E-book apps: Which are your faves, which do you hate, and which publishers allow ePub extraction?
Now that e-book apps for the iPhone/Touch are so common, what are you favorites—from both tech and content perspectives?
Which are good as both books, or quasi-books, and which stink? And which show the most imaginative use of the app feature?
The ePub extraction issue
For virtually all apps, I believe that ePub extraction capability is a “must.”
O’Reilly has released 17 more app books., all allowing users to extract ePub files, and the company’s Andrew Savikas says: “Many more are on the way. (Typo corrected: 17, not 27.) Shown is an earlier O’Reilly app book, an iPhone manual.
I invite other publishers to use our comments section to mention their own offerings with extraction capability. I’d hope O’Reilly wasn’t the only one.
Of course, I’d love to see the process automated—and coordinated with e-reader apps, using common standards. With just a few taps, you should be able to import the content of an e-book app into Stanza or whatever, then delete the app itself—at least when there are not technical obstacles, which might arise with some books offering sophisticated interactivity.
O’Reilly’s Safari Books Online (m.safaribooksonline.com). Though I generally prefer real apps to web apps, this web app has a killer feature not found in other iPhone e-book readers: clipboard support.
Universalis is interesting because it is an infinitely long e-book – different content for every day of every year, for ever – packaged into a downloadable application that’s about 4MB.
Since e-book readers aren’t programmable, there’s no way Universalis can be a straightforward ePub e-book. But we’ve given the Windows version of the app the option to create ePub or Mobipocket private e-books containing the Universalis content for any day (31KB), week (210KB), or month (850KB) of the user’s choice, infinitely far into the future. In that sense we’re selling an unlimited e-book synthesizer for non-programmable platforms, packaged into an e-book app for programmable ones.
It means we don’t have to sell subscriptions, and social DRM on the generated e-book files is enough to keep us happy.
More about it here.
We haven’t done something similar with the iPhone version because it’s a little hard to see where the generated ePubs should go – if you know, tell us and we’ll think about it. On the other hand, we operate a “one licence for all platforms” policy, so an owner of the iPhone version can use the Windows version free in any case.