Why Buy Kobo over iBooks?
From the company blog:
Here’s a quick snapshot of what makes the Kobo iPad app rock:
- It’s FREE: We want everyone to be able to enjoy Kobo on the iPad.
- Full use of iPad’s large screen: The app provides an immersive eReading experience.
- Original books – no standardizing of content: For the first time, all books read on the iPad will be full ePub files, as intended by the author, editor and publisher. We also offer a feature that will let you apply our hand-tuned, optimized reading experience).
- Anytime, anywhere reading: Reading offline is now easier than ever. In the Kobo iPad app, offline is the default, so the book is always on your device.
- Add your own flair: Personalize your bookshelf with nifty designs and pick one of our eight unique bookmarks (we like the monkeys the best) or custom book shelves. We’ve already been getting requests
- Read the books you’ve already bought: We broke all our sales records in the last few days, so we know a lot of you have been buying new books. You can read those on your iPad without having to buy again from those ‘other guys’.
Some other things, from my own notes:
- The Kobo platform is device agnostic. You can take your content anywhere on a lot of different devices: iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, Android, Palm Pre, the Kobo eReader and any Flash-capable web browser.
- Everything you buy will follow you around and across different physical devices: sign in on your iPad, all your books will start downloading right away.
- A clean, simple user interface, with the content front and center. We believe that being an e-reader app doesn’t necessitate the use of a real-world-book-emulation interface.
- Multiple bookmarks (we call them ‘dogears’, since you fold down a page corner to activate them). Highlighting, annotations, dictionary lookups all coming soon, although the latter might just require that Apple opens up access to the OS X Dictionary lookup APIs which they seem to be using in iBooks.
- Last time I checked, we have more publishers signed up to provide us with content than Apple does. And we’re not severing ties with any of them because of the iPad either.
If you want to see more, grab the app and try it out (it’s free) or watch the video here.
