Wattpad 100,000+ books review

Maggie Holland

We review Wattpadd 100,000+ books, an Apple iPhone application that takes the place of an expensive eBook reader

Published on Sep 28, 2009

Everyone’s talking about eBooks these days. To the extent that the high street book shops are more than a little bit worried.

But shelling out a couple of hundred pounds on an e-book reader is not to everybody’s taste or budget. Enter Wattpad.

The My Library section of the app was already pre-populated with six titles when we first fired the app up, but you can easily delete and/or replace these. Within the main menu, you can hit search to find a book by name or browse through publications that are popular, new or recommended.

We opted to look at old favourite Frankenstein. The text is self-scrolling, the pace of which can be determined by the reader based on the slow-fast bar.

You can also override this speed by using your finger to slide the text up as you would when reading an email, for example. This proved particularly handy as it does take a while to work out what speed is just right for you.

We all know that black and white can probve a little boring, so the developer of Wattpad has allowed you to change the size, colour and type of font, in addition to the background colour. This is almost an essential element for the partially sighted, or even if you struggle to read small font on a compact screen.

There’s also a neat ‘social’ button that lets you share you new-found eBook joy via email, Twitter and Facebook. This button also invites you to provide feedback on the app as well as rating the book in question.

The only thing that really lets this app down is the ads running at the bottom, which proved a bit of a distraction but this can only be expected on a free app.