Tech Away: Read on the go

All you bookworms in the house, put your hands in the air! Or you can just take your nose out of that book and look at what I found. Many think eReaders are the bane of society, that paper or hard-back books are the only way to enjoy reading. But if you are a serious book-lover, you want your fix, no matter where you are. Instead of lugging that huge special edition hard-bound copy of Pickwick Papers to the beach next time, here are a few apps you can download. Kindle Maybe you didn’t save up enough to buy that new Kindle you had your eye on, no biggie. Just download the app on your smartphone and you get all of Kindle’s goodness in your pocket. The app is one of the best out there for storing your books, syncing your purchases, bookmarks, notes, and furthest page read across devices. Customisation of reading preferences — font size, screen brightness, background colour, orientation — is easy, plus the app has a built-in dictionary, and Google and Wikipedia links. Apart from the millions of books, magazines and newspapers you can buy, the collection of free books is quite good and you get to discover some pretty decent unknown authors. Aldiko Book Reader Aldiko is great as a reader for your pdf and epub files. Import the books you want into the reader and they appear on a virtual shelf. The app is really comprehensive when it comes to organising by title, author, series or you can insert your own tag. You can download the kind of font you are most comfortable with and customising the app is fairly easy, if not as smooth as most other readers. It’s nothing fancy, just gives you a straightforward reading experience. Google Play Books A lot of us love the Google experience and Play Books gives us that in spades. It has all the features of a standard eReader and with fairly regular updates, the app is really easy to use — not just for reading, but also for buying books. You can also preview the first chapter of any book you’re considering buying. Of course, the flip side is that you cannot pick up a free ebook without entering your credit/debit card information. If you’re used to selecting a whole bunch of books at once, like I do, that can be a bit annoying. Of course, if you’ve already saved all your data to your Google account, it becomes easier. Mantano Reader Mantano is quite a popular app, incorporating more than just standard eReader features. One of the great things about the app is a boon for Type A personalities — great organisational features. You can index your books by authors, tags, ratings, collections, what have you. Its biggest attraction, of course, is being its own cloud service, just like Kindle ’s Whispersync. Moon+ Reader As someone who wants complete control over her reading experience, Moon+, as an app, gets a five-star rating from me. A lot of options — I mean a lot — make for brilliant reading. Easy control features, smooth interface, a dozen themes, sophisticated display options, five different scrolling methods, a range of gesture controls, backup/restore options to cloud via DropBox — I could go on. The app supports epub, mobi, chm, cbr, cbz, umd, fb2, txt, html, rar, zip as well as OPDS. Read on! The Hindu