E-books, alas, are not among the most popular apps in the Android Market. Let’s hope that changes. Get ready for an Android invasion over the next year—-not just phones with that operating system, but also tablets and other devices. Android has attracted its share of gung-ho fans, with Windows Mobile under serious siege.
In the Android world, the top free e-book reader is apparently WordPlayer Art of War, from Andrew Sacher. Here’s what the Market listing says: “WordPlayer is a book reader that allows you to add to your library from amongst thousands of instantly downloadable books or load epub books. WordPlayer’s page navigation, highlighting, bookmarking, and customizable settings make reading a breeze. Comes with Sun Tzu’s classic book of strategy, Art of War, already installed.”
Oh, and get this—from the WordPlayer site: “Use our seamless integration with the Calibre ebook library management application to transfer many types of ebooks to your phone, including CBZ, CBR, CBC, EPUB, FB2, HTML, LIT, MOBI, ODT, PDF, many PRC, PDB, PML, RB, RTF, and TXT formats.” It would be great for everything to be ePub from the start, especially without DRM. But I like WordPlayer’s approach of leveraging on Calibre’s popularity.
Does Art of War live up to the ballyhoo? Anyone here used it? Or can you do so for fellow TeleRead community members and share your impressions?
Other apps of possible interest
Meanwhile here are other Andorid apps of possible interest, beyond two already-familiar ones, FBReader and the Aldiko reader (both of which also can display ePub, among other formats). Not owning an Android device—this could change!—I haven’t tested them.
—JETCET PDF, a demo app. “Download PDFs using the browser or view your PDF attachments in gmail.
—Documents to Go (demo and paid). “Allows you to use Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint & Adobe PDF files – all in one complete package. Easily create, view, edit, save & send attachments while our InTact Technology maintains 100% of the original file formatting. Supports Office 2007 & password-protected files.”
—Scan2PDF Mobile ($14.99 for paid version), shown to the right. Also available for Windows Mobile and coming for the iPhone. “a revolutionary new software release which uses your mobile phone to scan documents and convert them to PDF files.”
—Quickpedia., from NextMobile Web “Wikipedia formatted for your Android phone. With Quickpedia, you can do most of what you already do on Wikipedia: search, browse articles, featured pages, and current events. Plus, Quickpedia can find Wikipedia articles near your current GPS position!”
—Free Dictionary. “To Begin, just type! Words starting with what you are typing will appear automagically under the textbox. Also if you do not know the spelling just keep typing. Possible typographical error will appear as “Did you mean:”
—SpeedyMarks thesaurus. “Retrieve the synonym for every word. If available you will get antonyms, related terms, similar word and user suggestions too.”
Usual reminder/disclosure: I own a tiny tiny speck of Google (the real people behind Android) for retirement investment purposes, though you might not think that if you go by my warnings against Google and Amazon dominating too much of the e-book biz.
David,
I am expecting an Archos 5 Android any day now. I will try these out and let you know.
Ellen
Thanks, Ellen! David