How To Read Ebooks Without an Ebook Reader
Jun
24
2013

Quite often I get mail from folks who are new to digital books and they’re not entirely sure how to get started if they aren’t necessarily ready to buy a digital book reader. The key is – You don’t need a digital book reader to read digital books, though, IMO, a digital book reader is a great thing and if you can afford one, they’re really awesome.

1.  Reader Apps.  Kindle has a free app for download. You can go to Amazon and download an app for your computer (Mac or PC) or your phone so you can buy books from the kindle store and read them on your devices, even without owning a Kindle.  And here’s their FAQ page about using the app.

2.  Here’s a piece about Adobe/PDF reading without an ereader from the New York Times

3. You can download a free Nook app but not for Mac.

4.  Kobo also has a free downloadable app to read their books on your tablet, phone, Mac/PC

5.  As does Sony

6. And Apple via Apple Books does too

 

These  apps allow you the ease of buying the books from their online stores (SO EASY) and then reading them on your computer. I have the Kindle app on my iPad, as does my husband. I mainly read on my kindle paperwhite but he does the majority of his ebook reading on his iPad. The synch with the kindle cloud means he can go in and read books on his kindle or his iPad really easily and when I buy books at amazon it asks me if I want to send it to whatever device, the iPad, my paperwhite, his kindle, etc.

 

4 comments to “How To Read Ebooks Without an Ebook Reader”

  1. Heather
    June 24th, 2013 at 8:00 am · Link

    You can download the apps to your cell phone too. I have the Kindle app on my iphone and ipad but I will pull out my iphone to read on a bus or something because I am going to be holding my phone anyway and its lighter.



  2. Dora Kitinas-Gogos
    June 24th, 2013 at 8:48 am · Link

    I have an iPad and do most of my reading on that especially when I travel. I have downloaded kindle for iPad but it still will not allow me to buy books. I wrote to Amazon and I got a very complicated reply which I would need to be an IT expert to work out why this is happening. I am really upset as I have several books I want that I cant get via the apple store as yet. Very, Very, disappointing 😯



  3. Lynn
    June 24th, 2013 at 12:37 pm · Link

    Dora, buy what you want at Amazon, send it to your kindle, and anywhere from five minutes to several hours later, the book icon will appear on your iPad in the kindle app with an arrow. Click the arrow and it will download the book ready to be read. 😉



  4. Gayle Gray
    August 3rd, 2013 at 10:34 pm · Link

    eBooks are a fast and convenient way to buy, read and keep the books you want. Because these are digital products, they can only be ordered online.