iPad Apps for Readers

Apple's own eBook app is a favorite of many. The reading experience is simply great including beautiful page turns, brightness controls, font options, text size options, in book searching, in app dictionary, Google search, and Wikipedia search. The iBook store itself is great although limited in selection. If you happen to have non DRMed ePub books you can load those into the app through iTunes and in the near future PDFs.

Amazon has been in the eBook business for some time, the one major benefit from this is a larger selection of books to buy. To purchase books the app directs you to Safari to purchase books on Amazon.com. The reading experience is similar to that of the iBooks app including the beautiful page turns.

Barnes and Noble is new to the game with their Nook product which shipped in early 2010. Barnes and Nobles has managed to get a pretty good selection into their store and this app is yet another way to ready your B&N content. This app offers some great options on how to display your book, but where it fails is in the page turns it offers a very computer styled sliding of pages over instead of the beautiful animations of the iBooks or Kindle app.

Borders has partnered with Kobo for both eBook software and hardware. This app is empowered by the Kobo app also found in the AppStore. The killer feature of this app is the ability to purchase content within the app itself. The reading experience is similar to the Barnes and Noble app. A great app that has access to yet another store.

For those that want less mainstream content Stanza is great within the app you can browse books from BooksOnBoard, Fictionwise, O'Reilly, All Romance, and SmashWords. When you decide you wish to purchase one of the books you are taken to Safari for purchase. A great interface that I wish BN and Amazon would adapt as far as purchasing content. The reading experience is similar to that found in the B&N eReader app.

Free content is available online to those that look for it. WattPad offers over 160,000 titles at no charge. The content is uploaded by its users, which may include copyrighted works. If an author finds misuse of their content they can report it and have it removed easily. It is an app that should be on your iPad as simply another option for getting content.