App Aims: Elegant Literary Escapism

Reviewer’s Comments
Pack a library of well-loved classics with you wherever you go with Classics by Andrew Kaz and Phill Ryu for the iPhone and iPod touch. This app is hitting nearly every note in providing the most realistic and satisfying book reading experience on the iPhone. You can reorder library shelves to suit your own tastes, perhaps moving the books you’ve read to the bottom of the collection so it’s easier to see which ones haven’t been opened yet. The interface animation is superb and the text and paper color scheme is easy on the eyes. Having these titles so easily accessible on your iPhone will make them more tempting to read (not to mention, convenient and lighter!)

The collection currently includes 18 books as of this writing including:

• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
• A Christmas Carol (illustrated)
• Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (illustrated)
• Dracula
• Flatland (illustrated)
• Frankenstein
• Gulliver’s Travels
• Hound of the Baskervilles
• Paradise Lost
• Pride & Prejudice
• Robinson Crusoe
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
• The Call of the Wild
• The Count of Monte Cristo
• The Jungle Book
• The Metamorphosis
• The Time Machine
• Treasure Island

There are a couple of elements that are lacking in the Classics app. One is that there’s no in-app dictionary to look up words. While this might not seem like a big deal, these are all public domain books which translates into authors from the early 1920s and before. Their vocabulary and usage is markedly different than ours is today and a dictionary would certainly increase the understanding and enjoyment of the stories. Other users and reviewers have complained about the limited number of books but the developers are continually releasing additional titles. The intent of this app is not to be an ereader of gross proportions but rather an electronic book format for the most popular classics. Given the amount of work involved to refine the interface and consistency of appearance for each book, it’s understandable that the book updates are fairly infrequent.

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