ruBooks 0.921

(15 votes, average: 4.13 out of 5)

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ruBooks, an upgraded version of the popular eBooks Reader.

One of the better, but lesser known features of the iPhone/iPod Touch is the ability to read eBooks. With the availability of numerous ebooks sources, this feature gives the user the ability to replace an invertible bookshelf worth of high-quality titles. This ability has been greatly enhanced with the release of ruBooks.

ruBooks is an intended replacement of the eBooks application. According to its author, it was developed on top of the eBooks code, with several notable enhancements. The application opens with a ‘Finder’ style interface, which allows you to navigate to your eBooks files. Initially, the view is of the /var directory, however a default eBooks directory can be specified via the Settings menu. Once you’ve located a given title, the interface quickly becomes very similar to the familiar eBooks Application. Clicking on a book title will present you with a listing of chapters, along with any other files that are associated with the book, including pictures, diagrams, and the cover itself (if available).

The power of the application doesn’t become evident however until you begin to actually read a given books contents. This application provides one remarkable feature that was missing from the original eBooks application; Automatic Scrolling. Via the settings, users can adjust everything they could in eBooks, with a few added features. The most notable of these is the Auto-Scroll Speed. In reading sample text with this application, I found the default of ‘4′ to be a bit slow for me, however this is easily changed in the Settings of the app.

Additional features found within the settings include the typical font, size, and color options, but also include a few surprising features as well. With the iPhone, the volume buttons can be specified to scroll. You can invert navigation, hide the tool bar, and enlarge tap zones. In addition, the application allows for File Import, complete with text encoding and ‘Smart Conversion’. The reader itself supports a music-navigation style interface, which allows you to pause, fast forward, or rewind through pages. Pause/Play are used to control the Autoscroll, making it easy to stop the text should you be interrupted. This pane also includes common options available within the original eBooks application; a slider-bar to quickly scroll through a given chapter, a ‘Negative’ button to invert the screen from white background/black text to black background/white text, and prompt access to the chapter list.

ruBooks isn’t just limited to ebooks however; its also a handy file viewer, supporting many popular file formats including most image formats, .HTML, .DOC, .XLS, and even .PDF.

Below is a complete listing of features as pulled from the applications’ ‘More Info’ page:

Visit ruBooks Homepage:(http://colel.info/rubooks/)

Available from the BigBoss’s Apps and Things Repo (http://sleepers.net/iphonerepo)

Developer: Sergey Makarov (sergemakarov@gmail.com)