I no longer enjoy launching the Kobo app on my iPhone or iPad. I stopped looking forward to interacting with it a few updates ago, and now I actually avoid it.

This has been building for a while. A year ago, I praised Kobo for being ahead of the curve when it came to adding entertaining new features to its iPad app (the features were later extended to other platforms). “Best app,” I wrote then, and I meant it. But over the past six months—well, ever since Apple crippled all the competing ebook retailers’ apps for strategic reasons in the summer of 2011—Kobo has been adding new features to make its app more and more “social” and “networked” and “fun”, with the consequence that the app has started to become less and less enjoyable to use. The latest upgrade (version 5.3) has simply made it not worth bothering with anymore.

All upsell, all the time

The new home screen for the Kobo app

(I don’t even want to talk about the fact that, because the last book I’d opened in the app before this update was erotica, now Kobo thinks that ALL I WANT TO SEE are self-published Smashwords-style M/M book covers with titles like “Marked Men” and “Temptation Castle”. That’s my fault for opening books in an app that clearly intends to track everything I do for all time. It’s embarrassing, I guess, but it’s not even what I’m upset about.)

There is a time and place for book ads, and it is: WHEN I HAVE CHOSEN TO SHOP FOR A NEW BOOK. Guess when I haven’t chosen to do that? When I launch the Kobo app for the sole purpose of reading a book I already own.

Again, my complaint put in even simpler terms: The Kobo app is was designed to let me read my ebooks. It is was not a catalog I launch to browse for new purchases.

One more time, in visual form, in case someone at Kobo sees this rant but is pretending to be too busy to read it:

Look at the screencap above again. Jeez. The new recommendations section takes up HALF of the display area now. Your own books–the ones you’ve added to the Kobo app so that you can read them (in many cases, you even paid good money for them)–are swept aside into a secondary section, reduced to one cover image (unless that slot is filled by a sample you recently opened, sigh) and a four-pane mini-thumbnail collage that together take up only one-third of the display area.

Imagine if the next time Apple updated its iOS for your iPhone it replaced half of your home screen with “trial apps” that you didn’t ask for. You’d think Apple was insane, or maybe had turned into a U.S. cellular carrier circa 2007. In fact, Apple does look at your past purchases (if you give permission) and offers up recommendations. But it does this within its App Store, so that you, the customer, have to deliberately choose to look at the list when you’re good and ready–the digital equivalent of walking into a store to browse the merchandise.

Try to buy this book, we dare ya

So that’s the first problem, and it’s a big enough “screw you” to customers to make me worry that Kobo now suffers from what I call Tivo-itis, which is when all the smart people who made a company visionary leave and are replaced by second- and third-stringers.

But the second problem with the new Kobo update is that this new “recommendation” advertising doesn’t even work. Here’s what it’s like to reach the end of a sample book.

Hmm, this does not bode well for my goals.

Remember when I mentioned that Apple had zombified all competing ebook apps? Those competitors, including Kobo, have to hand over 30% of their profits if they want to include crazy cutting-edge things like links to their own websites. This means Kobo, Nook, and Kindle have all been forced to offer dumbed down apps that can display files, but that can’t enable any sort of shopping experience.

Kobo still has to follow this rule, even with “free sample” books. The result is what you see above: If you do tap on one of their recommended titles, what you’ll end up with is a “free sample” that just stops at the end of the sample. There’s no message. Nothing. Not a quick “End of sample!”, and certainly not a “Buy this book on Kobo’s website!” because Apple would reject that functionality in a microsecond. Just a blank screen, and an error message if you try to turn the page. It’s true you can “share” the name of the book via email or social media, but let’s look at how you can do this.

It's easy and fun to find out more about a Kobo sample... if you're on amphetamines.

So technically, if you really want to sell yourself the ebook sample, by emailing it to yourself you can then get an email with a link to the book on the Kobo website, and from your email message click through to buy the book. Wow. It looks as stupid illustrated here as it felt doing it.

