Shortcovers for iPhone

How many e-book readers do the iPhone and iPod touch need? The answer, I think, is as many as the market can bear.

Shortcovers, the e-book vendor and mobile application from Indigo Books and Music, competes directly with Amazon's Kindle app ( Macworld rated 3.5 out of 5 mice ) and, to a lesser extent, Barnes and Noble's (formerly Fictionwise's) eReader ( Macworld rated 3.5 out of 5 mice ). Shortcovers is slightly more expensive than its rivals when it comes to new offerings, but the range of prices and content keeps the retailer competitive. The app also lets users browse Project Gutenberg's library of more than 30,000 free, public domain books, which places it in the company of Wattpad ( Macworld rated 3.5 out of 5 mice ), Stanza ( Macworld rated 4.5 out of 5 mice ) and the excellent Eucalyptus reader ( Macworld rated 4 out of 5 mice ).

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The gimmick with this free app is you can bookmark books, chapters, articles, or what have you, plus upload your own material (assuming it's copyright free, of course) and share and comment on what you're reading. Unlike other online booksellers, which usually offer only a few pages of a book for preview, Shortcovers generally lets users read a chapter or two before compelling a decision to buy or pass. Shortcovers also employs editors to help connect readers with what's "new and hot"--and, one presumes, what's good from time to time--by posting recommendations on the Web site that also appear under the app's "featured" screen.

As e-book readers go, Shortcovers is adequate--not great, not terrible, just OK. The interface is pretty, and easy to navigate. You can sort content by books, chapters, article,s or blog posts. You can access your page settings within the app, and can make format changes in the middle of the book you're reading by tapping the screen and then tapping the preferences icon at the bottom of the screen. Shortcovers has a wide range of customizable features, including variable line spacing, eight colors and themes, six typefaces and five font sizes ranging from "smallest" (which is very small) to "largest" (which is roughly 12-point type). But that's as to be expected in any decent e-book reader.

A bit more troubling is the way Shortcovers lets readers navigate a book's pages. You have the option of vertical scrolling or turning pages by swiping. Neither option is quite satisfactory. The vertical scrolling option lets you move down through four or five pages of text before you need to tap a right arrow to move to the next set of pages. I imagine this serves some sort of memory saving purpose, although why this would be necessary for books with short chapters is a mystery--it detracts from the reading experience.

Also, the constant scrolling is certain to cause thumb cramping and lead to an explosion of OSHA and worker's compensation complaints. The app should swipe a page from Instapaper Pro ( Macworld rated 4.5 out of 5 mice ) and add a tilt-scroll option.