Ibis Reader built in and launchable from its desktop, and FBReader can of course be installed from the console as it can from any flavor of Linux.

The great things about Jolicloud are the zippy boot speed—I haven’t timed it, but I’m certain I go from off to a login prompt in well under thirty seconds on my laptop—and the simplicity. I think this could very well be the most user-friendly version of Linux yet. The desktop launcher user interface is a simple and familiar two rows of square icons—when I talked a friend into installing it on his own computer, his first question was, “Why is there an iPhone on my PC?” But at the same time, since console access is just an Alt + F1 keystroke away, it has all the power of any version of Linux available to power users at a moment’s notice.

The OS has a very simple method for installing new applications; you just go to the top of the page and type the name into the search box and choose to search Jolicloud, and there they are, or you can click one of the icons in the upper left and browse the catalog. Many of these are “web apps”—essentially, shortcuts that open a dedicated, interfaceless session of the Chromium browser on a given webpage such as Facebook, Meebo, Pandora, Twitter, Seesmic, etc. Others are normal Linux apps that launch in their own windows.

By and large, I like this system. There are some web apps, such as Gmail, that I prefer to keep running in a tab of Chromium, but there’s nothing stopping me from doing that. And others, like Meebo or Pandora, it makes sense to keep in their own, always-visible panes.

There are a couple of minor annoyances about it, however. If an app isn’t in Joli’s catalog, it must be installed from the console, with apt-get (or in some cases an independent binary package or even by compiling it oneself)—something that may be beyond many Linux newbies. And if it is installed that way, there is no way to add a shortcut for it to the desktop launcher—it must be launched from the “Accessories” section of Joli’s user menu, or a local applications subfolder in a subfolder on the launcher. (Or from a console or an Alt + F2 command prompt.)

Another minor problem is that some of the function keys are not intuitive. The Windows “start” button on the keyboard serves as hide/reveal all, and the “context menu” button to the right of the space bar (which brings up the right-click menu in Windows) is Joli’s equivalent of a “start” menu. Unlike with Windows, there is nothing to click on the screen to get either one of those functions; they must be accessed from the keyboard. I actually had to ask on the support forums to find out how to do it. (I’m not sure how tablets running Joli are supposed to access this menu.)

One of the features of Jolicloud is that it’s supposed to synchronize multiple computers or devices running the OS, so that your desktops look the same and you have the same apps installed on each one. You can even access the web apps on your desktop via the web (though they essentially come off as shortcuts that open in new tabs that way). I’ve only tried the OS on one device at a time so far, so I’m not entirely sure how well that works.

Like many modern Linux distros, Jolicloud can install itself into a directory within a Windows PC and boot that way, taking only a minimal hit to overall performance. This means that practically anybody could try it out on his PC simply by downloading a program and running it, at no more risk to his current Windows installation than any other program. It’s a great way to get your feet wet in Linux, and experience the additional speed and stability available to modern and antique hardware alike when you don’t have to deal with Windows cruft.

Some may wonder what the difference is between Jolicloud and another Chrome-based netbook OS, Google’s ChromeOS. Though I have not used ChromeOS myself, as I understand it Jolicloud is essentially a standard Linux distro with cloud capabilities added on, meaning that it is as useful off-line as Ubuntu or any other such Linux—but ChromeOS, on the other hand, is optimized for being connected to the Internet at all times, and is much less useful when no Internet access can be had.

Here’s something that I didn’t know that I found in the iBooks portion of the review:

Unfortunately, iBooks doesn’t scale very well as the size of your EPUB library increases. While iBooks is perfectly fine for a few dozen or perhaps a hundred or so books purchased from the iBooks Store or synced into iTunes, it is extremely unwieldy once you approach 300+ titles loaded into the database.

In casual testing we uploaded over 1000 full-length EPUB novels to iTunes which we synced to the iPad. We encountered a number of connectivity/timeout issues with the iBooks sync on Windows, plus we discovered that iBooks performs badly when browsing in “Bookshelf” mode when many titles have been loaded into the application.

We found that the less aesthetically-pleasing “list” mode actually works better for browsing a large content library, but as the iPad only has 256MB of RAM, caching that many titles into the database still causes the app to perform very slowly, so I wouldn’t recommend using iBooks for storing your entire personal library in EPUB format.

Readers can now select any of the on-board fonts (omitting some unsuitable decorative fonts for clarity).

Turning pages uses a more reliable method. It’s now much harder to accidentally switch pages by brushing the screen.

All visual effects now use CSS3. On iPhones and iPads these will appear to be much smoother than before.

Many menus are on the iPad are now drop-downs, providing a better overall view of the application.

Regarding fonts, they say: On the iPad, we’ve converted the font menu to a drop-down. We’ve also included full support for all the on-board “body” fonts. The iPhone font list includes the new fonts in iOS4; if you still have 3.x, you’ll see them as well but they’ll have no effect. Until iOS4 supports embedded fonts in a non-buggy way, we’re not able to support embedded fonts either, and at this time user customizations will always override book fonts that are supported on these platforms.

Full details, with screenshots, here.

Full information and download links here.

Smartwords is a lightweight, easy-to-use standard for retrieving and publishing real-time, contextually-aware information about words.

It took reading through the CNet article a couple of times to figure out that it might better be described as “an integrated dictionary on steroids.”

Existing e-book apps with dictionary support (such as eReader) are largely limited to clicking on a single word to get a definition. Wordnik wants to go further than that. With Smartwords, as CNet puts it:

Wordnik and its partners are aiming to bring deep levels of context to any kind of electronic text—be it in e-books on readers like the iPad, Kindle, or Nook, or on computers or mobile devices—by examining words and the words around them and linking readers to potentially vast amounts of information about them.

And that context is not just limited to the words around the one in question; Wordnik CEO Erin McKean suggests it might even go as far as checking out what other books you keep on your device so it knows to offer information only about words you probably haven’t seen before.

Smartwords will also incorporate elements of social networking, allowing readers to share snippets of text on Facebook, Twitter, and the like. (Though I wonder if I am being too cynical to foresee a bit of difficulty getting many e-book device and app makers to sign onto this, publishers being notoriously paranoid about copy-and-paste ability.)

It might also provide a useful source of demographic information for publishers—letting them know how long it takes readers to finish particular books, or where they stop reading. This might be of some concern to privacy advocates, but McKean says they have an advisory board—including the Internet Archive, well-known for being concerned about privacy itself—that will be keeping an eye on those aspects.

One thing’s for sure: this isn’t some “if I build it, maybe they might come” pipe dream. CNet’s listing of some of the backers of the Smartwords project reads like a veritable who’s-who of digital media: “The New York Times, Forbes, the Huffington Post, O’Reilly Media, Vook, Ibis, Scribd, and the Internet Archive.”

Smartwords has the potential to be quite useful. It will be interesting to see if anything comes of it.

(Incidentally, along the lines of Paul Biba’s capitalization pet peeve about the “nook”, the Smartwords website only capitalizes “smartwords” at the beginning of sentences. I wish companies would cut that out. CNet uses more traditional capitalization.)

We’re starting to share early betas of the Ibis Reader mobile UI for iPhones, Nexus Ones, and other Android devices with a limited group of testers. If you’re interested in joining the beta program and testing on other phones, tablets, and laptops, please email info@ibisreader.com. You may be asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement.

More info on our upcoming ereader is available in our announcement post.

The reader will support iPhone OS, Android and Palm webOS and will support Epub. It will use the Bookserver ecosystem from the Internet Archive.

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