Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in June of 2010. It has been updated as of July 2011 with current content.
Apple’s iPad has arguably become the ultimate eBook reading platform, with several reader apps and stores that are now supported on the device. Here’s the lowdown so you can make the best choices in which eBook app software to use on your iPad.
Since the iPad’s introduction in early 2010, it has quickly become one of the most popular platforms for reading eBooks, simply due to the variety of content providers which have written applications for the device.
However, the average iPad user may not be aware of features or limitations in the various eReader apps available on the App Store, so I’m going to try to boil this down so that you can make the appropriate choices which best fit your reading lifestyle.
Also Read:
- Apple iPad Showdown: Battle of the e-Reader Apps (Gallery)
- iPad vs. Kindle, which is the better e-Reader?
Since this article was originally published in June of 2010, Apple has made some significant changes on its App Store as to how eReader applications can distribute content.
As a result of these changes, many of the applications listed in this article are no longer capable of buying content directly from the application, and can only act in a “Receiver” mode where content is purchased outside the application (such as by using the iPad’s built-in Safari browser or browsing using your personal computer) and then synchronized to the eReader program.
For more information on these content distribution changes, please read the following related posts:
Also read:
- June 30: Judgment Day for Amazon’s Kindle on Apple’s App Store
- Amazon, Others Cave to Apple on In-App Purchases Today, HTML5 Tomorrow
- The Truth About Apple and the eReader Changes: Customers Lose
iBooks
By virtue of being Apple’s preferred book-reading platform, iBooks has quickly become one of the most popular e-book reading applications for iOS. As of version 4 of iOS, iBooks runs native on the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch, giving it some of the largest consumer reach of any e-book reading platform available.
While there is no doubting iBooks’ success in terms of its widespread use, compared to all of all the other reader applications we’ve looked at, it is actually one of the least functional.
Apple designed iBooks to behave and act like a real book, and focused more on the aesthetics and UI than actual App functionality.
One of the main benefits of iBooks is that unlike the two other major e-Book reading applications, Kindle for iPad and Barnes & Noble e-Reader, iBooks supports syncing of DRM-free EPUB and PDF content directly to the iPad thru iTunes.
This is an excellent feature, but essentially locks the user down to using iTunes as the primary data transfer mechanism and thus requires a host PC or Macintosh in order to maintain the library.
Additionally, EPUB and PDF content synced into iBooks’ library is not accessible by other e-Reader applications. Generally speaking, every e-Reader app for iPad maintains its own separate database, and are not compatible with each other.
Unfortunately, iBooks doesn’t scale very well as the size of your EPUB library increases. While iBooks is perfectly fine for a few dozen or perhaps a hundred or so books purchased from the iBooks Store or synced into iTunes, it is extremely unwieldy once you approach 300+ titles loaded into the database.
In casual testing we uploaded over 1000 full-length EPUB novels to iTunes which we synced to the iPad. We encountered a number of connectivity/timeout issues with the iBooks sync on Windows, plus we discovered that iBooks performs badly when browsing in “Bookshelf” mode when many titles have been loaded into the application.
We found that the less aesthetically-pleasing “list” mode actually works better for browsing a large content library, but as the first-generation iPad only has 256MB of RAM, caching that many titles into the database still causes the app to perform very slowly, so I wouldn’t recommend using iBooks for storing your entire personal library in EPUB format.
The iPad 2 is faster, has 512MB of RAM, and Apple has made a number of performance improvements to iBooks since this article was first written, but I’d still say that the iBooks software isn’t as sprightly as the others on this list.
The aesthetic focus of iBooks is also in my opinion one of its most serious weaknesses. Much time has been spent by Apple’s developers on how the app looks in terms of eye-candy and very little time was spent on how well the application works for actual text reading.
One glaring omission is the lack of color themes, especially a white-on-black inverted text motif. To read text inverted on iBooks, you actually have to go into the iPad Settings applet for Accessibility and choose “White on Black”, which changes the color scheme of the entire device globally.
In June of 2010, Apple added a sepia tone color theme, the ability to full justify text and added support for Baskerville, Cochin, Georgia, Palatino, Times New Roman and Verdana fonts.
Additionally, there is no way to set iBooks to maximize the most use of screen real estate and adjust margins, or to remove the pagination graphic which uses up about a half a centimeter wide of screen space on the right hand side and about a quarter of a centimeter on the top and bottom of the reading area.
It doesn’t sound like a lot of wasted space, but when you compare it to the other reader apps we looked it plus the lack of the ability to adjust the margins and have a simple “plain paper” look when reading, it is.
By far iBooks’ best asset is the iBooks Store, which has a familiar interface similar to the App Store. It’s very easy to search for content and you can get free reading samples for just about every book in the store before you decide to purchase.
Because it is Apple’s official eBook reading application, it is also now the only one which offers an integrated bookstore and in-app purchases.
