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By David Rothman

shortcovers The best e-reader for the Apple iPhone is still Stanza, just gobbled up by Amazon—but the Shortcovers e-reader is catching up.

In two months, more than 100,000 people have downloaded Shortcovers via the iPhone App Store. That’s just a speck of the number of Stanza downloaders; what’s more, the Kindle for the iPhone App is the hit of the moment. But the potential in Shortcovers is there.

A new Shortcovers upgrade lets you easily change pages by tapping on them or using a swiping motion, similar to the one for the Kindle iPhone app. Plus, you can switch the color scheme. And, yes, although the screen shot does not show this, you can arrange to see only the book you’re reading. I’m hoping that Shortcovers in time will offer the range of fonts that Stanza does, especially some nice bolded typefaces to improve viewability. I’d be surprised if Shortcovers did.

Blended in with store

Significantly, Shortcovers is blended in with the store of the people behind it—Indigo Books & Music. The minus is you can’t put in your own books, as far as I know. But maybe Indigo will be smart enough to allow this, which would be one way to distinguish Shortcovers from the closed Kindle App.

From what I understand, the Shortcovers reader can read the ePub standard, itself a powerful reason to root for the App.

Meanwhile, a Shortcovers news release notes:

  • “Reading personalization and enhanced paging, providing a more book-like reading experience
  • Enhanced browsing and discovery, including best sellers, award winners and other notable sources
  • Integrated purchasing for Blackberry and Android
  • Support for Android and new mobile devices to be announced .”

As for the popularity of the app:

  • “Users in 160 countries. Top global regions include the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, India and China
  • More than 100,000 people have tried Shortcovers, and 10,000 registered with the service
  • The average purchase is just under $10 USD
  • The most popular purchases include the Twilight series and Outliers
  • Authors have contributed thousands of books, chapters, short stories and other works directly through Shortcovers.com.”
 
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