The other ebook retailers have similar problems with samples–for example, Kindle samples offer “buy this book” links that simply don’t work. The difference is, because the customer has pre-selected a Kindle sample, the non-functioning link serves as a reminder that the title can be purchased from Amazon. On Kobo’s app, the experience is more like, “Here’s a bunch of context-free excerpts from books you probably don’t care about. Good luck with that.”

Part of me wonders if this is the first sign of the New Face of Kobo, now that it’s been bought up by Rakuten. Software updates don’t happen overnight, so this was likely something Kobo had in the works for a while. Rakuten surely had enough time to kill this update but chose to release it anyway, which is a good sign that this is the way things will work with Kobo from now on. Who knows? By the time summer comes around the Kobo iOS app may be nothing but an impenetrable billboard of book samples, Facebook alerts, infographics, help screens, pop-up windows, slide-out sheets, and “share this” badges. (I haven’t even discussed the increasingly overstuffed social sharing features, but if you haven’t experienced them for yourself, just imagine how cool it would be to combine an ebook app with the slot floor of a casino.) Good times.

What Kobo should have been working on the past six months was a decent web app alternative so that it could escape Apple’s ridiculous iron fist. Then it could reinstate the original web catalog that it used to have, which was both useful and non-intrusive.

What Kobo has been doing instead is steadily ruining the customer experience for some of its best customers–the ones it already has.

(Photo: jot.punkt)

I’m not going to comment on the software, as I’m still downloading it as I type this entry. And other sites are doing a great job of covering today’s Apple press conference, so I’m not going to give Apple more free PR if I can help it. I mean, unless they want to pay me.

But I would like to point out one important catch. The fancy new textbook authoring software that Apple is giving away, iBooks Author, comes with a big restriction in its license agreement, and it’s that you can only sell your textbook in Apple’s iBooks store. (Click image for full-size screenshot of the license from the App Store page.) If you want to give your new textbook away for free, Apple has no problem with that. But if you want to sell it yourself or use some other retailer, no dice. You go through iBooks, meaning through Apple, and you give Apple a cut of the profits. Or you don’t use iBooks Author to make your fancy new digital textbook.

That, of course, is why iBooks Author is free. It’s sort of like if the company started giving away Pages, but required that all novels typed with the app belonged to the Apple Store.

So download it, play with it, learn from it. But take a good look at the terms before you invest any real labor in using it, because whatever you end up producing is going to be under Apple’s control for a long, long time.

Wicked with Bonus Material: Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (Wicked Years)

Gregory Maguire’s detailed history of the Wicked Witch of the West re-imagines the classic villain as an intelligent, headstrong opponent of Oz’s establishment class. From her humble childhood, to her political awakening at college, to her growing isolation and defamation by her opponents as she rises in power, it’s an intriguing story of a woman’s coming-of-age in a complicated and unjust world. If you only know “Wicked” from the musical, you might be surprised by the sometimes adult themes in the original work.

You may want to grab this quickly, because it appears to be a promotional edition to help sell the latest title in Maguire’s Oz series. I saw it last October and kept forgetting to post it, so I don’t know how much longer it will be around. It’s also available for the same price from iBooks, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo Books.

Price: $1.99

Sample the book right now in your browser:

Please note that prices may have changed since posting. Always check the current price on Amazon before making a purchase.

Check out the Amazon Bargains archive for more books.

I sent it to them nearly three and half months ago, so I’m fairly certain they’re not going to respond at this point. To me, it’s a perfect example of how a local bookstore can fail at building a relationship with local customers who want to shop locally but prefer ebooks over print.

Here’s what I wrote:

I briefly stepped into McNally Jackson this past Saturday, and although it was too crowded for my tastes, before I left I glanced over a couple of tables at the front of the store. I found a trade paperback of science essays titled Future Science that I wanted.

But here’s where the problem comes in, and why I’m writing to you: I wanted it in ebook format, because if I bought books in print these days I’d essentially turn into a third Collier brother. But I couldn’t figure out a way to buy it in ebook format while in your store.

