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By Paul Biba

header_2.jpgHere are some excerpts from Martin Taylor’s review of the service:

I checked Shortcovers out using its iPhone/iPod Touch reader app which works pretty well. Part of the Shortcovers proposition is its emphasis on lots of short content – under 5000 words – that you can easily read on your mobile phone. Most prominent among this is a great selection of first chapters that you can read for free so even if you don’t buy anything online it’s likely to be a worthwhile resource just for browsers.

You’ll need to be online to access them. These chapters are not downloadable as far as I can tell. A nice feature is that Smartcovers, like the online ebook reader Bookworm, keeps track of your place in the book even when you access it from a different device. You can start reading on your phone and pick up later from your PC’s web browser with Smartcovers remembering where you were in your book. …

The reading experience on the iPhone was OK but it wasn’t a match for Stanza or eReader. The main annoyance was its requirement to scroll down as you read, eventually getting to the bottom of the “page” when you’d flip to the next page. With Stanza and eReader, you don’t scroll, you just tap the right edge of the screen to move forward or left to go back. I’m not sure why Smartcovers has done this unless it’s too keep the concept of a “page” in sync with the printed edition or to accommodate larger screens that might show all the text on one screen. Certainly it’s not very smartphone-friendly.

 
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