Loading ...Newly in beta, booksoniphone (http://booksoniphone.com/) is aiming to sate some of the hunger for using an iPhone as a personal ebook reader. With over 20,000 titles to choose from, all of them free, and a made-for-iPhone interface, this could be the ideal way to spend your commute (assuming you don’t drive to work). We took a look to see if it can really best your local library.
First off, if you’ve not got an iPhone then you’re out of luck: the booksoniphone site refuses to load on desktop machines. Start it up on your iPhone, however, and you’ve got easy access to title search, recommendations and your own personal Readlist of saved titles.
Since it runs in Safari you can choose whether to read the text in portrait or landscape orientation; either way, unlike some ebook hacks the page formatting will reflow nicely to fit the screen. The MultiTouch navigation gestures make moving through pages straightforward and natural.
In terms of speed, we found that while page loads over WiFi were quick and problem-free, EDGE proved a little slow. Not enough to particularly sour the experience, however, and the addition of handy features such as email links to forward titles are a distracting addition.
Obviously, the crux of any site such as booksoniphone is the quantity and quality of material they offer. With more than 20,000 titles there’s obviously plenty to choose from, but a large amount are classics rather than modern fiction since they’re titles that have slipped through the copyright net. If you’re a publisher, or you have a text of your own you’d like to offer, they’re apparently happy to receive suggestions. If you just want to read then you’ll need to look through and see if anything takes your fancy.
Overall, despite some speed issues when using EDGE, we like booksoniphone. It really takes advantage of that beautiful iPhone screen, and navigation has obviously been given no small amount of thought with big, finger-friendly buttons and a sleek layout. We’d score it 3.5 out of 5.
August 7th, 2007 at 5:07 am
booksoniphone also offers upload of your own text via web site utility. in other words, if you stumble upon a novel or article on web that you want to read and want to prepare it for iPhone reading then simply upload it to booksoniphone.com and it’ll be added to your readlist.
August 7th, 2007 at 8:56 am
I love it, found it about 2 weeks ago.
In my daily 2 hour commute, I finished Faust and just begun Paradise Lost. I select what music I want to background, add it to a playlist and away I go.