Bookworm Online Reader Review

Bookworm is a free online platform for storing and reading [DRM Free] EPUB ebooks. The main benefit of using a reading system such as Bookworm is that you can read your ebooks from any web browser on any computer, including most mobile web devices, anywhere and at any time.

Create an Account

Before you can use Bookworm you’ll need to sign up for a free account. They’ve kept things very simple, meaning all you have to do is provide a username, email and password – if you happen to have an OpenID then you can use this too. Once you have your account you can start adding books to your Library.

There’s many places you can get EPUB books but the best place to start is right here on epubBooks.com!

At first look, you might think that Bookworm is quite boring to look at, but this simplicity of design really starts to show its benefit when you actually begin reading your ebooks.

Reading your eBooks

There are three main views to the reading system, the default opens the book within the normal Bookworm website, however, if you click the small square icon next to the Font style button, you switch into the full reading mode. The layout here is at an absolute minimum (just a tiny header and footer), which leaves the rest of the screen for the book page itself. To turn a page you just click in either the left or right margin.

The layout is very clear, the two available font styles are nice to read and you have unlimited zooming options. All images have so far displayed perfectly and I was happy to see that the footnote links also worked perfectly.

Reading on the iPhone and other mobile devices

The final reading layout has been especially designed for mobile devices; in particular, a lot of work has gone in to optimizing for the iPhone/iPod Touch.

The Bookworm website didn’t automatically recognise when I visited with my iPod Touch, so I had to manually select the mobile version, so you might want to bookmark the site or just type an m before the address to access it directly (m.bookworm.oreilly.com).

When using Bookworm on an iPhone or iPod Touch, the whole chapter is loaded in one go, so to read though the chapter you scroll instead of turning pages, which is a very natural thing to do on these kinds of devices anyway.

Viewing books on the iPod Touch via Bookworm was a very nice experience, although I would prefer it if the next and previous links were slightly bigger.

Amazon Kindle

As the Kindle ebook reader comes with Wispernet internet access and a web browser built in, you can therefore read EPUB formatted books. This is a real coup for Bookworm as at this time it’s not possible to read EPUB ebooks directly on any Amazon Kindle reader.

Conclusion

Bookworm is great, really! To have such non-stop access in a world with an almost persistent internet connection is going to make this online EPUB reader the perfect solution for many people.

Go try for yourself, it’s free!

bookworm.oreilly.com / m.bookworm.oreilly.com [mobile version]