They say that most of times releasing a product is just about good timing. Understanding what people need in that precise moment, being sure that your app will be the only one that can appease the users for months. Until a new app will show up and beat yours to death, people usually adds. Then there’s another situation, pretty weird actually: you announce and release a product while one of your biggest competitors has announced a similar app that will go out in a few months and it promises to revolutionize your same market niche. Yeah, that sucks.
In this case, if you consider that a) the biggest competitor is Apple and b) the aforementioned app is iBooks, you can easily realize that c) it’s a game over before the game even starts. Man I wouldn’t recommend this stuff to my worst enemy. Or maybe yes. Anyway, fortunately the Ideal Biunary guys are not my enemies, and their newest app 3D Bookshelf is very good and promising.
Even though it’s very similar to iBooks and Classics, we should take a look at it. Because it has some chances to survive.
Bookshelf is a 3D ebook reader for iPhone. It comes with a selection of 15 built-in classic books (you can’t add more), a “scrollable” shelves-made library and a nice 3d view for each book you read. The main screen is the library, where the books are sorted in gorgeous antique wooden shelves. You can browse your books collections by simply swiping over, in an animation that remembers Coverflow actually, but with some momentum that makes the whole experience very “physical”. To start reading a book, just tap on it. The book will “load” (it takes 2 seconds on my iPhone 3GS) and it will “slide” over a desk, open and then come in foreground again. Sounds weird I know, but it’ nice - trust me.
The reading experience itself it’s pretty good too, though I have some concerns. The 3D graphics are good, but they’re not as nearly as perfect. There’s a lot of aliasing around, the text isn’t always crisp (especially when you zoom out from the book) and sometimes the animations are slow. But I believe in these guys, so they’ll probably optimize everything within a few updates. Just the fact that this app runs almost fine is a great achievement in my opinion.
The other thing that I wish the devs will improve is text rendering. There’s only one font available, and while it’s no doubt good and easy to read, it’s strangely justified. This means that there are weird spacings all over. Hopefully the developers will look into this and consider it. But what’s great about 3D Bookshelf, despite these drawbacks, is how the books feel in your hands: flipping each page has been a pleasure for me, a mesmerizing experience I’m really satisfied of. Well done.
Overall, 3D Bookshelf is a good and nice looking application. It’s not Classics,maybe it won’t revolutionize the market, but it’s surely opening new ways for ebook reading on iPhone. It has some technical flaws which sometimes make the experience a little less great, but that’s anything that can’t be fixed.
At $.099 in the App Store [introductory price, iTunes Link] I think it’s a fair price to get a sneak peek of what’s coming next.
