Readdle service turns iPhone into ebook reader!
I’m always on the lookout for new ways to consume literature. I have a Sony Reader that I love, but don’t use that much (mostly due to Sony’s poor book selection). And I have an iPhone that I use daily – for everything from making calls, surfing the net, checking/writing email, listening to music and watching movies. Yep, it would be hard to find me going about my day without my iPhone by my side.
And thanks to a great service called Readdle, I can now read ebooks on my iPhone without having to hack it or make any other changes that void the warranty. Here’s how it works: You sign up for a basic account (which is free) and they give you 50MB of storage. Okay, it’s not exactly enough to read War and Peace, but it does give you a basic idea of how the service works.
Of course there is an option to upgrade your account. For $5/month you get 1GB of storage, the ability to read your docs offline (great for flying), and a bookmarking feature so you don’t have to scroll through 100 pages to find your spot. For $10/month, a whopping 5GB of storage and can store an unlimited number of documents.
Basically, once you are logged into your account, you upload your ebook and it’s saved for you. Then you can log on via your iPhone and read until your eyes fall out. A very cool service! Did I also mention that Readdle supports doc, fb2, pdf, txt, html, jpeg, xls, and pdb files. I’ve only used it for PDFs and it works better than my expensive Sony Reader.
Ebooks, Short Stories and Beyond!
If reading an entire ebook on your iPhone is too much to bite off, don’t worry, there are other ways you can get your fiction fix. I’ve recently discovered Amazon Shorts (aff link) where you can buy short stories and other short works by new and well-known authors. Best of all, each short story is only $0.49 – less than a can of Pepsi at your office vending machine. There are also some works that are free.
Combining the iPhone with a service like Readdle makes reading short fiction a perfect experience. You can read them just about anywhere and you don’t have to take up precious memory on your iPhone to do it. I have already read a few short works of fiction and really enjoyed them. The iPhone is a great e reader because you can adjust the text size easily, and read in landscape mode (turning the iPhone on its side) which feels "natural."
iPhone might be a game-changer for the ebook world
This summer, Apple will allow iPhone users to load third-party apps onto their devices. This will increase the functionality of an already multi-functional tool and allow you to do just about anything. According to Readdle’s own website, they plan on creating a natvie app for the iPhone – meaning you will probably be able to store ebooks right on your phone!
The problem with reading devices like Sony’s Reader and the Amazon Kindle is that they DRM their ebooks so you can only read them on their respective devices. For example, I can’t download a book meant for the KIndle and read it on my Sony Reader and vice versa. Futhermore, these devices are rather expensive and the only thing you can do on them is read books (the Kindle allows you to do a little more, but not much)
The iPhone, on the other hand, is truly an all-in-one device. It’s a cell phone, an mp3 player, an organizer, internet browser and eventually an ebook reader. People who buy an iPhone will be able to do many things, unlike the Kindle, for example.
My point is that I think the trend is leaning towards all-in-one devices like the iPhone. People don’t want to carry around twenty different things (cell phone, mp3 player, organizer, Kindle, etc), at least not when they can have a device that does it all.
Yes, I’m very biased towards the iPhone. If you don’t want to get sucked into AT&T’s service plan, then get an iPod Touch which gives you more storage and basically does all the same stuff without the cell phone capability.
As I use Readdle more and more on my own iPhone, I will try and write a follow-up review. Stay tuned…
(NOTE: This review of Readdle is based purely on my own experience and I was in no way compensated by them or any other third party for writing this post.)
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