Shaun Green takes a look at the options for bibliophiles looking to go digital...
Ebooks are big business today. That said, they're a far cry from the digital 'success' stories such as music or streaming video services (the whole financial situation within both markets is the topic for another article, mind you). Ebooks took a long time to get any traction in the market, as did the ereaders that we were supposed to use to read them. Indeed, it was the smartphone and tablet booms that really saw digital books come into their own.
Even that growth period has now largely levelled off, leaving ebooks representing around 25% of total book sales. As with so many new technologies, it turns out that the new won't replace the old so much as find a natural balance with it.
Yet the success of ebooks is still such that a lot of competing apps and storefronts - even sales models -have appeared, as companies attempt to capitalise upon it. To British readers this could seem like a return to the days before Waterstones and Smiths were the only booksellers on the high street - when Borders, Ottakers and numerous independent shops could still be found around the country. Of course, increased choice means decisions must be made about where to shop - and where to read.
Kindle
Amazon's Kindle needs little introduction; Amazon virtually invented the online bookstore, played a key role in popularising ebooks, and sold one of the first successful ereaders. No other brand name in this sector (and few anywhere) is as widely recognised as Kindle, and Amazon are a dominating force in online retail. The Amazon ebook catalogue is, frankly, enormous, and whilst specific numbers are difficult to come by (it will only go as far as to say "millions" of books are available), it's undeniably... big.
The Kindle app offers all the features you'd expect as a reader, including all-important and extensive customisation around presentation, including text size, font selection, and margin and line spacing settings. You can also search within your books, highlight passages and leave notes, and the app by default uses cloud synchronisation - which includes recording your position in various books between multiple devices. Much of this is basic ereader functionality, but when it comes to reading it's important to start with the basics!
Page transitions are quick and sharp, with the app proving responsive throughout (though this will, of course, differ from device to device). One of the Kindle app's more unique features is its progress meter, which appears along the bottom of the screen. This informs you of your percentage progress through the current chapter alongside an estimated time remaining for the same (calculated based on your own reading speed). Although some might find this a distraction, it's also quite a useful feature for reading on the go. Commuters, for example, might appreciate the knowledge that they can reach the end of their current chapter before their stop. In truth, if you don't want to use it, it doesn't take long to stop noticing it is even there.
The Kindle storefront, accessible through the app, is surprisingly workmanlike, but - like Amazon's regular website - is beginning to feel rather dated. User experience considerations aside, though, it's speedy, the search function works well, and the app's home screen makes good use of Amazon's recommendation algorithms. Happily, it manages the latter without obnoxiously pushing its attempts to sell right into your face.
Drawbacks to the Kindle app are its limited support of file formats, with only .mobi, .pdf and .txt supported, placing limitations on the importing of non-Kindle ebooks. It's also important to note that Amazon restricts its ebooks using proprietary DRM, so reading them using other apps or devices can be a challenge (this is true of most of the big booksellers, although some use app-transferable Adobe DRM). There's also an ethical dimension to consider, with Amazon having taken a lot of criticism in recent times over its corporate behaviour, working practices and more.
Kobo
The Kobo brand has a multinational history. Originally a Canadian business that branched out from a bookstore chain, Kobo was later acquired by the Japanese conglomerate Rakuten (the very same who bought and changed the direction of play.com). Nowadays Kobo run an online bookstore and distribute ereader devices via partners in different countries around the world. Here in Britain, they work with WH Smith - a name with some serious history.
The Kobo catalogue is surprisingly diverse, and on a few occasions I've found books listed on it that I struggled to find elsewhere - books from small British imprints, for example. This, presumably, is an advantage to Kobo's alliances with 'local' retail companies. They claim to offer over four million books in total.
The Kobo app is a mixed bag, with plenty to like and a little to dislike about it. Let's start with the good: it's quick to run and load books, whilst page transitions are similarly snappy; it offers a decent mix of text customisation features - although you can't adjust margins or line spacing; it has solid note-taking and annotation features and allows you to share public notes - great for book clubs and academics alike.
A little more contentious is the app's use of social components. Users can sync Kobo accounts with Facebook to share and see others' reading activity. There is also a 'Reading Life' screen that presents various statistics on total pages read, total read time, and averages derived from the books you've read. Frivolous, perhaps, and easily ignored, but for those who do like to be social around their reading - GoodReads.com users, say - a big plus.
The Home page won't be to everyone's taste, though. It's a two column mish-mash of various blocks including recent reads and store promotions. When reading there are no page transition animations - opinions vary on how important those are - and, we're sad to say, we've experienced some app instability (although relaunches are quick). Kobo supports .epub, .html, .rtf and .txt, although it excludes .pdfs, .mobi and various other formats.
