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Despite music downloads being popular for the past ten years and movie downloads for the past five, ebooks are only now starting to become popular, not because of the need for bandwidth, as determined when than old e former two arrived for popular consumption, but for lack of standards and an old industry not willing to change their ways. Though ebook readers are nothing new, it was the Amazon Kindle that really kickstarted the business (of course the iPad has certainly helped), and today almost every new release is available for download. Android users can't read books from the Amazon market place yet (though they will soon), but honestly, I have plenty of stockpiled books on my computer that I've collected over the years that I would like to read first. Because many of them were PDFs, I first tried PDF readers. While this proved documents to be perfectly readable, I couldn't save my place, making it difficult to put down a book and come back to it later. The presentation was pretty lacking, too - I'm not saying I need something as pretty as what Kindle of iBooks brings to the table, but it certainly adds some legitimacy to the product.
Enter Aldiko, an excellent and free ebook reader specifically made for Android. Not only does it provide all of the basic functionality that you might need to read books - automatic placeholders, multiple bookmarks, text resizing, and a night and day mode - but it also serves as an excellent way to show off your book collection. There's even a store interface that offers free and buyable books from FeedBooks, O'Reilly, Smashwords, and All Romance ebooks, if you're into that sort of thing. If you can't find what you're looking for through the store, there is an import function that, while easy, can become a bit cumbersome to manage if you begin to accumulate a large amount of books. It's not any worse than manually managing any other form of media on an Android device (by far the worst aspect of the OS), so if you can add your music or video, you can deal with the books, too.
Aldiko only reads books in the epub format, which was originally a limiting factory considering many of my books were PDFs (even sometimes txt or html files). In solving this problem, I stumbled upon another great piece of software, Calibre, which not only serves as an easy and imaged-based way of managing your desktop ebook collection, but it can convert a book in literally any format (DRM excluded, of course) to any other format. It was a simple thing to convert my HTML copy of Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential, to epub, adding metadata and coverart to the file in the process.Perhaps, once Amazon's Kindle app is released, there might be a worthy contender for Android's best ebook reader (though I don't really want to reconvert everything to .mobi anyway, and that's if I can even import my books at all), but for now Aldiko is far and away the best ebook reader app for Android. I'm always looking for new ways to read books, and after spending a plane ride easily paging through The Accidental Billionaires, I think I'm going to be using Aldiko a lot more often. At least until Audible releases their Android app.
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