The world of ebooks is constantly evolving, but the end goal remains simple: to ensure a great reading experience. Over the years, companies like Amazon, with its Kindle service, and Kobo, with its own bevy of apps and devices, have traded blows in an effort to sway users to one ecosystem over another.
While Amazon may have the lion’s market share, Kobo, now owned by Japan’s Rakuten, Inc., continues to iterate on its excellent iOS and Android apps. The latest update for iOS 7, aptly bumped to version 7.0, brings a new reading interface with specific improvements for the majority of users running the new OS.
Though it’s still not possible to purchase books inside the app, due to Apple’s limiting terms and conditions, Kobo for iOS offers a new navigation system, with a slide-out menu that offers up a breakdown of books, magazines and Collections.
While the update benefits both iPhone and iPad, the reading experience has always been better on a tablet, and Kobo has improved various elements of the app, such redesigning the library and updating the menus, on the larger device. Both versions benefit from a more consistent look and feel and, of course, books still remain synchronized between apps and platforms.
Recent Kobo versions have fleshed out the importing functionality as well: users can add material from email attachments, the web or a Dropbox account, as well as limited-time borrowing from public libraries that support it. The gamification elements remain, too, in Reading Life, which awards users who spend lots of time in the app. Finally, Kobo Pulse has proven (to me at least) to be a very capable way of interacting with others in the Kobo community with similar interests.
Unfortunately, Kobo’s iOS app remains far more functional and responsive than its Android equivalent, though the company has made an effort to bring the two versions to feature parity in recent months. Still, Android readers are better served with alternatives like Readmill, Aldiko and Moon Reader.
[source]App Store[/source]
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