Nook
Like Kobo, Nook comes to us from North America - though this time it's the US of A rather than Canada. It's the brainchild of Barnes & Noble, the largest retail booksellers in America. Also like Kobo, Barnes & Noble's Nook has retail partners in the form of Sainsburys, Argos, John Lewis and ASDA. These are evidently not bookshop chains, but fortunately Nook has also partnered with academic bookshop Blackwell's and the London chain Foyles. The Nook UK store claims to offer over 2.5 million titles. This isn't bad for a UK operation that many suspected was to be wound up back in 2013, after the prices of Nook ereaders were substantially slashed.
Despite a well-stocked catalogue, the Nook app is a mixed bag. It's powered by Adobe technology and can, in places, prove a little sluggish. There is plenty to like about it, though, from minor touches like the page-turn animations (which, like Google's offering, allow you to 'peel' each page across the screen should you so wish) to more significant decisions like the way the home screen focuses entirely on your library of books (i.e, it does not upfront push sales, specials or recommendations upon you).
Customisation options are fairly rudimentary (font size, type and brightness) and a standard set of annotation options are present, alongside the expected search functionality. One rather nice touch is the way the contents screen for a book also lists all of the notes you've saved - something it has in common with the Kobo app.
Browsing the Nook store via the app is not a great experience; exploring books by genre or category can be tricky, as the pre-defined filters are largely about new releases or special offers. If you'd like to browse, say, crime thrillers or science fiction, you're better off using the website -which isn't ideal. Even where you can find a suitable category, sub-filtering or ordering options are noticeable by their absence. Searching, at least, works well.
Despite the limitations with in-app shopping and the limited features of the app itself, the Nook app does make for a pleasant, unadorned reading experience, and sometimes this is all you need. Although 2.5 million books is well below what Google and Kobo offer, it is still an impressive number. A shame, then, that at present it only supports .epub - although Barnes & Noble claims to be evaluating adding more support.
Play Books
As with so many Google services, its efforts to maintain consistent branding come out awkwardly. How, exactly, does one 'play' a book? Still, at least it's better than 'Google Play Music All Access', its tongue-twister of a Spotify competitor.
Fortunately, whilst Google's universal branding may not be up to much, its software engineering and user experience is top-notch. Ebook pages are clean and allow you to focus entirely on the text, whilst animated page transitions simulate actual pages turning - cosmetic frippery, perhaps, but one that goes so far as to allow readers to simulate playing with the corner of a page whilst they're still reading it. That's dedication to bibliophiles!
Colour schemes, text sizes, fonts, alignments and line spacing are available to customise, and the 'timeline' feature - allowing you to quickly navigate through the book -is probably the best available, with numerous intuitive features. Notetaking features are less obvious less and powerful than the Kobo's but, like the Kindle app, can be accessed via tap-and-hold.
On Android devices, the Play Books store integrates with the regular Play Store, and books can be purchased either from the Play Store or via a re-themed book-only storefront within the app itself. It's all as fluid and responsive as you'd expect from Google. They also claim to offer the largest selection in the world, at four million books.
Alas, for iOS users Play Books is a less tempting prospect. Although it is available - whereas there is no Apple iBooks for Android - the app's rating is average at best, and it's probable this version receives comparatively little attention from Google.
For the rest of us, perhaps the only real disadvantage of Play Books are the occasional gaps in its catalogue, its support being limited to .epub and .pdf, and the fact that using it locks us yet further into Google's product-and-services ecosystem (albeit this can also be seen as a plus).
Wattpad
Wattpad stands out on this list because it is fundamentally different to the apps and stores we've looked at thus far. There isn't really anything quite like it - at least not as popular. Its origins lie in a writing community founded back in 2006. Users could post their material - stories, poetry, articles etc. - and read and comment upon that posted by others. A community grew around this, with about 50% of its audience base apparently from the US, but the other half hailing from the other three corners of the world.
On first launch the Wattpad app makes some effort to introduce its unique concepts to new users, explaining in simple terms that you can 'follow' authors and books to see when new content appears. This unique approach goes so far as allowing authors to release their books chapter-by-chapter, with readers following them almost as they are written. The setup process also includes optional social media integration - as with Kobo, using Wattpad can be about being part of a reading community.
As a reading app, Wattpad offers the standard customisation features alongside a communal commenting system. This is on by default, albeit hidden behind tap-and-hold functionality, and it may be considered a pro or a con to be able to see the comments of others on what you're reading, depending on your taste for such things.
Unfortunately, pages often load slowly, with pages apparently not pre-loading as far in advance as they do within other apps. Perhaps this is simply the inevitable result of the app pulling public comments from the web for each page that loads. Disabling inline comments does improve loading slightly, although it's still not as fluid as on other devices.
The other big potential issue with Wattpad is its catalogue - which of course is largely full of self-published material. Quality is highly variable, although there's little doubt numerous diamonds are to be found among the mountains of rougher submissions. Still, this is clearly an app and community for enthusiastic readers, and is obviously intended to be used alongside other apps that offer more traditional publisher-vetted catalogues.
Bluefire Reader
Seattle-based Bluefire Productions offers its reader app as a 'white label' platform to other businesses, allowing them to rebrand it and integrate their own stores with it. Of more interest to you and I is that it also offer Bluefire-branded Android and iOS versions for free.
