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Ebook Apps Discussion

I was going to check out Alkido based on the comments here, but even some of the positive reviews on the market said it ran slow. I suspect it's another of those apps that's great if your phone is fairly current, not so great if it's an older model. (Angry Birds and Handcent fall into this category for me, if that gives you an idea.)

Moon+ has full font customization, everything from font size to line spacing. It's a fairly small program, books tend to load kind of slow, but the app itself is fast. Smooth scrolling to read, which I prefer to page-turning (though, I'm pretty sure that's an option if I did want it), decent organization system. Another big plus is that the free version's ads are only on the bookshelf, so it doesn't interfere with reading.

I admit that it's the only one I've tried other than nook for Android, but that one was so slow that I could set my phone down, go make a sammich, and come back to find it still trying to load a book. It actually put me off readers entirely, because it made me think maybe my phone's just not capable of running one decently. Having found one that runs so smoothly on my phone and does what I need it to, I haven't even bothered looking at others.
 
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For me, the gold standard for e-book apps was Mobipocket before Amazon bought and razed them to make the Kindle. It was perfect and had everything. The closest think I can find to it is Moon+ Reader. It does note-taking and highlighting, online and offline dictionary support, multiple formats, online libraries, fully customizable layout and themes, etc. I have yet to find an app that offers all of these options.
 
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I always use kindle. The main reason is you can change the colours. I always hear that the display uses most of the battery so it seems to me it's best to read with a black background and white text to save the battery. My eyes seem to prefer this too. I often get eye strain from reading PC's etc and this seems to help. My version of Aldiko does not seem to have this option.

I've used mobipocket to convert pdf files to .mobi so I could read it on my Galaxy S using kindle. The conversion went slightly wrong for one book and left with a grey text colour when I turn the kindle to black background. Having read it for a while though I much prefer this colour. Problem is I don't know how to get this colour on my other books that are the "correct" colour. Does anyone know how I can choose from a larger set of colours for the text? I'm guessing grey would help the battery also.
 
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I always use kindle. The main reason is you can change the colours. I always hear that the display uses most of the battery so it seems to me it's best to read with a black background and white text to save the battery. My eyes seem to prefer this too. I often get eye strain from reading PC's etc and this seems to help. My version of Aldiko does not seem to have this option.

I've used mobipocket to convert pdf files to .mobi so I could read it on my Galaxy S using kindle. The conversion went slightly wrong for one book and left with a grey text colour when I turn the kindle to black background. Having read it for a while though I much prefer this colour. Problem is I don't know how to get this colour on my other books that are the "correct" colour. Does anyone know how I can choose from a larger set of colours for the text? I'm guessing grey would help the battery also.

Generally speaking the only time black background helps with battery life is if you have an amoled or samoled screen. That said no matter what i prefer the black back, white text. What version of aldiko you using, my has always had this option?
 
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The version thast came on the phone seems to be either a cut down or an old version. I just downloaded the app from the market and it's got way more functionality. It's strange though as I would have thought downloading the latest full version would get rid of the old or cut down version. I now have two apps with almost the same name. Not the end of the world. I'll play around with Kindle, Moon+ and Alkido and see which I prefer. I don't want to have more than one of them as they all seem to create their own directories and I hate the messiness of having lots of unneeded folders on the phone.
 
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The version thast came on the phone seems to be either a cut down or an old version. I just downloaded the app from the market and it's got way more functionality. It's strange though as I would have thought downloading the latest full version would get rid of the old or cut down version. I now have two apps with almost the same name. Not the end of the world. I'll play around with Kindle, Moon+ and Alkido and see which I prefer. I don't want to have more than one of them as they all seem to create their own directories and I hate the messiness of having lots of unneeded folders on the phone.

That is strange. I feel ya though, hate all the clutter
 
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I bought Beam Reader. It was the only one that would deal easily with books downloaded from Project Gutenberg.
I also have a Nook, but to deal with some books I found, I had to get the DRM remover.
I will not buy from Barnes & Noble.
Here's an excerpt from a B&N forum:


The two areas which immediately raised red-flags for me was the section of Sparknotes' Privacy Policy section which read:

1. What is the personal information that we collect?

Personal information is your name in combination with other information that we collect about you. For example, personal information can include your name in combination with your e-mail address, billing address, shipping address, phone number, or credit card information.

and

(b) Information automatically collected
There are circumstances in which we automatically receive and collect personal information from you. The most common sources of this information include:
* Cookies
* Pixel tags or clear Graphics Interchange Format files, known as GIFs
* NOOK
* Occasionally from business partners, contractors, shared databases, and other third parties
For your convenience, we have provided a summary description of each of these circumstances below."

