scribd app featuresScribd has been updating both its Android and iOS apps fairly regularly over the last few months, and some of the added features are quite nice.

They’ve added highlighting, bookmarking and the ability to make notes in a book.

I rarely make notes in a book, so I haven’t used that feature beyond testing that it works as expected. If however, you are a heavy notes user and like to read on multiple devices, you’ll be thrilled to learn that notes and highlighting sync across devices. Now that Scribd has added the “For Dummies” series to their service, I expect to be using both notes and highlights more often as there are several books I’ve been meaning to read.

The new feature I like the best is the ability to enlarge illustrations. It just happened that I was reading an illustration-heavy book right when the feature was introduced, and I loved it. On my Nook HD, those pictures were tiny. Enlarging them was welcome. Fair warning. The images were somewhat pixelated, which I suspect was more a function of the resolution in the original book file than a failing in the Scribd app.

Enlarging an image is easy. Tap on the image to make it bigger. Tap on it again to put it back to full size.

The Scribd app has come a long way from when I wrote my first article about it and said it was far from a full-featured reading app.

What features do they still need? Well, top of my wish list is a way to adjust spacing between lines. In my opinion, books in both versions of the app have too much white space. I’d like to compress the spacing. Two-column mode in landscape is another must-have for me. If they really want to go all-out, page turn zones like on the Kindle Paperwhite would be awesome. I love how easy it is to read left-handed on my Kindle. If Scribd added the feature to their apps, it would definitely set them apart from most other reading apps.

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