The tablets are uncovering like multipurpose devices. Together with smartphones, they are the Swiss army knives of our time. One of its most important functions is reading books. While their backlit screens not the same as electronic ink, we can adapt the light settings to make it more comfortable for us. In addition, they provide an element that ereaders still do not have: The color to enjoy comics.
With these five free download applications you can use your iPad as an electronic book reader for different formats:
- iBooks It is the official Apple application. Has a very nice interface and rotating the iPad to see it in landscape mode the simulation we get of a paper book is really good, even turning the pages! The negative note is that you have to load the books from iTunes and it turns out very impractical. Instead we can have our library hosted on Dropbox and load them from there with iBooks, which is a much easier process.
- Stanza maybe it is the best option to read ePub and PDF of text. The first of the formats we can even personalize it and leave the book with the appearance that we like. You can also download free books from Gutenberg Project, which are already in the public domain. The problem is that reading comics with this app is not very fluent. If we want to have the best possible experience, we must download Goodreader, but unless we have the device with jailbreak, it costs € 3,99.
- Another application to consider is that of Kindle for iOS. We will be able to synchronize and have access to the library of books that we have purchased; as well as enjoy the endless Amazon catalog. We will also have the possibility of using what is perhaps the most advanced format to support electronic books: MOBI.
- exLibris, it is a good app to read in ePub and FB2 format. Allows us view books horizontally like iBooks and its system for turning pages is quite similar. It can be another alternative to this one if we want to skip the step of opening the books from iTunes.
- By last, Read it Later It is not an application to read books in itself, but it will be very practical when it comes to store articles and other texts on our iPad or send them from a computer and have them available too when we are offline.