What Android apps do people use/recommend for reading ebooks and other text documents?
(Rather than hijacking other topics, I thought it would be a good idea to have some dedicated topics for discussing and recommending apps! I'm new to Android, so having to find apps to cover all the things I used my Psion for.)
My requirements are slightly unusual, in that I have loads of books in Palm DOC (.pdb) format which I've edited/formatted myself. (I'm very fussy about typography &c! I used to read them on my Psion using Simon Quinn's EBook program. But I'll probably be converting them to FB2 or HTML or similar.)
The reader I'm trying at the moment is
AlReader, and I'm liking it so far. It handles .pdb files, has a built-in file viewer, can read files on an external drive, and can add book shortcuts on the home screen. I like its almost-full-screen mode, with just a thin progress bar along the bottom. It has a choice of fonts, colours, and textures. You can configure the actions attached to a wide variety of taps, swipes, and some keypresses. It has some nice animations (intuitive but fast and unobtrusive).
My main niggles so far are that most keypresses aren't supported (so e.g. I can set the ‘1’ key to the ‘Find’ function, but not F or Ctrl+F; and that it doesn't preserve whitespace when showing text (ignoring any indentation and double-spaced sentences). Also, ideally it would support the same sort of auto-bookmarking that Simon Quinn's program did (with a tag at the bottom of the file giving the character used to start heading lines — I always used a chevron) — though I don't seriously expect any programs to support that these days, now better formats are available!
Before that, I briefly tried
FBReader and
Cool Reader, but wasn't so impressed. (I think they both had character-set and formatting issues, and the former had trouble opening files in other folders.)
What apps are you folks using, and what do you like about them?