Pixel tags is a euphemism for web bug, a hidden element within e-mails which monitors users without their knowledge for marketing purposes. Unfortunately, it is currently legal, albeit morally bankrupt.


Books a Million does let you opt out.



Maybe some of you don't mind an inbox full of spam - I do.
I also don't like being tracked for advertising. They have problems when you only deal with certain types of sites. Telescope marketing is not very common, so they guess.


To be fair - the wifi Nook isn't bad, I can control the SD card. The original had a battery issue and the brick and mortar local B&N promptly replaced it.
 
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I bought Beam Reader. It was the only one that would deal easily with books downloaded from Project Gutenberg.
I also have a Nook, but to deal with some books I found, I had to get the DRM remover.
I will not buy from Barnes & Noble.
.
Project Gutenberg blends seamlessly with aldiko

And i added non-B & N books to my nook just fine (though i am using aldiko on that as well)
Is Aldiko for tabs only? I'm new to eBooks completely and I just started using Kindle. I buy books from Amazon because that's really all I know.
It works on ALL android devices. I would suggest installing it, then trying it out on one of the books you already downloaded to test it out. Love the load of options available compared to other reader programs
 
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Doesn't the Kindle have the feature of a computer generated voice reading the book to you? I think it is the one someone mentioned as having this, and that it actually did a rather good job. I am kinda old (boy, I will never get use to saying that) and my doctor says anything I can do to preserve my eyesight is good. I check out Librivox for audiobooks, but the selection is limited to public domain.
 
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Doesn't the Kindle have the feature of a computer generated voice reading the book to you? I think it is the one someone mentioned as having this, and that it actually did a rather good job. I am kinda old (boy, I will never get use to saying that) and my doctor says anything I can do to preserve my eyesight is good. I check out Librivox for audiobooks, but the selection is limited to public domain.

I don't see that option in the Kindle app I have on my Thunderbolt.
 
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Doesn't the Kindle have the feature of a computer generated voice reading the book to you? I think it is the one someone mentioned as having this, and that it actually did a rather good job. I am kinda old (boy, I will never get use to saying that) and my doctor says anything I can do to preserve my eyesight is good. I check out Librivox for audiobooks, but the selection is limited to public domain.

The hardware Kindle reader can text to speech.

Harry
 
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OK so i thought i'd start a ebook app thread since we took up a whole page talking about aldiko in the other thread.

Lets not limit the discussion to aldiko (even if it's the best one, lol). Quetions about aldiko or one of the other ebook apps? Post them here.

Know any tips/tricks about any of the top ebook apps? Share them here.

Gonna try to get confirmation that we can post links to apk's of previous versions of aldiko or any other reader apps as long as it doesn't violate forum rules. (Roze, since your our resident book mod what do you think?)

At any rate.... Let the discussion commence!

I thought this was something different. There's a program for Linux called ebooks but it's for accounting.:)
 
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There is a PC based program called Calibre that will convert nearly any ebook format into nearly any other format. If you use that, it begins to matter less which format you find a book in, because you can always change it to epub.
I'm with NightAngel in thinking that Aldiko is the 'best' reader, though Moon+ is a very close second. With either it's easy to import epubs into the app for reading. Aldiko also has built in libraries where you can download books. And of course there are lots of sites on the internet where you can find free and/or reasonably priced ebooks. Typically I download a book onto my PC and then move it to my device for importing into Aldiko.
 
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Doesn't the Kindle have the feature of a computer generated voice reading the book to you? I think it is the one someone mentioned as having this, and that it actually did a rather good job. I am kinda old (boy, I will never get use to saying that) and my doctor says anything I can do to preserve my eyesight is good. I check out Librivox for audiobooks, but the selection is limited to public domain.


Moon+ Reader Pro has a text to speech option :)

A good eBook reader, I tried it with .epub books. But I didn't try the TTS feature yet (my hearing isn't the best :) ).

Harry
 
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Calibre won't run on the XP laptop. It seems to run on the Ubuntu desktop. I checked out all those readers and some just didn't work the way I wanted. The spanish type one was called Laputa.

Any reader has to deal with my PDFs. I can and do copy and paste to save as a PDF. I can use Illustrator, Foxit PDF writer, and even WordPerfect. I think that since most of the ones I do create are documents rather than books, some of the other readers could have had a problem with the titling and/or my filing system.
 
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