I looked up at the register to see if I could ask about this option there, but there was a line of about five customers waiting to buy printed books. That’s great news for you, but not so much for me since I already wanted badly to get out of there.

I thought about asking the woman at the Espresso Book Machine, but she seemed busy, and not at a register.

I looked around for some sort of signage or instruction about how to buy a Google Books digital edition from within the store, and I couldn’t find it (maybe I overlooked it?)

So here’s what I did. I left the store, and literally before I crossed Mulberry Street I’d used my phone to buy the Kindle edition from Amazon.

Now to be clear, I didn’t buy the Kindle version because of price, or because I hate bookstores, or because I’m naive about the financially precarious state of indie booksellers. I’m pro-McNally Jackson, just not to the point where I’d buy a format I don’t actually want or need just to help a business I don’t own.

I wanted to share some thoughts about this with you:

• I wanted to buy the book right then, while it was fresh on my mind, not later (for instance not from your website when I finally got home hours later).
• I’m not a Kindle fanatic. I know how to strip DRM and I can easily adapt most of my ebook purchases to suit my needs.
• I’m price conscious but, unless there was a price difference of 50% or more on the Google Books edition over the Kindle edition, I would have bought the Google Books edition as a show of support for your store. (It turns out, the price for both digital editions was the same.)
• It was the physical, face-to-face encounter with the trade paperback that prompted me to make the purchase, so I feel that you should have received that sale.

So I’m at a loss as to how I can help support you. I’m a frequent book buyer, and I want to support McNally Jackson, but there’s no real place for me as a customer in your store right now so far as I can tell.

I realize I’m probably still in the tiny minority of your current customers, and this isn’t meant to be a rant. But if you can figure out a way to let people like me browser [sic] the merchandise and then leave your physical store with a digital edition instead of print, you’d be my first and pretty much only bookstore in Manhattan from now on.

Here’s what I got in response:

And that’s why I don’t feel bad for buying my ebooks from online retailers that aren’t connected to this bookstore.

But then—even though Amazon’s promotion was aimed more at big box retailers—the crazy publishing industry types had to get involved.

If you want to see the collective mind of U.S. bookselling culture at its lockstep worse, first read Farhad Manjoo’s provocative article at Slate where he praises Amazon’s Kindle initiative and disparages local indie bookstores. Then take a deep breath and read the comments. No, wait, the comments are filled with stuff that’s too easy to dismiss as weird nonsensical ranting, like the commenter who claims authors don’t get royalties from Amazon sales. Go instead to the The New York Observer and follow some of the links in that summary.

For example, The Observer describes New York bookseller Dustin Kurtz’s response to the Slate article as a “play-by-play excoriation,” and it’s being praised and passed around the Internet by what I can only assume are people with rabies. Although it looks at first like a methodical takedown of Manjoo’s arguments—the kind of written fistfight I love to dive into—it’s actually just a string of increasingly emotional and sarcastic insults. A true counterargument would rationally dissect each of Manjoo’s statements and show how he’s wrong to dismiss the local bookstore model; Kurtz just goes for emotional outbursts, as if the average customer will be swayed by the party that displays the most contempt.

It’s fine to have an emotional tirade in private, where you invent new obscenities to heap upon Amazon and lay a series of elaborate curses upon Bezos’ family tree. But the rest of us don’t care about that. The only thing that I, by which I mean a Random Customer, want to know is why I should support a local bookseller even if it can never compete on price or selection. I want the bookseller advocate to show me facts that I’m too inexperienced or blinkered to see on my own.

Instead, we get stuff like this. Manjoo writes that bookstores used to have the advantage of letting customers sample books before buying them, but that this “advantage has slipped away. Amazon and Barnes & Noble let you sample the first chapter of every digital title they carry, and you can do so without leaving your couch.” Kurtz’s response:

This guy. Okay first, publishers do that as well, and Google. We would, too if competing with Amazon didn’t mean we couldn’t afford a better website. But more importantly, IS THAT THE STANDARD BY WHICH YOU WISH TO JUDGE A SUCCESSFUL IMPLEMENTATION SIR? Because do I have a chamber pot to sell you.

