- What are eBooks?
- Understanding eBook File Formats
- Choosing an eBook Reader App
- Reading eBooks with iBooks
- Reading Books with the Kindle App
Choosing an eBook Reader App
All this talk of eBooks and eBook readers begs the question: How do you read eBooks on your iPhone? It’s actually pretty easy, if you have the right applications installed.
That’s right, you read eBooks on your iPhone via specific iPhone apps. There are several of these e-reader apps available, each designed to read a specific format of eBook. You can download and install a single app to read eBooks in a specific format, or install multiple e-reader apps to read eBooks in all available formats.
The most popular e-reader app for the iPhone is Apple’s own iBooks. Like all of these eBook apps, iBooks is a free download; you can find it in Apple’s App Store. iBooks reads eBooks in both EPUB and PDF formats, although its best suited for EPUB-format books, which flow automatically from page to page on your device’s screen. You can easily increase or decrease the size of the book’s text, and iBooks instantly reformats the pages accordingly.
You can purchase and download eBooks for iBooks from Apple’s iBookstore. This is a subsidiary of the iTunes Store, with more than 150,000 EPUB-format books available. You can also download EPUB books from other online sits.
iBooks isn’t the only e-reader app for the iPhone, however. Also popular is Amazon’s Kindle for iPhone app, downloadable for free from Apple’s App Store. The Kindle app works much like iBooks, but lets you read Kindle’s MOBI-format eBooks. (The Kindle app is also compatible with PDF-format books, but not with EPUB books.) You can order Kindle books from Amazon directly from the Kindle app.
If you want an alternative to iBooks for reading EPUB-format eBooks, there are a few options available. Both the B&N eReader and Stanza are free apps that read EPUB-format eBooks, both available from the App Store. The B&N eReader is particularly nice in that it lets you purchase and download EPUB books from Barnes and Noble’s NOOKbook Store, which has more than 2 million eBook titles available.
Avid readers will find that they need at least two eBook apps installedone for EPUB-format books and then the Kindle app for MOBI books purchased from Amazon. Since all these e-reader apps work in similar fashion, it’s easy to switch from one to the other to read eBooks in a specific format.