The Best Four eBook Reading Apps for your iPhones
Some of the free must haves apps for your iPhone…
If you want to punish your eyes, read an eBook on any smartphone with less than a 4-inch display. The iPhone has 3.5 and unless you have eagle eyes, it can be a real strain to finish even a chapter of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings in one. Luckily there are excellent eBook reading apps in the market that more than make up for such smallish screens. Some of the best iPhone eBook apps are downloadable free of charge from their respective online stores. Here are a few apps to consider.
iBooks from Apple
Compatible with iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Requires iOS 3.2 or later
In general, you can’t go wrong with a native eBook reader designed specifically for the device. Originally designed as Apple’s first e-Book reading apps for its highly successful iPad tablet, the iBooks got tweaked for the iPhone and can be downloaded for free from its App Store. Quite polished for a first time iteration to say the least, it comes with an excellent typography that is highly readable and pixel free when used with the iPhone’s superb retina display. It has the ability to annotate the page with a neat page-turning animation. The app supports EPUB and PDF file formats so you can read downloaded PDF files in your iPhone. Purchasing eBooks from the App Store is a breeze since you can download your purchases directly into the reader.
The reader comes with a free eBook Winnie the Pool and has an in-application portal that accesses the thousands of eBook titles in its online bookstore. Just don’t expect it to be as rich a library as what you can find in Amazon’s Kindle store.
Wattpad eBook Reader
Compatible with iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Requires iOS 3.0 or later.
With its iPhone version released in 2009 and now enjoying more than a million free downloads per month, the Wattpad has become one of the most popular eBook readers. It is supported by its own library touted as the “YouTube” of eBooks where both amateur and professional writers can share content by uploading their published and unpublished works for readers to download, and there are tons of fiction short stories, fantasies, science fiction, romance, etc., that you won’t find in Kindle or Nook sites.
It is essentially the Freda eBook reader initially designed for Windows Mobile phones whose current version 2.1.2 for the iPhone improves the stability. Supporting DRM-free EPUB, HTML and TXT formats, the reader allows you to bookmark and annotate pages and remembers your most recently read eBooks. It has an in-app browser that allows you order and download apps with links to the Caibre, DropBox, Feedbooks, Smashwords and the Gutenberg library, on top of the Wattpad site.
Amazon Kindle iPhone App
Compatible with iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Requires iOS 3.0 or later.
The Amazon Kindle reader for iPhones has competitive features like adjusting font sizes though you’re limited to just five font types with a choice of black text on white, reversed and in sepia look which many consider kindest to your eyes. You can bookmark pages with the ability to open the title at the last page you left of. Its most outstanding feature really comes from having access to the Amazon’s library. You just need to open a free Amazon account which is easy to set up. After that, you get one of the lowest eBook prices and simply the widest selection of about 400,000 titles apart from the millions of free titles in the public domain. Just one caveat though, the purchasing process can still be improved since you need to toggle between reader and the iPhone’s web browser to download new eBooks. If Amazon can add an in-app purchasing feature, its iPhone reader can be considered the best.
The Kobo eBook reader
Compatible with iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Requires iOS 4.0 or later.
An anagram of the word “book”, the Kobo first released in 2010 was initially meant to compete with the Kindle but its free Kobo e-reader application had gained a significant following for use in the PC, Mac, Android and the iPhone. Its appeal lies in its ability to share excerpts and pages from your eBooks to your friends in Facebook and Twitter while getting recommendations from them as well. Supporting the EPUB and PDF format, you can read eBook content published in website, blogs and other online content from your Instapaper account where you get daily newspaper delivered to your Kobo library.
Its other standout features include annotations and a look-up facility for unfamiliar words with a choice of its own dictionary, the Wikipedia or Google using a one touch press. Text font and sizes can be customized to what is easy for your eyes and you get a page curl when turning pages just like the real thing.
Last Words
Any of these e-readers makes for a competent choice and if you’re content on reading eBooks on the iPhone, you’re lucky. Just don’t do it on the iPad or the Kindle. Because once you do, you won’t ever want to go back reading eBooks on the iPhone.