So if I’m reading Manjoo correctly, he’s saying that bookstores have lost a competitive edge—book sampling—now that the ebook infrastructure has matured. Manjoo explicitly points out that this isn’t just an Amazon feature. Kurtz responds that publishers and Google also offer this, which in fact supports Manjoo’s original statement. He then sidesteps the issue to complain that Amazon’s existence has prevented him from creating a good website. I can’t disprove that statement, although based on my experience building websites over the past decade it sounds foolish. I can, however, show Kurtz this sample page from a local indie bookseller [update: I think it's his own store, in fact] that uses a Google affiliate account to provide free digital previews. Yes, I just helped Kurtz counter one of Manajoo’s statements with actual evidence. You’re welcome, furious bookseller.

I don’t even understand the final part of Kurtz’s response in the quote above. I mean, I think Manjoo is saying that previewing a book is a good thing, and that any bookseller would want to offer it to customers. So yeah, I think it’s absolutely appropriate to include it in a comparison of what retailers offer to consumers. And…Kurtz doesn’t? What? At any rate, I don’t need a chamber pot, although I do think the term “night soil” is pretty awesome.

The whole piece is like that. Kurtz argues that bookstore employees are better at making recommendations to customers than a recommendation algorithm, and that a bookstore can order a book and have it ready for you to pick up in the same time it would take you to receive it from Amazon. The first statement doesn’t accurately describe the real world shopping experience, and the second one misses the point about what makes for a competitive advantage.

When it comes to recommendations, what booksellers aren’t willing to acknowledge is that Manjoo isn’t talking solely about Amazon when he notes the competitive advantages bookstores have lost in recent years. Manjoo’s point is that when you buy a book online, you have access to a vast amount of data that a physical bookstore can’t provide on its own. If I pick up a new paperback by a well-known thriller author in a bookstore, I have, at best, less than a handful of data points to help me decide whether to buy it: the back-of-book summary and any promotional blurbs, a quick skimming of the opening pages, a personal thumbs up or down from the employee, and in rare cases the feedback of another customer. If I look at the same book online—and not only when I’m shopping on Amazon, but at any time when I’m near a computer and remember the book—I can visit Goodreads, look at Amazon and B&N customer reviews, grab an offline sample to read later when I’m ready, search for author interviews and professional reviews. And it’s not just that I have more points of data, but that more of them are impartial. On top of all that, the Internet lets me comparison shop for my preferred price/format combo.

As for Kurtz’s claim that a bookseller can order a book for you in the same time you’d get it from Amazon, assuming that’s a true statement (I don’t know of any evidence one way or the other), it doesn’t address other competitive disadvantages for a local retailer like pricing or the limited recommendation tools I just described. In fact, it actually highlights those disadvantages, which works in the online retailer’s favor.

Kurtz is just one bookseller. He was having a fit, and I sympathize with that. But wait, here’s writer and editor Judy Berman at Flavorwire: she not only mocks Manjoo for rationally preferring to shop at the retailer with the best prices and recommendation tools, but she also dismisses book consumers who share their thoughts online as stereotypical basement nerds:

I find it sad, actually, that Manjoo — a generally sharp and smart technology writer — finds clicking around on Amazon to be more fun than browsing the shelves of a real-life bookstore where (gasp!) one might actually interact with other book lovers. It also seems specious to argue that Amazon customer reviews are more useful than the advice of an independent bookstore employee or owner, who presumably has more knowledge of and enthusiasm for literature than your average unknown dude typing angrily in his parents’ basement.

