50 Popular Classic ebooks (updated)

An iPad app for $2: 50 Popular Classics (iTunes link.) That's a good price. Good titles too.

Sure, since the books are out of copyright, you can surely find them on the web for free. But I think it's more than worth two bucks to get them nicely formatted in a professional reading app for the iPad.

It's a decent app. You can't change text/background colors yet, it seems, or font, but you can change text size easily and in tidy steps, and it has auto-scroll, which can be varied steplessly in speed, although it's a bit jerky unless it's very slow. It also has bookmarks features and Search.
And they make it clear they are eager to add new books and to improve the app, so this is one I believe in.

(Hey! in the new advanced compositor, Blogger actually does place a graphic where the cursor is! I've been asking for that, and for a simpler upload process, which is there now also.)

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I'm sure that the iPad is different thing to different people. For some it's a bigger gameboy. For some it's a movie viewer. And it's great at those things. But for me, both before I bought it, and after, it's 98% an ebook reader. That's what I wanted it for, and it's what I end up doing with it all the time, no matter how many other things I try. 

I actually article reading include in that; because when you use Instapaper or similar, it no longer feels like reading on a "web article", thank god (no ads or loud and confusing layout to distract you), it feels like reading a short ebook. An excellent reading experience.

Update:
Bruce said...
Project Gutenberg: The ultimate source of free on-line books, various formats, including several different e-book reader formats, or just plain ascii. Highly Recommended.

Ganesha games said...
And if you like epubs, feedbooks.com is highly recommended.

Note: "ePub" is a book/text file format, like MP3 is a music file format, or JPG is a picture file format. It is considered by many to be the Standard format for ebooks, and Apple chose it for iBooks, but irritatingly Sony and Amazon chose other formats for their ebook readers (the Sony Reader and the Kindle). This was spoken about today in a large book publishers' conference as one of the main things holding back the ebook publishing industry.