Archive for the ‘kobo ipad app’ tag
Kobo integrates Instapaper into its iDevice apps no comments
Kobo has updated its reading app for the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch today. One of the new features is the integration of Instapaper into the Kobo ereading application. Instapaper lets you save text and articles from web pages to read later. Instapaper content will be synced across your iDevices.
The update also adds Kobo’s new Reading Life social reading feature to the iPad.
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Kobo Coupons; Kobo iPhone & iPad Update no comments
Kobo has released some coupons for the following ebooks:
- “The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest” by Stieg Larsson – $1.50 off with coupon code GIRLKICKED
- “61 Hours” by Lee Child – $1.50 off with coupon code 61HOURS
- “Blockade Billy” by Stephen King – $1.50 off with coupon code BLOCKADE
- “Frankenstein: Lost Souls” by Dean Koontz – $1.50 off with coupon code FRANKENSTEIN
- Any Harlequin title – $1.00 off with coupon code 1harlequin
These coupons are good through July 31, 2010 at KoboBooks.com.
Kobo has also today released a new version of its iPhone and iPad app. The new eBooks by Kobo app replaces the Kobo HD app for the iPad. What’s new in version 3.0:
- Rich text and images support added for iPhone
- Pre-bundled classics added for iPhone to get you started right away
- Enhanced book navigation
At first glance the new features are mainly improvements to the iPhone app. On the iPad now all of the books on your library shelf have covers (before some public domain covers were blank and untitled). Also, the navigation scrollbar before only worked to navigate within individual chapters – now it quickly scrolls through the whole book.
The eBooks by Kobo app is free at the iTunes app store.
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Kindle for iPad, iPhone Update – Kobo to Follow; New Photo App no comments
Amazon today updated the Kindle for iPhone and iPad apps. New in version 2.1:
- Bigger fonts and more font sizes on iPad
- Easier and faster navigation between home and archived items on iPad
- Search in book – iPhone only for now
- Download progress and percentage display
Amazon also lists some items to be added in the next release:
- Dictionary with 250,000 entries
- Look up words in Google and Wikipedia
- Search in book on iPad
This seems to be something of a stop-gap release until the next one which
promises much more. More font sizes are of course nice – and the new largest size font will be helpful for those with visual impairments.
The in-book search and the lookup trifecta when it arrives on the iPad will be welcome. I would also like to see an auto-scrolling feature like the Wattpad reading app has. This may sound frivolous, but it comes in handy when reading in bed or with your iPad on a stand. The iPad is heavy, and it is nice to be able to prop it against a pillow and have the page scroll down as you read. I can’t believe Wattpad is the only one of the ereading apps to include this feature so far (unless I’ve missed something).
Another feature I would like: both the Wattpad and the Barnes & Noble reading app for the iPad allow you to choose background and text color. As I have noted before, reading on an LCD does stress my eyes after a while. The night mode helps a lot, but in my case a blue font on a dark background really works well. Sounds strange? Well, if you can choose your own colors you can find what works best for your eyes.
Kobo also released some sort of minor update to their reading app a few days ago, although I have not spotted any changes – whatever improvements there are seem to be under the hood. The blurb for the update (Version 1.0.3) says “Prepares library for upcoming Kobo iPhone & iPad update that includes amazing new features and stability improvements.” So it looks like Kobo will be releasing a substantial update to their reading app soon as well.
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This has nothing to do with ereading on the iPad, but there is an interesting
looking photo editing app for the iPad from Tiffen that was announced today. In addition to simulations of many of Tiffen’s glass photographic filters Photo fx Ultra has a lot of features:
- Choose from 68 filters organized into 7 different filter groups
- Select from a total of 836 presets
- Try one of the 65 different color or black and white film looks
- Add realistic diffusion to photos using a library of 50 interesting textures
- Create natural lighting effects using 117 different patterns
- Choose from 27 grain presets to simulate popular motion picture film stocks
- Add multiple filters without saving
- Selectively apply filters by painting a mask
- Modify filters with sliders, on-screen controls or presets
- High resolution support up to 2048 pixels
- Edit in portrait or landscape mode
- Crop, Rotate, Straighten
- Zoom into the image with the Close-Up Lens filter
- Compatibility with the still image editions of the Tiffen Dfx Digital Filter software
- Quickly search for filters and presets
- Integrated Help
I have not bought this one yet – I’m still waiting for the camera connection kit to be in stock so I can connect my camera directly to the iPad, but this is one app I will be looking at. Photo fx Ultra is $5.99 at the iTunes app store.
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Ereader and iPad News – 5/27/2010 no comments
Kindle coming in black? CrunchGear has a rather poor quality photo that alleges to be a black Kindle spotted at a photo shoot. It makes sense that Amazon would offer color choices at some point.
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Borders announced its financial results for the first quarter of 2010 today. While the second largest bookstore chain saw its loss narrow in the first quarter, traffic and sales in its stores fell. Revenue in the US fell 16 percent. Border’s share price fell 7 percent today in an up market.
Borders is placing a lot of hope in its digital initiatives. Borders.com was in fact a bright spot in the first quarter with sales increasing by 34.7 percent. The Kobo-powered Borders ebook store will be launching next month, and pre-orders are already being taken for the Kobo eReader. Next week pre-orders for a second ereader will begin and more devices will be added in the near future. An Apple reading app will also be introduced by the end of June.
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Penguin and Amazon have finally reached some sort of agreement and Penguin’s new ebooks will once again be available in the Kindle Store. Since the Agency Model went into effect on April 1, 2010 none of the 150 or so new Penguin ebooks published since then have been available for the Kindle.