Then there are the absurd exchanges like this one on Twitter (you can see a screen capture here), where a Penguin executive insists that self-publishing and the current “singles” trend in e-publishing existed well before Amazon, but refuses to acknowledge the massive transformation the Amazon Kindle has forced upon the marketplace despite the continuing resistance of traditional publishers like Penguin—a transformation that has so far benefitted every sector of the industry but one: physical bookstores.

The real issue here is that there’s a false technological divide, one booksellers (and their traditionalist fans as well as many publishers) have created to their own collective detriment. They demand to know of you, the consumer: Do you support humans or robot overlords? Do you support small business or faceless corporations? (But please ignore those corporate behemoths who provide our merchandise—we need you to hate only this specific evil corporation.) Berman even pulls out the old political us vs. them values deceit, writing that “We would also prefer to see our cash go to small business owners (and their employees) whose values are more in line with our own.” Quick, someone bring the two major political parties into this dust up, because I think we just went there.

STOP, LOCAL BOOKSELLER ENTHUSIASTS. JUST STOP. Reading your outbursts reminds me of when a family member of mine was diagnosed with diabetes, yet refused to acknowledge it or change her diet. Look, there actually are things local bookstores can claim as authentic competitive advantages against online retailers like Amazon:

• You can lease an Espresso Machine and offer true instant gratification to your customers. At the same time, start pushing publishers to make more new releases available on the Espresso platform, and push Xerox and On Demand Books to continue improving the quality of the final Espresso product. Consider ways to use the machine to provide local self-publishing services and classes. Unless you’re a publishing elitist, the idea of helping regular people read and write and exchange one-off, custom books and journals should be bookseller nirvana to you.
   
• You can keep developing the concept of the local bookstore as the only place to meet authors. Figure out unique, site-specific variations on the old-fashioned book signing, like how Housing Works Used Book Café in NYC had a live band join Jennifer Egan at a reading earlier this year. Find ways to increase the personalization of the traditional book reading. Perhaps you could collect questions from local customers ahead of an author’s visit, and offer those whose questions are answered at the event some special perk, like maybe a smaller “private” Q&A with the author before or after the event.
   
• You can send the marketing of local authors into overdrive, and market your store as an integral component of the very fabric of your local culture. You want customers who shop with you to feel a visceral sense of pride and connection to local history when they step through your doors—it’s a value proposition no online retailer can offer.
   
• You can find better ways to sell ebooks. Figure out how to intercept price-conscious customers before they leave the store, not so you can guilt-trip them into buying from you but so you can make them special offers, or you can teach them how to buy ebooks from your website so that you still make a little revenue.
   
• Finally you can learn to respond to market threats positively, at least around ebook customers, so that they instinctively want to be on your side. When I wrote a thoughtful, knowledgable email to the owner of a local bookstore in NYC earlier this year explaining how their current ebook strategy was losing them customers (you can read it here), I received no reply. Zilch. Crickets. By comparison, do you know how many indie software developers have personally responded to my random bits of feedback over the past five years? All of them. Seriously. Even the Symbian game developer in Russia, whose English was not so good (although a lot better than my Russian). Indie developers know that every customer matters, and that the next useful insight could come from anywhere. If they resented my input, they didn’t show it to me.

Why more local booksellers aren’t aggressively pursuing these strategies, or ones similar to or better than them, instead of throwing fits online about an article that’s at least 65% accurate about the shrinking value prop of the local bookstore, is beyond me. I guess ultimately I just like books more than they do.

(Photo: go ask alice…)

I clicked through to the settings screen and was presented with this new (well, new to me) set of options.

I think it’s terrific. I’ve been a big proponent of eReaderIQ for a while now, because it’s an effortless way for the average consumer to find Kindle deals. (For a similar service for iOS, try AppShopper.) Unfortunately, eReaderIQ’s daily email has been losing its utility lately as more and more ebooks flood the Amazon store—the amount of chaff makes it harder than ever to find the occasional grain of wheat.

This morning, I opened my eReaderIQ email and smiled. It’s a lot cleaner and better organized, and a lot easier to see whether there’s anything worth grabbing.

