Buying an ebook ought to end with something uncomplicated: just start reading.
That simple idea has been behind a substantial rebuilding program at eBooks.com. Over the past year we have introduced a new browser-based Online Reader, added support for the excellent Thorium desktop reader, and now we’ve launched completely new eBooks.com apps for iOS and Android.
These new mobile apps are the latest step in that process.
Although they are new, they’re not exactly untested. We have kept the fanfare fairly quiet while the apps spent several months in the hands of real readers. During that time we collected feedback, watched how people actually used them, fixed things that irritated people and refined hundreds of small details.
Our aim was not to create an app bristling with features simply because we could.
The aim is to make reading ebooks simple, comfortable and pleasurable.
The software should disappear
Good reading software should mostly get out of the way. You should be able to open a book, find your place, adjust the page if you want to, and then forget about the application altogether. That sounds obvious. Achieving it can be difficult.
The new eBooks.com apps were designed around the principle of intuitive simplicity. Navigation is deliberately straightforward. Reading controls are easy to find. Books open quickly. The interface is restrained rather than crowded.
There is plenty of technology underneath it all. We just don’t think readers should have to wrestle with it.
If you’d like a clean alternative to Kindle or Google Play Books, this new release brings a highly optimized reading experience. Key features include:
- Modern Page Rendering Engine
Built on the Colibrio engine for seamless page layouts and lightning-fast loading. - Deep Accessibility Integration
Full TalkBack and VoiceOver compatibility, system-level accessibility compliance, and highly adjustable page layout settings. - Cloud-Synced Reading
Instantly maps highlights, comments, current page location, and bookmarks across multiple devices. - Interoperability
Now you can read the ebooks you bought from eBooks.com on any other app or device that supports Readium LCP.
Make the page yours
There is no single perfect way to display a book. Some people like a traditional serif typeface and generous margins. Others prefer sans serif text, larger type, tighter margins or more space between lines. Some read during the day; others want a gentler screen late at night.
So the new apps give you extensive control over the reading page.
You can adjust things such as typeface, text size, line spacing, margins, alignment and colours, while still allowing a publisher’s original design to shine through where appropriate.
This becomes particularly important for books that are more than straightforward flowing text. Fixed-layout books, illustrated titles, academic works and other sophisticated ebooks often depend heavily upon their original design.
Our aim is to respect the publisher’s design while still giving the reader control wherever the format allows it.
Accessibility isn’t a special feature
Accessibility was part of the design of the apps from the beginning rather than something added at the end.
The apps integrate with the accessibility technologies already built into iOS and Android, including VoiceOver and TalkBack, and give readers considerable freedom to customise typography and page layout.
That benefits people with visual impairments, dyslexia and other reading difficulties—but it also benefits everybody else.
Larger text is useful when your eyes are tired. More line spacing may simply make a dense textbook easier to read. A different typeface might be more comfortable on a small phone.
Good accessibility often turns out simply to be good design.
Novels are easy. We do the challenging files too.
Most ebook readers can display a novel. The harder challenge is everything else.
The new apps support EPUB 3 and PDF and have been designed to cope with the extraordinary variety of material that publishers now produce digitally.
That includes textbooks, professional and scholarly works, fixed-layout ebooks, illustrated books, mathematical content, multimedia, two-page spreads and manga—including right-to-left reading.
In other words, whether you’re reading a 300-page thriller on the train or working your way through a complicated university textbook, the same app should be at home with it. And yes, manga looks rather gorgeous.
Read on your phone, computer or browser
The mobile apps are also part of something larger.
Earlier this year we launched a completely rebuilt eBooks.com’s Online Reader, allowing you to read directly in a web browser without installing anything.
We subsequently added support for Thorium Reader, the excellent open-source desktop ebook application available for Windows, macOS and Linux.
And now the new eBooks.com apps cover iPhone, iPad and Android. That gives you several ways to read your ebooks from eBooks.com:
Mobile
The new eBooks.com apps for iOS and Android
Web
The eBooks.com Online Reader (read online without downloading or installing anything)
Desktop
Thorium Reader (desktop download)
And, yes, there is DRM
We know that three letters can provoke unusually strong feelings among some ebook readers: DRM.
DRM stands for “Digital Rights Management”, which essentially means limitations that a book publisher puts on what a reader can do with the ebooks they buy. It involves tricky bits of encryption and obfuscation that prevent you from sending ebook files to your 500 closest friends. It’s an anti-piracy measure really. In the earliest days of ebooks (1990s) publishers were looking on in horror at what had happened to the music industry. They sure as heck didn’t want to see their industry shrink to a quarter of its size due to rampant file sharing.
Those feelings are understandable. But the solutions they put in place to prevent piracy were clunky and very limiting for end users. Many readers would prefer to buy an ebook, download an ordinary file and read it forever using whatever software or device they choose. Physical books don’t stop working because a particular application disappears, and it’s reasonable for people to want some of that same freedom with their digital books.
Publishers, meanwhile, have legitimate concerns about making commercially valuable books available as completely unrestricted digital files that can be copied indefinitely.
Those two positions are difficult to reconcile completely.
We can’t make DRM disappear from books whose publishers require it. What we can do is try very hard to make it less intrusive.
That is one reason we have adopted Readium LCP. LCP provides the content protection publishers require, but it is built around open publishing technologies rather than tying an ebook exclusively to one retailer’s proprietary reading system.
The key here is that DRM should not become the main event. You shouldn’t need to understand how the security system works in order to read your book. You shouldn’t have to think about licences and encryption every time you turn a page.
Our investment in LCP, Thorium, the Online Reader and our new mobile apps is an honest an attempt to make digital reading more open and more pleasant—even in a world where DRM remains a commercial reality.
We think we’ve made meaningful progress.
Built properly for both iPhone and Android
There is another detail that technology-minded readers may appreciate.
The iOS and Android versions of eBooks.com aren’t simply one generic application squeezed into two different operating systems; they are separate native apps, built specifically for their respective platforms.
That means each app can make proper use of the features, accessibility services and interface conventions of the device it is running on, while still giving readers essentially the same eBooks.com experience on both platforms.
It also gives us a much better foundation for what comes next.
This is not the finished product
Software is never really finished.
One of the benefits of our quiet launch period has been discovering some things that matter to readers, but seemed minor when we were designing the apps—and occasionally discovering that something we thought was terribly clever wasn’t especially useful at all.
That feedback has already shaped the apps, and it will continue to do so.
We have spent the past year rebuilding much of the reading environment around eBooks.com. The result is a modern reading platform spanning mobile, desktop and the web, built around accessibility, open standards and reader choice. But the underlying objective remains much simpler:
Find a book.
Buy it.
Open it.
And enjoy reading it.
