iBooks Underscores the Immediacy of Mobile Reading Apps

While its library is limited, Apple's iBooks is a resource worth cultivating for readers with print disabilities such as dyslexia and visual impairment.

With the iBooks app, you can quickly download many free classics from the iBookstore onto your iOS device and listen to them using VoiceOver.

Within minutes, I had Hamlet and Heart of Darkness on my iPod touch bookshelf.

I marveled at how easily accessible mobile apps make books. A few minutes on iBooks underscores the efficient immediacy of other reading apps such as Audible, Learning Ally Audio, and Bookshare's Read2Go.

The steps separating knowing a book you want to read and reading are now reduced to a couple of clicks. The concept of software, installing readers and opening files, feels antiquated.

I remember reveling in the efficiency of Learning Ally phone orders that sent cassette books to my door within a week.
This new mobile immediacy enables blind people to read what friends are reading at the same time, rather than waiting 6-8 months for a Talking Book.

Technology that connects people to information is valuable enough. Apps that facilitate the shared experience of reading, connecting people to one another, may be an even greater service.