(Photo: peterjroberts)

Capaneus at Capane.us figured out where to find the text files for Skyrim’s books from his own copy of the game, and then he formatted them into a single ebook file for reading on the go.

So, I took a look at how Skyrim actually stores these nuggets of incidental storytelling. By the 9, it was in plain text! I pasted the book text into separate docs, slapped on headings, created a table of contents and a cover, and just like that, I can read my copy of The Lusty Argonian Maid on-the-go!

According to his later comments, “Just like that” actually means about eight hours of work:

All the books are in plain text in a monolithic string file under //apps/skyrim/Data/Strings…in the DL string file. [Use an app like Notepad++ to open the file.] Start by copying and pasting the text of each book into a seperate .html file. Keep the filenames consistent with the title of the book, and add a number at the end of each book in a series. This will make table of contents building way easier.

I think this ebook approach is a cool way to repurpose some of the game’s content for personal use, but if you don’t want your own ebook version, you can read these books online in the Lore section of The Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages.

Capane.us [Via Sidequesting] ]]> http://booksprung.com/how-to-convert-the-entire-skyrim-canon-into-a-single-ebook/feed 0 http://booksprung.com/stanza-updated-now-works-on-ios-5 http://booksprung.com/stanza-updated-now-works-on-ios-5#comments Fri, 11 Nov 2011 01:38:48 +0000 Chris Walters http://booksprung.com/?p=7166
Clearly I was too pessimistic last week when I wrote about the death of Stanza, the ebook reader app that stopped working on Apple devices with the release of iOS 5. Earlier today an updated version of Stanza was released, and the app now works again. I take back what I wrote in that earlier post; Stanza will never die! Do you hear me? Never!

As some of you are aware, every November is National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. If you’re a NaNoWriMo DoRk–and I can use that term because I’ve been one myself in the past–then you know that it’s incredibly difficult to squirt out the minimum required number of words every day for 30 days straight. (I never made it past day 3.) Most likely, the last thing you need at this delicate point in your quest is to be interrupted by a bunch of writing advice. What you need is caffeine, snack items, and another big helping of willful idiocy self-abuse.

But these titles probably won’t be free much longer, so try to sneak over to Amazon and grab them before they go away. Then, come December, you can peruse them at your leisure over a snifter of brandy while you relax by your hearth; I’m pretty sure no writer worth his salt would sit by a regular fireplace.

Update: Forget all of this! Stanza delivered a surprise update to the Apple app store on November 10th, 2011, that restored functionality on iOS 5. But only update if you need to: this latest version breaks the app if you’re running an older iOS like 4.3 (thanks to Paula for pointing that out in the comments below.)

Lexcycle’s Stanza, the once mighty ebook reader app for iOS devices, doesn’t work on Apple’s latest mobile operating system iOS 5, and as development and maintenance on the app appears to have stopped, it likely never will.

Eulogy

Stanza was my first and most favorite ebook app for the iPhone, and later the iPad. When it was first launched, it had better features than any competing third party app, and over time it consistently beat the big players like Amazon, Kobo and Barnes & Noble on things like openness and customization. I loved Stanza for subway rides—I used a giant font size in landscape view and was able to flick through screens like index cards, which made it easy to keep my place while being jostled and interrupted constantly.

For a while, Stanza was my catch-all app for ebook files, and it let me standardize my library around the EPUB format despite Amazon’s anti-user push for azw/mobi and tpz. Whether it was a title I’d downloaded from an author’s website, or a classic I’d grabbed off of Project Gutenberg, Stanza could handle it. I stopped caring that Amazon and Barnes & Noble were taking baby steps with their branded apps, because the scrappy alternative was far better. Worst case scenario, I could always remove the DRM on books from those retailers and shift them over to Stanza.

But best of all was how Stanza worked with my Calibre ebook library. I exported my entire Calibre library using OPDS and uploaded it to a private server, then connected to it from Stanza over the Internet. I was able to browse my library—and instantly download titles to my app—from anywhere I could get a wireless connection.

