Dave Law and I both plunked down $3.99 to try out Readdle’s BookReader 1.0 for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Just how would BookReader compare with free rivals such as Stanza?
Well, for now, the others haven’t much to worry about. Both Dave and I were disappointed, for example, by the limited font choices available—an embarrassing flaw in a reader touted as “elegant.” Stanza actually is much better in the font area. But look, this is Version 1.0 of BookReader. Maybe Readdle will do better with the next incarnation, while allowing us pioneers to update at no charge.
Thanks to Dave for writing, in effect, a mini-review via his TeleRead comments. Here it is for the benefit of those reading us on RSS and via email:
Broke down and purchased this one but I have to say this isn’t any better than what is out there. I will stick with the Stanza and Eucalyptus.
On the plus side it does support a variety of formats and has a striking appearance. The book shelf is an interesting design but I still like to see the covers as I do with Stanza. I also like including the title and page number on every page, such as Eucalyptus does. The page flipping is very similar to Stanza, though I sort of like Eucalyptus better.
On the con side, it is limited to 2 fonts (Antique and Grotesque) and 3 font sizes (small, medium and large), which is pretty much it for settings. Also, it converts a PDF to text, so you lose a lot of formatting and it doesn’t remove headers or footers, such as Calibre can do for you. This makes reading difficult with “garbage” text every so often. Though, it seems to handle ePub, txt and RTF fine. The other big minus is that there are no page breaks between chapters so all the text just flows together and though it can grab books from Gutenberg, such as Eucalyptus, it doesn’t do any of the extra formatting that Eucalyptus does. Eucalyptus still gives the most book looking appearance of any eBook apps.
It will be interesting to see if future versions can make up for the current issues but for now the free apps (Stanza, eReader, etc) are much better that I wouldn’t waste my money on this one.
