Books on Iphone is a new web app offering over 20,000 books and articles to read in an iPhone optimized format. The site is free to use, and seems quite a good option as an ebook-reading alternative if you do not want to jailbreak your phone.
It seems to have a decent enough, though far from vast, selection of books – I quickly found a couple of Stephen King titles, several of the Harry Potter books, a Hemingway novel, Orwell’s Animal Farm, and some Hunter S. Thompson works.
I’ve been playing around with Books on iPhone for a fair while this afternoon, and liking it, finding it very usable over WiFi and Edge connections.
There are a couple of obvious drawbacks for now in Books for iPhone – one is that you cannot flick scroll through a book (as you can with the nativ
e Books application). This one was not a killer though – the app serves up around 250 characters to a ‘page’ and you simply tap anywhere on the text area to advance to the next page. The app responded very quickly in flipping pages even with an Edge connection.
The second place that things are a bit clumsy is with looking for books and titles to read. There are no topic sections to browse through to find what interests you – the only categories offered up are Recommended Readin g and Featured Authors. The second one may be an interesting way to discover writers you haven’t read before, but it would still be very nice to be able to browse by category as well. For now, the best option is just to use the Search feature and enter an author’s name or part of a title, whatever works best for you. This is an area that the site’s FAQ says they are aware they need to improve.
Although Books for iPhone does not have as many settings for you to adjust as the native ebook reader, it does have some which are quite usef
ul, such as adjusting the font size (between 8 to 14 point) and choose between around 9 fonts to use for the body text.
There are some quite handy features with this app as well. It lets you maintain a "ReadList’ of titles you are already reading or even just ones you want to earmark when browsing through your search results. You can also upload virtually any text from a desktop machine onto their site, and have it formatted for the iPhone and added to your reading list. You need to do a little formatting work if you want things to look better when you upload texts, but this is a nice way to be able to quickly throw up text from nearly any sort of document and have it accessible instantly via the Books on iPhone site.
You can also add personal notes to pages as you are reading – so this could be a good study aid I would imagine.
Here’s a tech document that I did nothing to – just literally selected all and pasted from a Word doc onto the Books on iPhone site. Not super pretty, but perfectly usable.
I’m quite impressed with Books on iPhone. This looks like a great option if you are on a stock phone, and really a handy one to bookmark even if you are jailbroken.
It’s got a cool little webclip icon and a place on my home screen.
Check it out at:
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