Review of eReaders App: Bluefire

On my last post, I reviewed the Kindle app for iPad. Whether you’re a fan of Amazon or not, and many aren’t, I feel it’s a good app for reading.

However, it’s not a good app for sharing notes and marks you make in a book. Check this post out here if that’s your goal. You can get your notes and marks to sync across your own Kindle devices, but you can’t share them with others. However, if someone reads a MOBI file on Kindle for PC they can share their notes and marks. See the linked post on how to do that.

On to Bluefire.

Last year, or maybe the year before, I received a “perk” from Klout: Stephen King’s short story Mile 81, which is protected with Digital Rights Management (DRM). I needed an eReader app that would handle DRM, so I found Bluefire. I had to create a free Adobe account to crack open Mile 81. When I upgraded my iPad I had to download Bluefire again and so had to log in to Adobe again.

Let me tell you what I like best about Bluefire: if you leave it in its native mode, it displays text in the Adobe Minion typeface, one of my all-time favorite typefaces, and it automatically and correctly inserts ligatures. People complain Bluefire loads eBooks too slow. This is why, it’s applying sophisticated typesetting to your eBook.

Ligatures make text easier to read and more visually appealing. Allow me to explain how.

I had a sister-in-law (she’s no longer my sister-in-law) who couldn’t tolerate food touching on her plate. The mashed potatoes, including the gravy, couldn’t touch the roast beef or the green beans. I always thought that was dumb since it all ended up as a ball of chyme in the stomach anyway, but I kept that opinion to myself. Which is probably why I got along so well with my ex’s side of the family.

Typefaces with serifs, those little extenders at the tops, feet, and cross bars of letters, often touch in set text. Particularly, the dot of an ‘i’ will touch the downward stroke of an ‘f’ set to its left. As my former SIL would say, yuck. A ligature fixes this by combining the ‘f’ and ‘i’ into one character. The crossbar of the ‘f’ joins the top of the ‘i’ and the ‘i’ is not dotted.

All basic ligatures involve the letter ‘f’. Two ‘fs’ are joined, an ‘f’ and an ‘l’, two ‘fs’ and an ‘i’, as in “office” are joined, and two ‘fs’ and an ‘l’ are joined. Here’s an example:

(Image from I Love Typeography.)

Bluefire does this for you whether you want it or not because they know it’s for your own good. Joking aside, you likely don’t consciously notice when text is set with ligatures. But your eye appreciates the aesthetics and you likely will read a little faster and better.

Bluefire has many other options: five margins, pages numbers in the margin, many different typefaces, orientation lock (a useful feature when reading while laying on one’s side), a night mode that works, and options for different effects while flipping pages. Two of my favorite features are, you can adjust the screen brightness by swiping up or down on the screen and you can turn justified lines off and read with ragged-right lines. Refer to my post on the Kindle app for details.

A glaring missing feature is, no two-column reading when in landscape mode. For me, unless I’m sure I won’t need to read a book in landscape mode, I will load the book into Marvin.

Stay tuned for my review of Marvin, the best eReader for the iPad.

Review of eReader Apps: Kindle App

I’ve blogged before that I read a lot of eBooks on my iPad. I had an iPad 1 for almost two years, and it served me well. However, since Apple decided it would no longer support the iPad 1, meaning there would be no more software updates for it, I decided to upgrade.

I sold my 32GB iPad 1 for $250 to a local guy and bought a refurbished 16GB iPad 3 from Apple for $400, with tax. I didn’t come close to using 16GB on my iPad 1 so I opted for the 16GB model. No sense spending money for unused storage.

I’m nearsighted so I don’t need glasses to read, unless what I’m trying to read is farther than about a foot from my face. The iPad 3 has retina screen, the iPad 1 didn’t. I could read fine in day-mode but when I switched to night-mode the text became fuzzy and I had to switch to a sans-serif typeface, which are not designed for reading large amounts of text.

The retina screen makes reading easy for me. The characters are sharp and clear, even when reading in night mode—no typeface change needed.

Over the years I’ve used four eReader apps: Stanza, Kindle, Bluefire, and lately, Marvin.

I downloaded Stanza because I first published to Smashwords, which supports Stanza. Thing I liked best about Stanza was, I could read in Courier, which I like to do when I’m writing a draft or editing a manuscript set in Courier. Only one other eReader app I know of does this. Unfortunately, the Stanza app has been abandoned by its developers and has become somewhat unstable.

Kindle App

The second app I downloaded was the Kindle app. Kindle is, well, Kindle. I’ve read people complaining about the MOBI format but as an eReader, it’s always worked fine for me. And I’ve done a lot of reading on the Kindle app as most of the books I download are from Amazon.

As an eBook creator, I know Amazon’s proprietary MOBI format isn’t as flexible as ePub, but I can still make great looking MOBI books. This is a necessity for an eBook creator.

What I like about the Kindle app

It’s customizable. The Kindle app gives you three margin sizes to choose from, several good typefaces to display text in, a night mode, a screen brightness slider-bar, and the choice of displaying text in two-columns when in landscape mode. That last feature alone makes it a good app for reading. I read a lot in landscape mode and shorter lines of text are easier to read than longer lines.

It’s stable. At least it has been for me.

I can email documents to my Kindle app. This increases the app’s usefulness. You have to set this up online in your account by telling Amazon what email addresses to accept files from, but once that’s done sending Word files, PDFs, and MOBI files to your Kindle app is a breeze.

What I don’t like about the Kindle app

It displays text with lines fully justified, meaning the right side of paragraphs align. This is how print books are set, and how this paragraph is set. Having the page be a nice rectangle is pleasing to the eye and it’s fine for a screen the size of an iPad, about 10 inches diagonal. It doesn’t work so great on a screen the size of an iPhone.

Here’s the problem with justified text on smaller screens: it creates awkward line lengths and breaks. Since the Kindle app doesn’t hyphenate books, long words are often shoved onto the next line, leaving the first line too short to be stretched across the length of the screen. This creates ugly gaps in the text.

I’m not a fan of eReader-hyphenated text because the hyphens more than likely show up at incorrect locations, like between a ‘t’ and an ‘h’. But that would be preferable, to me at least, than having one line with two three words, and not justified, adjacent to lines that are fully justified and are filled with words.

The Kindle app does not allow the user to view the text in ragged-right mode. It should. Ragged-right text is easier to read because the spaces between words are equal, which helps us read faster. Ragged-right text isn’t as pretty as fully-justified text is, though.

As I wrote, I read a lot in the Kindle app and it’s a pleasant enough experience. And to my knowledge it’s your only choice if you want to read MOBI books.

In my next post I’ll review the Bluefire eReader app.