Shortcovers a Kindle/E-Book Competitor for Canadians?
Our best frenemy forever, CrackBerry.com’s Kevin sent us word that Canadians currently excluded from all the Amazon Kindle E-Book app goodness may just have an alternative. Seems Chapters/Indigo (think Barnes and Nobles with maple syrup, eh?) is getting into the game, and onto the devices, with a new service called Shortcovers.
While Kevin was sickened by the prominence of the iPhone in the above video, we thought it was fantastic. (And if the fugly look of the BlackBerry app compared to the hot sexay of the iPhone version is any indication of how this whole BlackBerry App World vs. iPhone App Store sitch will work out for RIM…)
Any of our readers to the north going to check it out?
March 6th, 2009 at 12:42 pm
The reviews for Shortcovers in the app store are consistently horrible – so now, I won’t be checking it out!
March 6th, 2009 at 3:52 pm
@Frazam: it’s a free download, wouldn’t first hand judgement of the app be better than the thoughts of a few reviews from <0.1% of users
March 7th, 2009 at 3:35 am
why waste my time if not a single review is positive. Who reads books anyway?
March 9th, 2009 at 8:07 am
I tried Shortcovers this morning. I’m not thrilled by the combination of scrolling down, then having the click to the next page, but it is workable for me, at least until they develop a reading interface that is more like eReader. They have a number of Canadian authors (Miriam Toews, Nino Ricci) and books (The Flying Troutmans, The Origin of Species) that I haven’t been able to buy through other ebook vendors, so I’m quite excited by this new development. The ebooks are almost as expensive as buying the paper copy, but the increased convenience of having them with me everywhere on my iPod Touch will help soothe that irritation, so I can foresee myself buying quite a few books from Shortcovers.