A new ebook app combining a bookstore for new purchases with the ability to import titles purchased from any retailer which supports epub files protected Adobe DRM launched earlier this month for Apple’s iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch.
By mimicking the ‘buy anywhere, hear here’ approach of standalone ebook readers such as those from Sony, the free iFlow Reader app follows txtr and Bluefire in ending the segregation of books within vendor-specific apps.
iFlow also offers readers to look up words and phrases on Google, Wikipedia, or dictionary.com as well as integration with Facebook allowing the sharing of excerpts and comments via the social networking site.
We’ve given the app a quick look over and were mostly impressed with its look, however adding DRM protected books can currently only be done via the website and the app doesn’t appear to include any method of de-authorising it from your Abode Digital Editions ID if you’d decide you wish to do so.
In a statement Dennis Morin, one of the founders of developers BeamItDown Software, said his team wanted to make “the best eBook application anywhere because we saw it as the only way for a little David like us to compete with the Goliaths like Amazon, Apple, and now Google, that currently dominate this marketplace.”
Morin added: “Apple and Adobe have provided extraordinary technology platforms for us to build on and we wanted to take full advantage of the capabilities these platforms offered for ebooks. After two years of intensive development, we firmly believe our iFlow Reader application is a huge improvement over anything else on the market today because we made the user experience of buying and reading eBooks our first priority.”
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