The Mac Observer has a 20120322bluefire1review by John Martellaro.  He really likes the free product:

If you’re only interested in Apple’s iBooks and Amazon’s Kindle reader for the iPad, you can do a lot. But if you want an alternative e-book reader from a third party and want to focus on books in EPUB or PDF format, generally without DRM, the Bluefire reader is an excellent alternative.

Some people like to collect Twitter clients. Some have lots of different writing tools. Sometimes people just feel better when they have a choice. Moreover, sometimes there are subtle differences between feature sets, and customers like to explore those. Finally, when an product is especially attractive or done with such great style and enthusiasm, and has a beautiful GUI, it’s hard to pass up when it’s free, being supported and constantly improve.

The Bluefire e-book reader for the iPad is like that. It’s so nicely done that you can’t help but want to explore it. But before I get into details, I should mention why it’s free. Here’s some background from the developer.

I completely understand your concern about our motivation, so let me clear things up. Bluefire Productions has been in business for over nine years. We started out doing interactive media production for companies like Sony, Microsoft, and Adobe. In fact, we worked with Adobe on some of their early e-book platform development. That partnership led to our development of Bluefire Reader. While we are deeply committed to the ongoing support and development of our free readers (for iOS and Android), we make our money through our white-label development work. We power reading apps for Books-A-Million, Hastings, the American Booksellers Association, Kaplan, and many other retailers. We do not collect any personal information from our users.

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