News release follows, slightly edited. Those are two separate screenshots below, not a double-page arrangement. One wrinkle is the ability to pipe in books from your desktop via USB. Twitter reaction is here. So, gang, how do you think BookReader compares with the free Stanza? Worth the $3.99? – D.R.
Readdle today announces BookReader 1.0, a stylish e-book reader for iPhone and iPod touch. BookReader lets people read digital books from their collections like the paper ones.
It opens nonDRMed TXT, FB2, RTF, EPUB, HTML, and PDF e-books that could be copied from reader’s computer to the iPhone as well as searches and downloads books from Project Gutenberg.
BookReader has a number of handy functions like animated page flipping, night mode for reading in the dark, and more.
Odessa, Ukraine – Today Readdle announces the immediate availability of BookReader, a stylish e-book reader iPhone application, that lets people read digital books from their collections like the paper ones. BookReader opens TXT, FB2, RTF, EPUB, HTML, and PDF e-books without DRM protection that could be copied from reader’s computer to the iPhone over Wi-Fi, 3G and USB as well as searches and downloads books from Project Gutenberg.
BookReader has number of small handy functions like animated page flipping, night mode for reading in the dark, locking book orientation and adjustable text size. It also provides everything that people need to quickly navigate through the book: configurable bookmarks, full text search and fast scroll slider. It’s very natural to read e-books with BookReader.
"We’ve seen stylish and intuitive readers for the classics books, as well as for project Gutenberg collection. BookReader extends this realistic reading experience to your own e-book library. By the way, Project Gutenberg is also supported," – explains Alexander Tyagulsky, Readdle CMO.
BookReader is designed to work with non DRM protected e-books in TXT, FB2, RTF, HTML, EPUB and PDF formats. eReader, iSilo, MobiPocket, Kindle, Plucker e-books are not supported. Also, people who don’t have wireless connection between their Mac or PC and iPhone could transfer their e-book to BookReader using USB cable and ReaddleWire software available at Readdle’s web site.
Pricing and Availability:
BookReader 1.0 is available exclusively on the Apple App Store at $4.99 (USD).
The application is compatible with iPhone and iPod Touch running iPhone OS 3.0
and later.
Readdle: http://readdle.com
BookReader 1.0: http://readdle.com/products/bookreader
Purchase and Download:
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=332555536&mt=8
Screenshot: http://readdle.com/images3/screenshots/bookreader/full/1.jpg
App Icon: http://readdle.com/images2/appicons/bookreader_big-trans.png
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.