I like to read. After watching B-grade movies in the middle of the day while eating something I've melted cheese over, reading is just about my favourite thing to do.
I'm not overly fussy about WHAT I read. I prefer science fiction but I don't mind a tell-all biography either. Thrillers keep me turning pages, but I'm just as enthralled by a sexy vampire as the next guy. (That didn't sound weird at all, right?)
Unfortunately, I can get a bit OCD when it comes to a series of books. If I discover a new author I like, for some reason I'm suddenly compelled to read everything that person has ever penned. Immediately. This used to involve a lot of hanging about. Book stores would have me on back-order, I'd be on the waiting list at the library.
Thanks to the advent of the eBook, all that waiting is behind me now.
I was a fairly early adopter, eagerly taking the original Kobo eReader home with me and never looking back. Now with just a few clicks and not much money, I can download an entire author's back-catalogue for non-stop, volume-after-volume reading. Paradise. All totally portable too, of course. How convenient to be able to carry a virtual encyclopedia of pulp fiction around with me inside a device smaller than the hard copies of most of the books it contains.
Me being me though, I wasn't satisfied. As portable as the Kobo is, I don't always have it with me. Sometimes in life, there are opportunities to read another chapter of your book - waiting rooms, slow moving queues, at work. Of course, as with cameras, now we can carry our library around in our phones.
Is it really possible to read a book on your phone? Is the screen big enough? Is there an interface "booky" enough for it to seem natural? How difficult is it to physically GET the books INTO your phone?
Well I've done it and it's actually pretty good.
As usual, I tried eReading on both the Samsung Galaxy SIII and the Nokia Lumia 820/920. Unlike the iPhone/iPad, there's no native eReader for these devices so I had to try out a few different apps before I settled on the best one for each device. On the Galaxy I went with Moon+ Reader and after a brief flirtation with Raccoon Reader on the Lumias, I settled on Bookviser instead. Both Bookviser and Moon+ Reader are free and I'm not quite sure why I'd need to buy one because they both performed admirably.
Both apps allow you to access your books via SkyDrive (or in the case of Moon+ Reader you may prefer DropBox, since you're already on an Android phone and probably have a DropBox account) You can also access various online libraries to purchase new books which will load straight onto your phone. I get mine in epub format because that's what I use on my Kobo and these load into both apps with no difficulty.
The only real differences are minor but do affect the overall reading experience. Moon+ Reader simply has more features - more fonts, more backgrounds and most importantly, more controls. Both apps can simulate a turning page if that's your thing, but Moon+ Reader has a nifty scrolling function which you can adjust to match your reading speed. This means one page melts down over the previous one at the pace you select. Call me lazy, but the I found the ability to turn pages without having to touch anything pretty awesome.
The other thing Moon+ Reader offers that Bookviser doesn't is clearer information about where you're up to in your book - not just what page and what chapter, but how far through that chapter you are. This is very helpful if, like me, you might be reading the same book on several different devices and you need to find your place quickly. Both apps give you the option of searching a particular word or phrase but for some reason, Bookviser wasn't very helpful displaying the table of contents, showing only the chapter numbers and not their titles. This may have been something to do with the electronic formatting of the books, but probably not, given they displayed perfectly well on Moon+ Reader.
Is it just as easy to read a book on a phone-sized screen as it is on the Ink-Screen display of a purpose-built eReader like a Kobo? Of course not, but the screens on both the Galaxy and the Lumia 920 are big enough to suffice. Even the smaller Lumia 820 proved totally adequate, due in large part to it's impressive clarity.
So this time, it's not really a battle between phones, but between apps. Unfortunately for the Windows 8 Phones, as usual, they just don't have the selection of apps Android offers so were always going to struggle to match a product like Moon+ Reader or iBooks. Ultimately though, there's not much in it, and certainly not enough to warrant changing phones for.
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