If you’ve been enjoying Bunny Munro, and the experience of reading on your iPhone, we thought you might like a quick guide to reading more books on there…
There are a whole host of other reading applications for the iPhone, a lot of them based on public domain books, like the Classics app, which offers a selection of well-designed public domain titles like Alice in Wonderland (above), Robinson Crusoe, and Huckleberry Finn. But what if you want to read new books?
An increasing number of new books are being released in the epub format – which Enhanced Editions is also based on. Epub is an open format, meaning you can read it on a range of different platforms, including on your desktop and on the web – and of course, on your iPhone.
There’s a good range of epub-format books available from a variety of sources. For older books in the public domain (meaning they’re out of copyright as it’s more than 75 years since the authors’ death – although that provision varies by country), there are free sources like Feedbooks, which offers direct downloads, and Google Books recently added an epub download to many titles in its catalogue which are “full view” – meaning they’re also in the public domain.
But publishers are also releasing new books in the epub format – and through the traditional booksellers too. Waterstone’s in the UK and Barnes & Noble in the US both offer epub editions of new titles by publishers large and small – as does FictionWise, a dedicated ebook site (owned by B&N).
Our epub-reading app of choice is Stanza – and it’s free in the App Store. It’s simple and easy to use, stores your books and remembers where you are in each one. It also supports other formats, like .mobi, which you can buy from Amazons ebook store, mobipocket.
Once you’ve downloaded an epub file, getting it onto the iPhone is reasonably simple, using Stanza’s desktop client. It’s also possible to download books on the go directly onto the iphone, although we not aware of many paid-for ebook stores that currently support this – US-based ebooks.com is an exception, with a nice iphone-specific interface.
Hope that’s of interest to some of you, and happy reading!
Photo by tsmall, used under Creative Commons.
