I thought I would surprise my parents with an
Android tablet for Christmas. I thought they could use it for
browsing the internet, Skype or reading e-books etc.
My choice was a 7” Prestigio tablet – not an
expensive one, but I have had good experiences with this brand so
far.
I made some quick tests after buying it to reveal
simple problems covered by warranty. (No problems were found.) I also
installed some softwares to be able to give a „readymade” device
as a present.
Is e-book reader rocket science in the 21st century?
I also tried the built-in ebook reader, but
characters were unreadably small.
7” screens are mostly flat rectangle shaped so I
can understand why characters are sized small when holding tablet in
portrait direction. But I think there is no excuse for using the same
font size for the landscape direction. (A lot of space remained
around the text, filled with white „paper”.)
I thought that an ebook reader with such small
characters would be nearly useless for people who already use glasses
for reading. So I decided to search for an other ebook reader on
Google Play.
I failed.
I have tried the first 5 ebook readers from Google
Play, but none of them have been satisfying. They either do not
support .pdf format (which is very common!), or turning page was
lame, or the character size was small, again.
I think I did not set my expectations too high:
- I wanted proper character size.
- I wanted the least possible manual resizing of pages.
- The software may be in English though my parents do not speak English, because it is enough to set it up once in the beginning – There is no need for interacting with the menu during normal use.
EBookDroid
After giving up experimeting with Google Play, one
of my colleagues recommended EBookDroid and Cool Reader.
These know exactly what I needed! Characters were
so big in landscape orientation that you can read them from 1
meter... And by default you do not have to resize anything.
EbookDroid supports .pdf, Cool Reader supports
.epub. (EbookDroid also supports .epub, but Cool Reader does not
support .pdf)
EbookDroid works best for our family – we have
been using it for the past 2 months. There have been only 2 issues
with it.
- After an update a very annoying menu has been introduced. It floats in when doing some touch events. (After a little practicing the menu will not be annoying any more.)
- The other issue was that something has been changed in the menu – either by my mom or by an update and it took a couple minutes to set it back again.
EbookDroid is 52nd in Google Play when searching
for ebook reader, but I can bet that it is going to get a lot better
ranking soon!
