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BookZ Text Reader: iPhone app optimized for PG-style sites, with integrated browsing to simplify shopping and DLing
July 10, 2008 | 12:45 pm
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By David Rothman
The quest goes on to make public domain books as easy to downlaod as the Kindle variety. Uncovered by Mike Cane in his Apple-ology studies of the iPhone App Store:
"BookZ Text Reader makes reading as easy as it can ever be. You can surf Project Gutenberg website (and any other site), download a book and start reading—all inside BookZ! What’s more, you can set bookmarks, fonts, images background, margins with ease…"
BookZ is said to work great with plain old text, just as the name of the app would suggest. Anyone care to test this one from Steve’s Studio? Price is $2 or so.
Update on Mobipocket issue: So far Mike believes that Mobi yet to come for the iPhone. But as we know, it is coming.
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Comments:
If this supported ePub, it’d be just was I was looking for.
I have downloaded three ebook readers from the App Store and BookZ is the winner so far. It is very slick how you can navigate to any website (Gutenberg being the obvious choice) and download any plain text file to get it into BookZ–all directly within the app.
This will not, however, get you the latest bestsellers. It was a surprise to see that the folks at eReader had developed a rudimentary reader for launch day. I had been keeping tabs on this and from what they had said publicly it sounded like it might be months before they would release software. The app is serviceable, but bare-bones. Very little font choice (only 2 faces! yikes!) and many many configuration settings you would like to have are missing. It feels like a rushed job, but it’s free and I think it will get better in a hurry.
If, like me, you purchased a large library of ebooks on another platform (Treo in my case) and you have been strangers with those books for the last year, it is refreshing to have immediate access to your online bookshelf through this app. Frankly it feels very right to have my small library waiting for me off in the cloud, and it has gotten me excited about ebooks again.
I would stay away from the Bookshelf application for now. Higher price than BookZ, very awkward mechanism for getting books into the app, and some of the configuration options don’t seem to work at all.
Mighty nice to see the competition, though. For those of us that like ebooks this can only be a great thing.