Reading eBooks

I’m not really the avid book reader that just has to get their hands on the next book and can’t put it down until I finish it. It’s quite possible that one of the only books I had read cover to cover was The Dilbert Principle and can’t exactly remember what most of it said, but sure it was I book I got when I was a teen and nowadays it might make more sense than it did back then.

But recently I got a membership for Safari Books Online thanks to my employer and began reading a bit more into technical books, which I’m really hating that they usually start with some really boring stuff and then, chapters later, get into the real stuff I began reading the book for in the first place. Aside from that my therapist recommended that I read The Single Woman and I didn’t want to get the physical book so I looked into getting the ebook version, but was still deciding whether to get it through Apple iBooks or Amazon Kindle when the author announced that there was a big discount on the Kindle version and that sealed the deal.

But after finishing that book, and taking a long time to do so but more on that in another post, I wanted to read more books that would be interesting and just to get into the habit of reading. I had a mixed environment with regards to mobile devices where my phone was iOS and my tablet was Android, so that meant that I couldn’t exactly use iBooks and Kindle was a better option, of course there was the Google Play Books but I wasn’t about to add more to the mix.

I ended up going with the Kindle for my phone and tablet, well mostly the tablet, because I found it to be better and more flexible. My tablet did need an upgrade as it was falling behind with running Android 4.0.4 and being annoying in some areas with apps that just didn’t work as expected. So for the upgrade I decided to go with the Apple iPad mini 4 as it was just the right size and it included iOS 9, which means that it’ll be in service for a couple of years. Really liked that tablet and have enjoyed using it for the past week since I got it.

Because I now had an iOS tablet I was able to try iBooks so I downloaded one of the free ebooks, The New Girl, but it looked a bit awkward and wasn’t that great to read on that app so I looked it up on Kindle and found that it was also free so I downloaded it and compared the two.

The above screenshot was taken on my iPad in the app switch view. I much prefer the way the Kindle displays the page, this is obviously not the default but the app allows for a lot of customization to how I prefer. The iBooks app also allows for some customization but isn’t as flexible end even making the font smaller doesn’t match the way the Kindle app looks. Safe to say that it feels more like reading an actual book.

So I’ll continue to read The New Girl on the Kindle app and will continue to use that one. Hopefully the Safari Books app will get better over time and look a lot closer to the Kindle app so it makes it easier to read the books as the current way it looks is a bit annoying.