Books

Yesterday we looked at real books so today it’s the turn of e-books. FBReader is an e-book reader based on the desktop application of the same name.

Although it’s currently at what sounds like a lowly version 0.7, the reading interface is slick and flawless. You have full control of the fonts and colours used – double control, in fact, because there is a day mode and a night mode, each of which retain their individual settings. Navigation between pages can be done by swiping the screen, but the more sensible option is using the volume buttons. For broader navigation, you can access the table of contents or set and jump between bookmarks.

When you come back to FBReader it immediately resumes exactly where you left off, and also remembers your place in any other books you’ve had open.

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It’s hard to know how to start a review of an application with a name so descriptive you know exactly what it is from the title. The standard cliche doesn’t work – Book Catalogue is a book catalogue application. Can’t write that. Somehow we seem to have got started though, so let’s move on.

More specifically, this is an application for building and maintaining an database of all your books – the old kind, made out of paper, rather than those new-fangled e-book things. There are three ways of adding a book, as follows:

If you have the excellent ZXing Barcode Scanner (review coming soon) installed, Book Catalogue will use that to let you scan the barcode directly. It then looks up all the details of the book, grabs a thumbnail of the cover if it can, leaving you to just fill in details like notes and location.

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