Recently I accidentally pushed an old post griping about e-readers.  After quite a bit of research, my eventual solution was to purchase a nexus7:

I got this primarily for the form factor (it fits like a trade paperback in my hand),  and the price and performance are outstanding. The Nexus7 also has the added benefit of doing ALL of the things I usually do with my much smaller phone, which is convenient, as I’m mobile near wifi hotspots quite a lot.

After a few months of futzing about with different E-Book software, I finally came up with Moon+Reader Pro as my go to e-reader.

I love the fact that it is extremely customizable. Everything from font to page color/texture to…well just about anything you want to make the experience “yours” is available with this software

Its ONLY drawback is that occasionally (and I do mean this in the strictest sense of the word) it will come across an epub or other format that it mis-handles. For these situations, I have a choice of e-readers to fall back on.

My second favorite e-book software actually surprised me a bit. If it weren’t for moonreader, my main choice would be the NOOK reader from Barnes and Noble. While not as full featured, it handles all of the basics beautifully, and I’ve yet to see ANY book not render properly with it.

The next choice in line is the KOBO reader which isn’t at the top of my list for readers, BUT it has online store capabilities that I like.

Another okay selection is the Aldiko reader. This isn’t nearly as customizable, BUT its online store has access to multiple sources such as Smashwords  and  Oreilly. Another feature that is aces here is the ability to add your own catalogs/stores. I just wish this reader was just a bit easier on the eyes.

My last choice on this list is Amazon’s Kindle software. While a very efficient reader with some nice customization options, my WORST complaint is that it natively only works with the Amazon proprietary ebook format (AZW). I prefer epub and non-drm formats for portability and access.  (You CAN convert other formats to AZW, but its a pain, and if the book is DRM”d (Digital Rights Management)—a fancy term for encrypted, its an even more hackish mess.)

I CANNOT STAND PROPRIETARY FORMATS. There. I feel better now.

 

A big reason for that mini-rant  (besides hating vendor lock-in) is that my entire e-book library is handled by this doozy of an application that lives on my main desktop PC..behold Calibre!

This was an absolute godsend from the coding deities as it allows me to store my books, edit metadata, back the books up to the cloud AND serve the content to any device I want.

(Another feature of MoonReader+Pro is that it has native calibre functionality, which is nifty if you don’t have or want the calibre companion application.)

I also use Calibre Companion for connecting to Calibre.  This picture is a default view on my tablet:

I’m not a big “reviewer”, but these are the choices that work at this point in time.

Hope that helps if you’re hunting about for e-reader software, as I think it is a very good start.  There are TONS of e-book applications out there…these are my choices.