E-Reading with iOS
Back in high school we used to always get assigned summer reading that we had to do before classes started up in the fall. One summer, before my senior year, there were three assigned books. I only remember one of them: Crime and Punishment. I remembering thinking it was a “crime” that they were making me read such a long book over the summer and that it was “punishment” for something I didn’t remember doing. Actually, I really enjoyed the book once I got into it.
I don’t remember if e-readers were a thing back then. If they were, they probably weren’t a big deal. I remember every summer it was impossible to get the summer reading books from the library, so you often had to just buy them. That summer though, I used Project Gutenberg. I had been downloading and reading free, out of copyright, books from them for a while at that point. They offered many classics in several formats including plain text. At the time, I would load the plain text onto my Palm Pilot and read books that way. It actually worked better for me because I could read a little bit anywhere I was even if just for a few minutes, and I didn’t have to carry around a huge book like Crime and Punishment.
For one reason or another, I don’t read quite that much these days. When I do, I tend to prefer physical books only because I find it easier on my eyes. That being said, there are lots of options for reading books on iPads or iPhones. Obviously, you can use the iBooks app, but you can also download the Kindle app. A lot of the things I end up reading these days are PDFs of academic articles or copies of old magazines. Did you know that iBooks can open those too? You can simply drag PDFs you want to read to your iCloud Drive and then they’ll show up in both iCloud Drive and in iBooks.
I don’t think I have a preference between the iBooks and Kindle apps. There have been a few books I wanted to buy that weren’t in iBooks, so I had to buy them in Kindle, and there have been others that were cheaper in iBooks. Both apps work about the same and have similar features. I haven’t gotten to try either of them since the new Night Shift feature was added to iOS. I wonder if that will make them easier on the eyes.
Of course, with both iBooks and Kindle, there are OS X equivalents if you just have to read whatever you’re reading on your Mac. I tried it briefly with one book I bought, but it really doesn’t work that well for me. The form factor of the iPad Air/Pro is really great for reading in my opinion.
I’ll probably still continue to prefer physical books over e-books in most situations, but I have to admit, I enjoy the convenience factor when it comes to e-books.