Now, I've been an avid book reader for as long as I can remember. I still remember the old Jack and the Beanstalk and Time Life Children's books I read when I was 3 years old. The funky watercolor paintings that served as pictures in Jack and the Beanstalk never really looked good, I mean they looked like a child did them, but hey I was a kid at the time so it's 4Kids By Kids right?
Well anyhow, skip a decade or so later and here I am, all grown up, but still reading books! The only thing is, I don't read books on paper as much anymore. Why is that? Because I've been living it up with all the gadgets I got in the last decade! That includes an iPad, an iPhone, an iPad Mini and a Galaxy Note. Now, I got rid of the iPhone when I realized it was just way too small for my tastes. I mean, get a clue Apple, Samsung's just passed you in smartphone sales and their best models are have all 4" to 5" screens!
But I digress. I live a very busy lifestyle. So it's only natural that I digress. But what was the point? Oh yes, the point. Well I am out of the house a lot, and I typically leave my iPad at home. I use it at home because it's more comfy to use at home due to the larger size. But it's too big to have with you all the time, even the appropriately miniaturized iPad Mini. But unlike these oversized iPads, the Note is with me all the time. It's my phone and subs for the iPad's functions whenever I'm not at home.
Now that's all well and good, but can we get to the point? Oh yes, well here's the thing: Apple's made bricks and buildings and flying rainbows about how its App Store ecosystem is way ahead of Google's Play Store. And in many ways, they are correct. While Google has made major leaps and bounds in the quality and depth of its Play Store, there are still a lot of apps that have no real counterpart on Android, or are just plain better, sometimes embarrassingly so, on iOS compared to Android.
One example is eReaders. Now, yes, we are getting to the point, right? Well here's the deal: in my estimate, the best eReaders in the world are iBooks and the Kindle Reader. Stanza used to be in the running, but it's been so horrible lately that I don't even bother with it anymore. iBooks has turned out to be a very, very good reader and has all the nice stuff going for it, it's fast, snappy, has nice animations/eye candy, you can underline and annotate, and all that stuff. The Kindle Reader is good, it's snappy and it has that whole Amazon ecosystem behind it, and most importantly, it has the one thing that iBooks doesn't have: proper syncing in between all your devices. Because the Kindle Reader is everywhere! Amazon's strong marketing and distribution clout we cannot fault.
But the Kindle Reader, aside from not having the bells and whistles the iBook reader has, has one major flaw: it only reads books from the Amazon Store! So what if, say, you have "acquired" books from elsewhere (like say a third party bookstore) or -- oh what the hell let's let it out of the hat, I got books from TUEBL and I'm god damn frikkin proud of it, so there -- and you want to read these books, but can't on Amazon's Kindle reader. So you read it on iBooks, right?
Well that's well and dandy, but like I said, I'm not home like 60% of the time! So I need to read it on the go with my Galaxy Note! "Well, my Padawan," you begin to tell me in a haughty, odious tone, "you have Aldiko and FBReader and all the wonderful readers on the Play Sto..."
STOP! STOP!
Yes. And one last STOP for good measure. I know. Yes. I've tried these readers out and they are ok. But like I said, some apps (actually, most apps) are just plain better on iOS, almost embarassingly so, and eReaders are no exception. All these Android readers are just downright embarassingly bad compared to their iOS brethren. Especially iBooks. So no. Just, no. And even if they were any good, that doesn't solve the lack of the key feature the Kindle Reader has: WhisperSync to seamlessly sync my bookmarks between my Note and my iPad.
So what's a joe to do? Yes, that's what's wrong with reading on eReaders: there's no universal reader that syncs everything and does everything you would ask of it!
Or isn't there? Now I did some further digging and I found one reader that just might solve the problem. It's called Kobo.
Now the Kobo reader is pretty cool! It's like the Kitchen Sink of eReaders. It literally has everything. It's got that awesome page-turning eye candy that I first saw on Stanza. It's got a classy bookshelf that is customizable with different themes such as marble, wood or even lilac. It's got Facebook status updates and integration. It has bookmarks and syncing between devices. Heck, it even syncs annotations, reader comments and other profanities from other like-minded readers like yourself who have nothing better to do than to read books and bitch about them. And to nail the coffin they even included a reader stats tracker that tells you how fast (or how slow) you read a book! And all that jazz.
Really, it looks perfect right? And you can even import books from your dropbox account so adding new books is as easy as it gets, you don't even need a computer to do it.
So what's the catch?
Unfortunately, there's one big, big catch. The thing runs like a pig smeared in tar trying to pass through the eye of a needle. Ugh. It's that bad. When I was reading Ken Auletta's "Googled" on the damn thing (a book which I do own the paperback of, viola! Clean reading here, no pirates here, sir!) the page turning was okay but felt slow, sluggish, unaggressive. Worse, every ten pages or so a pink "Loading..." message would pop up on the upper right and keep me from actually, you know, doing some reading.
It's such a shame, the folks at Kobo had the right ideas, they had the best intentions, and they gave me perhaps the one single reader to rule them all. Sadly, they need to put it on a diet and make it run a few 100m dashes before anyone can even hope to comfortably use it.
