One of our readers (Neville) mailed in and asked my views on the iPhone as a book reader since he finds it indispensable and suggested we write a bit about it.

The developers of Books.app for the iPhone and lots more information about the program can be found here.I thought about it and decided to do just that. I have used Books.app on my iPhone and it is a great little app.

Although not officially available in South Africa, there is an active iPhone market in South Africa and of course, iPod Touch fans can take advantage of the same software. We are unlikely to see the Kindle anytime soon, but with the experience the iPhone or iPod Touch provides as a book reader, we may not miss it.

I used to use MobiPocket a lot on my Nokia e61 which I used before the iPhone. It was a great app but on opening up Books.app, the first thing that will strike you is that no screenful of text on any device has looked this good. The iPhone’s text rendering is nothing short of gorgeous.

The screenshot is slightly pixelated so doesn’t quite do it it justice, but even in the pic above, you can tell that this is a lot better than your average mobile/handheld device.

To use Books.app, the iPhone or iPod Touch must be jailbroken. I am not going to go into how to do that here – that’s a topic for another day but it is a process of minutes these days, and simple enough for anybody to do.

Once jailbroken, Books.app can be downloaded via Installer.

It’s fairly light, just a few hundred kilobytes and a few seconds and you are done.

Fire it up and you are greeted by the first problem. The library is empty. No sample books at all. Back to installer and into the eBooks category and you can pick from a collection of crap titles which all happen to be freeware. Well, not all crap since I found the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes right up front. A quick download later and voila – a readable book on the iPhone’s beautiful screen.

But the selection of Books on Installer is very. very poor so somebody needs to set up a repository for books from Gutenberg or something ASAP.

Books.app takes all the interface elements away and presents you with just the text. You scroll in the iPhone way by flicking up or down. Scrolling is smooth and stylish. Tap the page and you get some options that come up.

The title button the top left will take you back to your library, the gear is the settings (screehshot below), the progress bar is a quick way to jump to different parts of the book, while at the bottom we have buttons for font size, screen colour and navigation adjustments.

In my settings I have chosen to invert the text to White text on Black. I think this looks better and has the benefit of not bathing the room in light when you read in bed next to the missus.

You can see here the quality of text rendering on the iPhone especially in larger weights. It is beautifully readable. These are some of the settings you can change.

You can use any font installed on the iPhone as the font for your reading. I find stock standard Helvetica works well enough and can’t say I have been tempted to try this option.

As nice as Books.app is, the big issue is the shlep you have to go through to get books on the phone. In short, there is no simple way to do it. You have to connect using a client like Fugu and copy books into the /Media/eBooks directory.

Books.app can only read books in .txt, .htm or .html format, so no pdf’s.

If you can queue up a few books then that’s great since you only have to do this every now and then but you can still have a large library on your phone whenever you need it. Unlike music and video, books are very small so you could have dozens and not significantly impact your storage space.

Many of these problems should be solved when official iPhone apps using the SDK are released come June. So I can’t really fault Books.app for being hard to use because transferring books to the phone is pain. They are doing what they can in the absence of an approved, easy way of getting data onto the iPhone.

For those who know where to go on IRC, there is a huge library of books available to download in HTML format, perfect for the iPhone. A quick scan revealed a fairly large percentage of the Amazon Top Sellers freely available.

If you are looking for legally available stuff, this is a good site.

Books.app is a great effort and i only hope that the developers continue to develop the app with the SDK so that we can continue to enjoy the iPhone and iPod Touch as a book reader.

Tags: Apple, book reader, books, iPhone books, iPhone reading, iPod Touch, review