Aldiko Android App Review
Today we’ll be looking at the Aldiko e-book reader app for Android on our generic 7-inch, Android 1.5, RK2808 MID. Let’s get reading.
The Skinny
Aldiko is an e-book reader app for Android, its default package coming preloaded with two books: Sun Tzu’s Art of War and H. G. Wells’ The Invisible Man, arguably two classics and both classics for entirely different reasons. But to refrain from delving into my thoughts on the two preloaded books, we’ll look at Aldiko’s ability to download books from databases such as Feedbooks where there are thousands upon thousands of public domain as well as free self-published e-books, so quality will wildly vary.
Browsing the book databases is easy, as you can search for a particular title or sort by popularity, author or genre/category. As of writing this review, the most popular public domain book is The Kama Sutra, which is closely followed by The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – so you can see, a wide variety of books are freely available.
The application has a lovely look, with a bookshelf background and book covers adorning it to give you a playful, The Sims like feel which is certainly refreshing to the boring alternative of using a standard file browser. In fact, one almost does not want to stray away from the bookshelf it is so pleasant to look at, especially if you have a large collection of books.
Scrolling through your book collection is easy, and books can be sorted by title, author, download date, last read date or rating. Further you can view a dedicated author list, which will then list every book by selected author; by tag, which is a category/genre system where you can assign tags to books; or by a favourites system. Browsing through books is rarely more streamlined and is certainly easier than the jumbled mess that comprises my overflowing bookshelf at home.
When you first select a book to read you are greeted with a tips pop-up which instructs you how to browse through the book – useful for first time users and can be disabled at will. You can configure display settings for e-book viewing which things like font settings (family, weight, and size), layout settings (line spacing, horizontal and vertical margins, and text alignment), navigation settings (page turn speed), brightness settings and much, much more. In fact, reading books is so customizable that you can configure Aldiko to display a book just how you want to, therefore making different devices / screen sizes a non-issue. Further, you can toggle a Night or Day theme which basically means white text on a black background or black text on a white background respectively. (Note: Still unsure, but using the Night theme might prolong battery life on your device due to less use of the backlight.) I personally found the Night theme to suit me best for reading.
The Day and Night themes respectively. I found Night to be far easier to read on a 7-inch LCD screen.
Aldiko does not load the whole book at once – it instead loads the book by chapters. This serves to speed up the initial loading of the book, but means you have to sit through additional loadings (which on our device were less than 5 seconds) at each chapter. This might make reading a book like The DaVinci Code a real pain. Unfortunately I couldn’t find a way to change this. If your book has many chapters, then chapters will be shorter and thus loading times shorter so it certainly is no deal-breaker.
Actual reading of the book is perfectly fine, as is scrolling through pages on our touchscreen device. It is worth noting though that simply tapping-to-scroll rather than dragging-to-scroll is far easier. When you tap-to-scroll you simply tap one half of the screen and the book scrolls in that direction. However – and you are of course bound to have your own inclination – I find reading e-books in general somewhat difficult on an eye-straining LCD. There exist several nifty features like Go To, which presents a slider, above which there is the chapter display as well as a percentage slider and this makes jumping to sections in books extremely easy. There exists a bookmarks function, as was expected. There is also even a dictionary for vocabulary-enhancement inline. All very cool. A Show Progress function allows you to track your progress through a book by percentage both overall and by chapter. Nifty, but reading should never be a chore.
Also, and much to my relief, there were no issues switching between portrait and landscape modes.
Parting Words
All in all, Aldiko is an excellent piece of software if you want to read e-books on your Android powered device. In fact, if I were so inclined to do so, Aldiko would be the software I chose. I guess there is not much more to say.
Photographs
Below are two photographs of the device in both Day and Night themes so you get an idea of how it looks on an LCD. Click the images to view them full-sized.
Note #1: As for performance on our RK2808 Android 1.5 MID, reading books were snappy and generally there was no choppiness. When downloading a book, however, the whole app seemed to slow down somewhat but that disappeared as soon as the book finished downloading, which doesn’t take long if you’ve got a good WiFi connection.
Note #2: Again, due to the lack of a back button on our MID, once we entered into a book which is in full-screen mode, there no longer existed the on-screen back button. The only way around this was to kill the process. A minor inconvenience if you don’t have a back button. However, this was only the case when actually reading a book – the back button was still accessible on-screen during book browsing and downloading.
Discuss reading e-books on our forum!
Categories: Android Tablet, App Review, Review, Tablet
Comments (4)
[...] in there, but genre is a fickle thing. That could have been overcome with a tagging system, like Aldiko had. No deal breaker, [...]
Hi, like you, I have a tablet that doesn’t have a menu button, it has only a software one in the status bar, but the status bar disappears when Aldiko loads. I haven’t found a way of getting to the Settings menu so I’d be really grateful if you could send me an e-mail to say how you’re doing it.
Our tablet did have a menu button, but not a back button which made things difficult. I’m not sure how to get into the menu if you don’t have a button.
[...] doesn’t seem to be the most powerful tablet out on the market today. It does however have the Aldiko e-book reader app that let’s you browse through thousands of e-books, as well as the AppsLib in which you [...]