Increasingly but not surprisingly, reading ebooks on the iPhone is becoming more prevalent.
We have already reviewed Stanza, an iPhone app that turns iPhone into an ebook reader. Stanza is a very good ebook reader application which offers a large collection of free ebooks but it doesn't offer a realistic reading experience.
The developers of iPhone App Classics are trying to address that with their revolutionary reading platform which they hope will offer iPhone users a more realistic reading experience.
Classics has been developed by Andrew Kaz and Phill Ryu.
When you launch Classics, it displays a virtual bookshelf stocked with twelve titles from public domain including The Time Machine, The Call of Wild, The Adventure of Huckleberry Finn, etc.
Instead of presenting you with a simple list of book titles, it shows you a wooden bookshelf with book titles in large thumbnail (which might not be a scalable solution once there are more books available). You can tap on the book, drag and reorganize their position. Once you have decided which book to read, tap on the book image to open it.
As per the developers, the primary focus while developing Classics was on the reading experience and turning the pages.
They have taken care to optimize the font and background color to make it comfortable for reading for a long duration.
When you open a book, the user interface is simple, with book title on the top bar and a content area with page number. You can also tap the button on the top-right corner to go to the table of contents and go back to the bookshelf by tapping the home button.
The most interesting aspect of Classic's user experience is the "tactile page flip" which occurs while flipping pages. Classics requires you to literally swipe your finger from right to left to flip the page. After using the App to read for sometime I was surprised to find that the "tactile page flip" actually makes the reading experience more comforting and somewhat realistic. It took the developers two months to get this effect to work so perfectly.
The attention to details does not end there, even when you go back to bookshelf while reading a book, Classics stamps a classic bookmark on your page before returning to bookshelf.
However Classics not perfect and has its drawback, unlike Stanza, it does not provide other features such as keyword search, quick navigation to a specific page and customizations such as selecting the font etc.
The other big issue and one of the deal breakers for me is the lack of content, it currently has only 12 books that you can read from, the developers have mentioned that they will be offering more book titles in future (which can also be downloaded freely once you purchase Classics).
On the other hand, Stanza which is a free iPhone app contains built-in reading support for various eBook format, including Amazon Kindle, Mobipocket, Microsoft LIT, PalmDoc, Microsoft Word, Rich Text Format, HTML, and PDF. So you can use Stanza to read just about anything.
But Classics offers a more realistic reading experience on the iPhone that I have seen so far.
Classics is available for an introductory price of $2.99. You can download it from App Store using this iTunes link.
As always, please drop us a line and tell us what you think about Classics.
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