Google Books was quietly updated yesterday with one key feature that most other reading apps had: an offline reading mode. It’s only available in Chrome, and it doesn’t support PDF yet, but this is still a useful addition to the app.
This might seem like a relatively minor feature, but there aren’t all that many reading apps available for Chrome, and the Kindle Cloud Reader, Google Books’ biggest competitor, already has an offline mode.
It’s been just over 3 years since Chrome launched and a year since the Chrome Store launched, and not very many reading apps have been released in that time. In fact, I’ve just searched the Chrome Store and I can only find a few reading apps. There are the RSS feed readers, the Marvel comics app, a couple Google News readers, and there are apps for Instapaper and ReadItLater. That’s all I could find, and compared to any other major platform that is a very sparse selection.
Actually, let’s put that sparseness into perspective. Aldiko was released for Android less than a year after the Android market opened. Stanza was released for the iPhone and was bought by Amazon less than 8 months after the iTunes app store launched. And yet with Chrome, I cannot recall hearing of any breakthrough reading app.
Does anyone read on Chrome? What apps do you use?
via Chrome Store
RSS
Email
Facebook
Twitter
I use Magicscroll. It is quite nice. It even lets you load your own epubs and keeps track of reading across devices.
And it’s browser independent, too.
http://www.magicscroll.net/
IDPF Launches Readium – Epub3/HTML5 Reading App - The Digital Reader // Feb 13, 2012 at 9:10 am
[...] release of Readium right now. There is a proof of concept release available as a Chrome plugin. Chrome doesn’t have many reading options, so this is good news.beta releaseReadium /**/ Tags:No Comments so far ↓There are no [...]