The app is connected with two stores, although one of these -Books-A-Million, a large American chain - can't be browsed through the Bluefire app. Instead it directs users to download and install the store-specific app, which seems an unnecessary complication. The second store is Feedbooks, a France-based ebook retailer that offers 'millions' of ebooks (it, like Amazon, doesn't say how many millions), from new releases to free public domain works - a pretty decent selection all.
The app also supports Adobe DRM, which means that any ebooks you've purchased elsewhere that are protected by this DRM solution can be imported into and read using the Bluefire reader. This includes many books available via Nook, Kobo and Play Books.
The app itself offers a reasonable reading experience, although oddly the book that comes bundled with it - Treasure Island - doesn't seem to be set up to match the app's own font resizing or pagination functionality. It's readable, but sometimes the text appears too small, or gaps in pages will appear.
If you want to adjust font settings, then this must be done on a different settings page - almost all other apps allow this to be done on-page so you can immediately see the effect your changes have had.
The Bluefire Reader is a decent app, and being able to import books purchased elsewhere is a great feature, but the flaws in the experience versus other apps make it difficult to recommend. Still, given the severe restrictions the more commercial apps place on importing books from elsewhere, it's worth installing Bluefire - or another app from our shorter roundup below - as a library for your sundry ebooks.
Subscription-Based Apps
A relatively new development in the world of ebooks is the idea of a subscription service - essentially a Netflix for books. There are two big players in this market at the moment: Scribd and Oyster.
Oyster is, at present, only available in the US, although when contacted for comment its response implied they intend to move into the UK market in the future. Scribd costs $9 a month, offering a one month trial to get you started, and its catalogue includes both books and audiobooks. The front-end of the app is extremely slick and, although the reader portion is a little less polished, it still works well, offering good customisation options and progress-tracking features like the Kindle's. There are also extensive social components, and users can upload their own self-published work via the platform.
Scribd's library is much smaller than that of the other apps we've featured, at half a million ebooks and 30,000 audiobooks, but still offers a decent selection - and frankly, the service only launched last year. One to watch (and perhaps read or listen to).
More Apps To Try
There are plenty more popular choices available that we've not had the opportunity to cover in as much depth, but we couldn't go without at least mentioning them in brief. We're only covering these in short because they're available for only Android or iOS - not both!
Aldiko: There are a number of similarities between Aldiko and Bluefire: like Bluefire, Aldiko makes use of the Feedbooks store, and allows you to import your own ebooks (including those using Adobe DRM). Unlike Bluefire, it's available for Android only, but also uses the O'Reilly and Smashwords stores, making it a great choice for techheads and fans of small presses (although, be warned, Smashwords also includes self-published works of dubious quality).
Moon+: an ambitious and generously-featured app, Moon+ offers more functionality and customisation options than just about any other Android ereader. This makes it great for power users - and less great for casual readers. The free version is also ad-supported and lacks some features, although £3 for the full version is not bad - and less than half the price of a new paperback. Books can be acquired via Feedbooks, Smashwords, Project Gutenberg and more.
FBReader: a free, open source app for Android, FBReader supports a wide variety of file formats, and integrates a good number of stores (including, once again, Feedbooks and Smashwords). Although it's probably the least slick ereader app we've seen, it works well, eschewing cosmetics and advanced design in favour of a pure and simple experience.
iBooks: Although its ebook sales aren't as impressive as, say, Amazon's have been, Apple have performed impressively in the sector without making much fuss about it. The success of the iTunes store and the App Store have essentially carried iBooks along, but it's a decent contender - and iFans may like having their book collection sat alongside their music and app collection (and cloud synced to boot). As a reader it is solid, if unexciting.
Marvin: A feature-rich and highly rated ereader app that is specific to iOS, Marvin is full of useful ideas that other apps don't offer, such as a reading timer (for study periods, or to remind you to go and let the cat in after reading for an hour), clever filtering options for your ebook library, and buckets of customisation options. The drawback to Marvin is that it doesn't support DRM from other stores, and the full version of the app will cost you (but not very much).
eBookMobi: Of the three iOS-only platforms we've looked at, eBookMobi supports far and away the best range of file formats. You can import your own .epub and .mobi files alongside a swathe of other formats, and can also import via iTunes and Dropbox. Unfortunately, it does lack DRM support, so DRM-protected books from other stores are still out.
Epilogue
It's difficult to single out a single app as a clear 'winner' in an overview piece such as this, or even pick just a couple. The reality is that whilst some apps do offer superior reading experiences to others, the majority are all fairly similar once you get into the process of reading. Similarly, whilst some of the stores associated with apps offer larger catalogues than others, none of them offer everything, so if you're determined to find a particular book in digital format you're going to have to shop around anyway.
Realistically, an avid reader is likely to end up using a few different apps in order to cover the bases of all their reading needs. More than a few can become overwhelming, of course, so we hope this roundup has helped you narrow down the field - and make the choice that's right for you, your reading habits, and the devices you use.