Best Free eBook Reader for iOS

Books are gateways into other worlds. They are designed to captivate you and bring you on an otherworldly adventure. Books are timeless treasures designed to make ideas last forever. 

Right now we are experiencing a digital revolution between paper books and eBooks. I love eBooks because they let me carry around a small library in my hands. I swear I have about seventy-five to eighty books on my iPad!

But what is the best eBook Reader? There are plenty of apps to choose from and it's my pleasure to compare these apps and give you what I think is the best.

iBooks is the default reader by Apple. It's a beautiful app that is very user-friendly. Since Apple updated it to iBooks 2.0, it has only gotten better. You can buy books directly within the application. The interface is a lovely wooden bookcase where your books are neatly lined up.

Right up top is the Store button. When you press the button, the whole bookcase flips and brings you to Apple's BookStore. When you open a book, there are several buttons on the upper left of each page. In the page layout you can control how bright or dim the page is, whether you want big or small letters, and choose between seven fonts. You can also choose a Theme. There is Normal, Sepia, and Night. Normal is the regular white page with black letters. Sepia is a little easier on the eyes, with a cream page and sepia (brown) letters. The last choice, Night, turns the page black with white letters. This is awesome to use at night because is greatly reduces the light shining in your eyes from the screen, but it's also cool to use in the daytime. You can also choose between Full Screen and Regular.

There is a magnifying glass where you can search the book for a certain page or a word/phrase. And finally there is a bookmark symbol to mark the page where you left off. When you close the book and then reopen it, it automatically opens to the bookmarked page, which is very handy.

iBooks is especially nice because it shows the actual page turning when you swipe your finger, giving you the illusion of a real book. However, iBooks only supports ePub, PDF, and books created in iBooks Author, which is iBooks and published as .iba.

The Kindle reader is another popular app. The user interface is very easy to use. Amazon recently updated the app a day or two ago. Before the update, the background was the silhouette of a small boy sitting at the foot of a tree reading a book. It was also slightly animated. During the day, the sky in the background would be blue; at dusk it would have a sunset with oranges and yellows, and at night it would be dark blue/black with stars and the occasional meteor that would streak through the sky. With the update however it's just a dark gray background.

The Kindle app is designed to work with your Amazon account. It supports AWZ, MOBI, PDF, TXT, and ePub book formats.

Opening a book gives you a simple user interface with buttons at the bottom. Like iBooks, you can choose between White, Black (Night), and Sepia page colors, big or small text, Brightness/Dim control; and you can search for page numbers and words/phrases. There is also a bookmark button on the upper left.

Stanza is not only a user friendly ebook reader, but also a good organizer as it automatically classifies your collection of books by titles, authors and groups so that you can get one to read from the library easily. In the book list, it helpfully shows your reading progress of each book.

This app supports various ebook formats including ePub, PDF, eReader, Comic Book Archive (CRB and CBZ) and DjVu. Besides getting book titles from online stores, you can also transfer ebooks from a PC to your mobile device by simply dragging and dropping them into the File Sharing section in iTunes.

Your reading experience can be fun and interesting with Stanza as it has probably the most user settings among free eBook readers including Apple's iBooks.

In page layout, you can set paragraph alignment, margins, spacing and indent; In appearance, you can set a theme, day/night mode, font type and size, background color, text and link color. You can even select a picture from your Photo Album for your page background at any degree of transparency you prefer.

User controls are not lacking either as you can set page-turn effects, vertical swipe to adjust screen brightness, left/right screen tap to go to the previous or next page, or pinch and spread to adjust font size.

Nook is an eBook app by Barnes & Noble. You must have a Barnes & Noble account to use the app. Every user automatically gets five or six free eBooks when they sign in. The books are classics, such as Little Women, Pride and Prejudice, Dracula, etc. The layout is very similar to other book apps. When you open a book, there are several buttons on the page. You can control the brightness, text size, Normal, Night, or Sepia theme, different fonts, search for words and page numbers, and make bookmarks.

Unlike iBooks and Kindle, the Nook app lets you control the line spacing, margin size, and whether to turn justification on/off and also publisher defaults. Justification is a certain alignment of the text. It basically centers the text in the middle, to make it line up along both the left and the right margins. I turned on publisher's defaults, but it only seems to change the shape of the text.

The Nook app supports ePub and PDF formats.

Google Play Books, formerly known as Google Books, is similar to Nook. You need a Google account to sign into the app. When you first sign in, you receive three free books. I'm not sure if it's different for everyone or the same, but the books I got were Wuthering Heights, The Three Musketeers, and Treasure Island. All good books in my opinion.

When you open a book, it shows the flip animation like iBooks does, so when you slide your finger the page turns. Called 3D Page Turn, you can switch it on or off. At the bottom it shows your progress, showing you what page you're on and how many pages in the book. I forgot to mention this but it does this in the other readers as well.

In Settings, you choose between Day and Night (white and black, respectively), the typeface or font, text size, line height. You can also choose between Flowing Text and Scanned Pages. This is very cool because when you choose Scanned Pages, it presents the pages as they would be in a paper book, which is something that none of the other apps did. Flowing Text is just the regular eBook view.

Google Play Books support the ePub and PDF formats.

Conclusion

All of these apps are very good for what they were designed for: reading eBooks. Personally, my favorites are iBooks and Kindle, but to each his own. The Best Free eBook Reader for iOS in my opinion is Kindle. It offers a great and easy-to-use interface, and the Kindle Store offers more books than iBookstore. A lot of people will use iBooks simply because it comes preloaded into every iDevice. But for those of you who want to make your own choice, I hope this article helped you on your reading journey.

If you have any questions, comments or criticisms leave them below and I'll be happy to answer them.

You might want to check out these articles too:

• Best Free eBook Reader for Android
• Best Free iPad Apps
• Best Free iPhone Apps
• Best Free Android Apps

This software category is maintained by volunteer editor orrandrew. Registered members can contact the editor with any comments or questions they might have by clicking here.

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