Ipad News
Kobo announced today that its iPad reading app is now available in all iPad markets with regionalized versions available for Canada, UK, Australia and a version for New Zealand coming soon. From the press release:
Kobo, a global eReading service, today announced availability of its popular iPad application in all markets where iPad is available. Additionally, Kobo today released regional versions for Canada, UK and Australia and announced a New Zealand application is coming soon. The regionalized applications, built specifically for the iPad, feature local content, merchandising, and currency. All Kobo iPad applications come pre-loaded with five eBooks and connect to the Kobo eBook store, which features more than two million titles including current best sellers, classics, and thousands of free titles.
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Wired Magazine finally released its app for the iPad, and reportedly sold 24,000 copies in the first 24 hours. The Wired app looks pretty amazing, but it is a big file (about half a gig) and costs $5 per issue – a print subscription in the US is $10 per year. The reviews at the iTunes store do contain some grousing about the price, but obviously a lot of work went into this. This is the way magazines should be done. So far I like it.
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MacLife is reporting that Apple is making it possible for authors to self-publish in the iBooks app for the iPad. There are some requirements: books have to have a 13 digit ISBN, must be in ePub format, must validate against epubcheck 1.0.5 and cannot contain any unmanifested files. Authors can choose which countries qualifying books are sold in and set the prices.
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Kobo on the iPad no comments
Kobo’s ereading app for the iPad lets you tweak the appearance of your reading experience quite a bit.
With the Kobo iPad appyou can view your library in a thumbnail with details view or with the by now familiar bookshelves. But Kobo adds the option of choosing from seven different styles of bookshelves.
You also have eight different bookmark styles to choose from – including a dead trout, which sounds shocking but is actually kind of cool. There are also four different page turning styles to choose from.
You can, as in the other iPad reading apps I’ve tried so far, adjust the brightness from within the app. Kobo provides a black text on white background or a Night Reading mode that gives you white text on a black background. I find the latter is much easier on my eyes when reading for extended periods.
Kobo gives you four fonts to choose from, three of which feel bolded. The largest font size is a little larger than the Kindle for iPad app which should make it easier to read for those with vision impairments.
Pagination in the Kobo app is a little different. An example would be “CHAPTER 2 – 2 of 51” which would be the second of fifty one pages of chapter 2. This can be a bit of a hassle if you are reading the same ebook on more than one non-synced devices and have to search for your last read page. Reading apps on the iPad have a slider bar you can access at the bottom of the page for rapid movement forward and backward in the book. Kobo’s slider, at least in the ebooks in my Kobo account, just moves you back and forth within each chapter.
There are no search, dictionary, note taking or annotation features in Kobo’s app, at least at this time. To look a word up in a dictionary you can exit the Kobo app and search on the Internet, or you could install Dictionary.com’s free app which does not need an Internet connection.
For some reason, one ebook that was in my Kobo account is shown in my Kobo app’s library on the iPad but I cannot open it. If I try to access it I get an error message – “Content not Available … we’re working as fast as we can to make this available soon.” I can open this book on my ereader, so not sure what the problem is. Judging by this, if you have a lot of books in your Kobo library you may not be able to access all of them on the iPad just yet.
Update: As of 4/7/2010 all of my ebooks are available, so it looks like Kobo has fixed this.
I like the ability to personalize the Kobo ereading app, but they do need to work on adding the missing study tools.
It is too early to tell how popular the Ipad will be for long form, immersive reading. With the iPad we will have access to the largest ebook stores on one device (still waiting for the Barnes & Noble iPad app – so far only their iPhone app is available). Thanks to the agency model imposed by the publishers the various ebook sellers with apps on the iPad will not be able to compete on ebook prices. So they will need to compete with the amount and variety of content they offer (Kindle Store wins here) and with the excellence of their reading apps. Having an app that is able to sync with other devices, including dedicated ereaders, will also be a great advantage.
So far all of the reading apps I’ve tried are fast and all have things to like, but each one also has some missing features and all have room for improvement – but then the iPad has only been out for three days.
Reading apps on the iPad need to have a night reading mode (Kindle and Kobo do) for those of us whose eyes are bothered by extended reading on the backlit screen. Dictionaries, search, go to, note taking and annotation features need to be standard as well.
As for reading on the iPad in general, after using it continuously over the weekend, I have to say that for long form reading e-ink is still better for me. One does have to wonder though if it makes sense any longer to buy one of the larger format ereaders such as the DX, Skiff or Que (providing that the latter two are even released) at their current or proposed prices.
For portable content handling I have at the moment (besides my smartphone) a netbook, iPad and three ereaders.
- The netbook seems best suited for content creation.
- The iPad is best for multimedia content consumption, Web browsing and reading magazines and newspapers.
- The dedicated ereaders are best for more than casual book reading.
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Kobo Demos iPad App no comments
Kobo has a preliminary video of their iPad app, though they will need to test it on actual iPads at launch time and make any necessary adjustments. Also it remains to be seen whether or not Apple will indeed let other book reading apps onto the iPad.
Kobo says that on the iPad their ebooks will be presented “as intended by the author, editor and publisher” and indicates that fonts and images from the original pbook will be preserved.
It appears from the video that the screen brightness can be adjusted from within the reading app, and a night reading mode with white characters on a black background is available.
No word yet on what study tools such as note taking, annotating, etc. might be included in Kobo’s iPad app.
£149.00
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