iPad adventures: books, comics and the rest

The battle for the best app to read your digital books/comics is not over yet. Currently on my iPad reside multiple applications because of various reasons. In this blogpost I will explain which ones and why.

Books

It seems currently there is no standard for e-books (yet). The most popular formats are PDF, ePub. Currently the most known DRM solution is Adobe Digital Editions which can be used on ePub files.

Apple iBooks

Reads the books from the Apple store. You can upload your ePub files through iTunes to it but only the non-DRM versions.

Kindle

If you want to buy books from amazon you are basically required to install there app on your iPad, iPhone or PC. Alternative is to buy the Kindle. Pro is the amount of books in English available. Con is that although a lot of books are cheap, the more popular ones are actually more expensive digitally bought then when buying the hardcover version. Thats a big no-no for me, digital content should be cheaper because you have nothing in your hands and there is no shipping/handling/stores/etc.

To be looked at

Stanza was the app which had great reviews and a really easy way to transfer your content to the iPad trough the iTunes File Sharing option. Only trouble is that it keeps crashing on import of my documents (Windows 7 + Itunes 9). Maybe in the future this app will blow me away…

Comics

Currently the distinction is between Marvel, which has a really good reading experience for there own comics, and the generic reader for your own comic collection to be uploaded to the iPad.

Marvel Reader

Marvel is in the process of adding metadata to their comics for the iPad app. This metadata, when applied, gives the reader the option to enlarge the page to only show the image where the focus needs to be and blocks out the rest, which results in a much more focused read. Only paid magazines from Marvel though…

Comic zeal

This app is pretty pricey ($7,99) but delivers. Uploading of your CBZ or CBR files is easy trough the iTunes File Transfer window and the comics read really nice. If your comics are only the scanned pages in images you can just zip it up/rar it and rename the file to CBZ/CBR and upload. Pretty sweet huh?

Magazines - Zinio

Magazines are graphical by nature but also contain a lot of text. Currently there is only one app which really blew me away, Zinio. They have a good looking iPad app and the content is pretty diverse. Plus the prices for digital content are as i want them; really really low! Downside but thats not there fault (Go Apple!): slightly erotic magazines are not visible/readable on your iPad (i.e. Playboy).