I always knew that Stanza would eventually go away after Amazon acquired it back in 2009. Frankly, I was pleasantly surprised the retailer kept Stanza available for as long as it did, although I suspect Amazon’s motive was purely strategic: it prevented Apple, Barnes & Noble, or Kobo from acquiring what was for a while the iOS platform’s most famous and popular ebook app, while at the same time it gave Amazon a way to indirectly offer an EPUB reader without having to sully the Kindle brand.

I suppose, if you want to live in denial, you can imagine there’s a slim chance Stanza will wake up from its comatose state one day and start working again. But it’s time to move on. From the day Amazon purchased Stanza, we knew in our hearts that it wouldn’t last forever.

We, the survivors

If you’re a Stanza user on an iOS device, what’s next for you? Here are some quick tips:

Getting your files back from a broken Stanza

The simplest strategy is to not upgrade to iOS 5 if you can help it, although by doing so you’ll miss out on some really nice features that Apple has introduced, like system-wide text expander shortcuts, an elegant (but extremely limited) to-do app, and the ability to update and sync your device over Wi-Fi.

If you updated your device already, and you have ebook files in your Stanza app that you really want to salvage before moving on, you can try using the Stanza Book Restore tool that Lexcycle created. It’s a Java app that will scan your most recent iTunes backup, find the Stanza files that were saved there, and extract them as files with human-readable names.

Finding a decent alternative

Based on the suggestions in this Get Satisfaction thread on Stanza’s iOS 5 issues and this Mobileread wiki page on ebook software, I tried a few other apps to see if I could find one that would work with my private OPDS library and provide some decent functionality. Here are my observations.

Best premium bet: MegaReader ($1.99 at time of post)

Pros:
• handles OPDS catalogs nicely
• good basic customization options
• some great built in catalogs, so if you just want to find a good book to read fast (from a public domain collection, naturally), you can do that within seconds of launching this app

Cons:
• doesn’t handle some basic font styles like bold or italic
• no way to take notes or look up words
• limited layout options (what is has are nice, but there aren’t many)

Based on the suggestions users are making on the app’s user forums, there are some other missing features that could limit its usefulness to some users: there’s no way to drag and drop files into it using iTunes, and it can’t handle really large (1000+ titles) libraries.

I’ve been using it for a few days, and I’ve found that for basic reading and public domain book discovery, I’m pretty happy with it. However, if I’m doing a closer reading of a book—which often includes taking notes, highlighting passages, making lots of bookmarks, and looking up unfamiliar words—I much prefer to use iBooks or the Kindle app.

Best free bet: iBooks

Pros:
• free
• simple but elegant UI
• handles PDF files as well

Cons:
• not many customization features
• no access to catalogs–only the terrible iBooks Store, which you should avoid at all cost unless you like having your ebooks locked to iOS devices and nothing else (not Mac desktops)
• I’ve had trouble with the app running sluggishly if I add a lot of notes and highlights to a text.

To get EPUB files from other online catalogs into iBooks, you’ll have to access them from Mobile Safari, then choose iBooks when you download the file. Alternately, you can drag-and-drop non-DRMed files into the Books section of iTunes and sync that way. Fine, it’s not a great solution, but it’s free.

Not recommended (except perhaps for public library checkouts):

Bluefire is more or less useless to me. Its choice of catalogs is paltry and locked down, meaning you can’t add your own, and its key functionality—the ability to read titles locked to your Adobe Digital Editions account—is duplicated in other apps. You can annotate your books, but you can’t export any notes, which makes the feature rather pointless.

Overdrive is only good for accessing library ebooks and audiobooks, and it doesn’t offer basics like layout options, the ability to annotate, or a dictionary. If you use the Kindle app, and your library has the title in the Kindle format, you’ll find it’s a much better option—Amazon will back up your notes so you can access them later, and you can take advantage of the Kindle platform’s bookmark syncing.

(Image credits: casket, wickenden; frame, John Loo)