I would like to give my hats off to Kobo, but darn What is Wrong With Them?! Test the damn reader and have some user acceptance first before you give it to us!
Alas, Feature Creep and Shoddy Programming seem to have won the day.
Well anyhow, skip a decade or so later and here I am, all grown up, but still reading books! The only thing is, I don't read books on paper as much anymore. Why is that? Because I've been living it up with all the gadgets I got in the last decade! That includes an iPad, an iPhone, an iPad Mini and a Galaxy Note. Now, I got rid of the iPhone when I realized it was just way too small for my tastes. I mean, get a clue Apple, Samsung's just passed you in smartphone sales and their best models are have all 4" to 5" screens!
But I digress. I live a very busy lifestyle. So it's only natural that I digress. But what was the point? Oh yes, the point. Well I am out of the house a lot, and I typically leave my iPad at home. I use it at home because it's more comfy to use at home due to the larger size. But it's too big to have with you all the time, even the appropriately miniaturized iPad Mini. But unlike these oversized iPads, the Note is with me all the time. It's my phone and subs for the iPad's functions whenever I'm not at home.
Now that's all well and good, but can we get to the point? Oh yes, well here's the thing: Apple's made bricks and buildings and flying rainbows about how its App Store ecosystem is way ahead of Google's Play Store. And in many ways, they are correct. While Google has made major leaps and bounds in the quality and depth of its Play Store, there are still a lot of apps that have no real counterpart on Android, or are just plain better, sometimes embarrassingly so, on iOS compared to Android.
One example is eReaders. Now, yes, we are getting to the point, right? Well here's the deal: in my estimate, the best eReaders in the world are iBooks and the Kindle Reader. Stanza used to be in the running, but it's been so horrible lately that I don't even bother with it anymore. iBooks has turned out to be a very, very good reader and has all the nice stuff going for it, it's fast, snappy, has nice animations/eye candy, you can underline and annotate, and all that stuff. The Kindle Reader is good, it's snappy and it has that whole Amazon ecosystem behind it, and most importantly, it has the one thing that iBooks doesn't have: proper syncing in between all your devices. Because the Kindle Reader is everywhere! Amazon's strong marketing and distribution clout we cannot fault.
But the Kindle Reader, aside from not having the bells and whistles the iBook reader has, has one major flaw: it only reads books from the Amazon Store! So what if, say, you have "acquired" books from elsewhere (like say a third party bookstore) or -- oh what the hell let's let it out of the hat, I got books from TUEBL and I'm god damn frikkin proud of it, so there -- and you want to read these books, but can't on Amazon's Kindle reader. So you read it on iBooks, right?
Well that's well and dandy, but like I said, I'm not home like 60% of the time! So I need to read it on the go with my Galaxy Note! "Well, my Padawan," you begin to tell me in a haughty, odious tone, "you have Aldiko and FBReader and all the wonderful readers on the Play Sto..."
STOP! STOP!
Yes. And one last STOP for good measure. I know. Yes. I've tried these readers out and they are ok. But like I said, some apps (actually, most apps) are just plain better on iOS, almost embarassingly so, and eReaders are no exception. All these Android readers are just downright embarassingly bad compared to their iOS brethren. Especially iBooks. So no. Just, no. And even if they were any good, that doesn't solve the lack of the key feature the Kindle Reader has: WhisperSync to seamlessly sync my bookmarks between my Note and my iPad.
So what's a joe to do? Yes, that's what's wrong with reading on eReaders: there's no universal reader that syncs everything and does everything you would ask of it!
Or isn't there? Now I did some further digging and I found one reader that just might solve the problem. It's called Kobo.
Now the Kobo reader is pretty cool! It's like the Kitchen Sink of eReaders. It literally has everything. It's got that awesome page-turning eye candy that I first saw on Stanza. It's got a classy bookshelf that is customizable with different themes such as marble, wood or even lilac. It's got Facebook status updates and integration. It has bookmarks and syncing between devices. Heck, it even syncs annotations, reader comments and other profanities from other like-minded readers like yourself who have nothing better to do than to read books and bitch about them. And to nail the coffin they even included a reader stats tracker that tells you how fast (or how slow) you read a book! And all that jazz.
Really, it looks perfect right? And you can even import books from your dropbox account so adding new books is as easy as it gets, you don't even need a computer to do it.
So what's the catch?
Unfortunately, there's one big, big catch. The thing runs like a pig smeared in tar trying to pass through the eye of a needle. Ugh. It's that bad. When I was reading Ken Auletta's "Googled" on the damn thing (a book which I do own the paperback of, viola! Clean reading here, no pirates here, sir!) the page turning was okay but felt slow, sluggish, unaggressive. Worse, every ten pages or so a pink "Loading..." message would pop up on the upper right and keep me from actually, you know, doing some reading.
It's such a shame, the folks at Kobo had the right ideas, they had the best intentions, and they gave me perhaps the one single reader to rule them all. Sadly, they need to put it on a diet and make it run a few 100m dashes before anyone can even hope to comfortably use it.
I would like to give my hats off to Kobo, but darn What is Wrong With Them?! Test the damn reader and have some user acceptance first before you give it to us!
Alas, Feature Creep and Shoddy Programming seem to have won the day.
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