Saturday, July 20, 2013

eBook Cloud Readers Gain Popularity

Untitled-1

When it comes to reading eBooks, many people are in two different camps. In one, you have the dedicated e-Ink crowd, that tends to buy the Kindle Paperwhite or Kobo Aura HD. In the other, you have tablet owners that download apps to read all of their books. There actually has been a 3rd option for the last year, but no one really talks about it and the companies fail to promote it. I am of course talking about online eBook readers, that allow you to buy and read books online.

Amazon Cloud Reader, Kobo Cloud Reader, Nook for Web, Zinio, Overdrive and PressDisplay all  offer the ability to buy and read content on the web. This goes beyond a simple website and instead gives you an HTML5 reading solution. Most of these services are responsive, which means if you have a 4 inch phone or a 10 inch tablet, they optimize to your screen size. There are plenty of cool features such as the ability to change the font, margin, linespacing, look words up in the dictionary, make notes and do highlights. Any changes you make in the online book, will automatically be synced to your favorite online reading app. For example, if you use the Kindle Cloud Reader and make five highlights, these changes will be evident in Kindle for Android or iOS.

Cloud Readers as a whole are getting more popular. Barnes and Noble recently discontinued Nook for PC and Nook for MAC and encouraging people to gravitate towards their cloud reading platform. This is the only company to really put an emphasis on the technology. The others, mainly use it to bypass Apple restrictions on in-app purchases, since its all done through the web-browser and purchases synced to your main app account, quite clever.

In this review, we take a look at most of the popular cloud readers and give you our take on the different features they bring to the table. Some are more advanced than others, and some just fail to load or crash constantly.


eBook Cloud Readers Gain Popularity is a post from: E-Reader News

No comments:

Post a Comment