by Adam Feneley

Created on: January 27, 2009

Viewing eBooks on your iPod touch or iPhone is easy, all you need to do is get one simple and free program. Its down-loadable from iTunes or your hand-held app store and it opens pretty much any file type, and stores two hundered mega-bytes (in the free version) of documents, whether this be rich text, PDF, word document, power-point, excel.. you name a file, it takes it and can open and view them.

The program is called 'Files', the free version with two hundred mega-bytes (200mb) of storage is called 'Files Lite' it is made by John Buckley at Olive Toast Software, if you want to search for it in iTunes or the App store, it is very popular and in the productivity section. I am aware that there are other specialized eBook readers out there (such as eReader and Stanza) but this serves the purpose very well and at the same time it meets many other needs of the iPod touch and iPhone. It isn't exactly expensive either even if you have over 200mb of documents or books, 3.99 GBP isnt going to dent the wallet too much, its easily the best app i have on my iPod touch, excellent value for money.

You link using a simple wi-fi connection using very well written instructions on the iPod, with guidance and menu diagrams and step by step guides for transferring files from any operating system, via wi-fi, to your iPod. I was amazed how smoothly it all fits together, all you need is a wireless adapter on your computer or laptop, and as you are on the Internet reading this, the chances are, you have one!

You can use this program to sort your books and documents into folders aswell, making them easier to find and access. The accelerometer is also used to good effect to view in portrait and landscape. The touchscreen zoom system is used to zoom just as in the photo application, putting two fingers on the screen and moving them apart.

To top it all off its been recently updated to include new features. The most useful of which is jump to page, so you can quickly flick through chapters and to different pages of a book without taking ages scrolling through the pages like in other readers. Another plus is that is a very good image viewer as well, so you can keep all of your home documents and pictures in one place and well organised, maybe as a backup, as well as them being very accessible and easy to view.

You can also add bookmarks into books which you are half way through reading or just to mark bits that you found more interesting or that you want to go back too, overall a brilliant little app, and makes most readers and data storers for the ipod touch and iphone pretty obsolite and best of all the free version is plenty for most users, easy!

Learn more about this author, Adam Feneley.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.