Sites about books and writting including book reviews, book recomendation services and sites offering electronic books to read on your mobile phone.

What's This?

New Yorker

Content: ****  Usability: XXXX
m.newyorker.com/ (xhtml-mp)

Fans of the New Yorker magazine's unique blend of short stories, poetry, reviews, cultural and political commentary will enjoy this new "iPhone" edition of The New Yorker. It has full versions of dozens of stories from the magazine.  

The site requires JavaScript and works well with the Android browser as well as with the iPhone. Cross platform compatibility could be better, however. Some of the links don't work with Opera Mini or the Symbian browser and the site's many free videos and podcasts can only be downloaded using iTunes!  Source: Oh! Mobile Directory


What's This?

Project Gutenberg

Content: ****  Usability: XXXX
m.gutenberg.org/ (xhtml-mp)

Project Gutenberg Mobile

Project Gutenberg now has its own mobile webapp at m.gutenberg.org.  The project, which is celebrating its 40th anniversary in 2011, creates free eBook editions of books that are out of copyright or were published under a license such as Creative Commons that allows them to be distributed freely. The catalog currently has over 36,000 titles.

Dubbed "PG Mobile", the mobile version carries the entire Gutenberg catalog.  Author, title and subject search makes it easy to find your favorite authors and books.  If you are looking for reading suggestions you browse listings of the most popular and newest titles or visit category "Bookshelves" like "Harvard Classics", "Detective Fiction", "Banned Books" or "Erotic Fiction".

Project Gutenberg's mobile view appears to be optimized for the iPhone and other touch smartphones but degrades nicely in lesser browsers and worked well when tested with the Myriad (formerly Openwave) browser of a basic feature phone.



What's This?

The Manga Man 2.0

Content: ****  Usability: XXXX
winksite.mobi/xhtml/ms_main.cfm?... (xhtml-mp)

Philip K. Dick Award nominated author Alexander Besher ‘s novel "The Manga Man" is the story of a half-digital, half-human “post-Zen” Butoh dancer-assassin whose mission is “to stop the warlords who plan to clone the universe.” Published by Winksite as a cellphone novel with one chapter per page.


What's This?

Yoza Cellphone Stories

Content: ****  Usability: XXXX
yoza.mobi/ (xhtml-mp)

Yoza cellphone stories are short, hip and free. Read them, leave comments and enter writing competitions to win airtime. Each story is a series with a new chapter published every day, like a soap opera on your phone. Source: Mobility.mobi


What's This?

The Book Seer

Content: ****  Usability: XXXX
bookseer.com/m/ (xhtml-mp)

Tell it what you book you enjoyed and the Book Seer will recommend others you may like with links to Amazon U.K. for reviews and purchasing.  Source Oh! Mobile Directory.


What's This?

Simon & Schuster

Content: ****  Usability: XXX
www.simonandschuster.mobi/ (xhtml-mp)

Big publisher Simon & Shuster's mobile catalog is seachable and includes a synopsis, author information for each title along with links to buy the book the from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or IndieBound.  There are also links to purchase most titles as eBooks from Amazon or B&N. The eBook links are currently broken, leading to the Kindle or B&N homepage rather than the eBook's purchase page. Source: Mobility.mobi


What's This?

LibraryThing

Content: ***  Usability: XXXX
www.librarything.com/m/ (xhtml-mp)

LibraryThing Mobile

A social network for book lovers.  LibraryThing lets you build an online catalog of your books, rate them and write reviews. It gives you recommendations of new books you may like based on the likes of other members with similar tastes. There are links to Amazon and other online booksellers. A basic membership, allowing you to catalog 200 books, is free.  Unlimited cataloging is $10/year or $25 "for life".  Social networking features include a profile page for each member, groups, forums friends and the ability to privately "watch" a member's updates.

Compared with the desktop version, LibraryThing's mobile site is quite limited.  It lets you view your book catalog and look at the site's recommendations.  There is no ability to add books to your collection, read reviews or interact with other users. Recommended by: @andrewjb44


What's This?

MobileRead

Content: ****  Usability: XXXX
www.mobileread.mobi (xhtml-mp)

MobileRead's mobile homepage

MobileRead is a very active blog and forum dedicated to getting and using eBook and Web content on mobile devices.

Lots of good items about ebook readers formats and ebook sources. Tips on how to "convert books to different mobile formats. The focus is on dedicated readers like the Kindle but there is also discussion of eBooks on phones and PDAs.

Mobileread also has a library of about 1000 ebooks available for download. Source: Mobility.mobi


What's This?

Robin Sloan

Content: ****  Usability: XXXX
www.robinsloan.com/ (xhtml-mp)

A collection of stories and essays from Robin Sloan, a former member of Twitter's media team and now a writer and "media inventor" in San Francisco. Mr. Sloan's first novel, "Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore", will be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in October. The site is built with a gorgeous responsive design layout.

Page size: 226 KB


What's This?

Feedbooks

Content: ****  Usability: XXXX
www.feedbooks.com/mobile (xhtml-mp)

A large collection of free public Domain and Creative Commons eBooks available for download in Mobipocket, epub and Kindle formats.


What's This?

BooksInMyPhone

Content: ****  Usability: XXX
mobile.booksinmyphone.com/ (HTML5)

 BooksInMyPhone I think BooksInMyPhone is a great name The site at mobile.booksinmyphone.com offers a small but growing collection of out of copyright classics and Creative Commons titles. The mobile site lists about 200 books in various categories. There is no search box, finding a specific title means a trip to the PC site, BooksInMyPhone.com to get a download code and then back to the mobie site to key in the code and get the download. The codes are alphanumeric too, a numeric code would be easier to key on the phone. That might be tolerable if the reading experience was good. Unfortunately the reader software is slow at paging down which interrupts the flow of reading. The real show stopper is that the left and right directional pad keys jump to the previous and next chapters. I'm always absentmindedly hitting the right key which I'm used to using to page down in Opera Mini and gMail and ending up in the next chapter. That wouldn't be so bad but when I press the left key to go back it takes me to the beginning of the previous chapter and I have to slowly page down to find my place. Update: a reader points out that you can press the "up" key to go back to your place in the previous chapter. BooksInMyPhone's also creates whole books as a single file regardless of size. Many novels are over 200KB when packaged as Java books. Few feature phones can handle jar files much over 100KB so any substantial work will be too big to load on the majority of phones.


What's This?

Secondhand Memories

Content: ****  Usability: XXXX
mukashi.wordpress.com/ (xhtml-mp)

The first North American Japanese-style ongoing cellphone novel, Secondhand Memories is a story of high school love.  Written on a mobile phone by "takatsu" it has short (50-100 word) chapters for "mobile snack" reading on your phone whenever you have a minute or two to kill. 


What's This?

Manybooks

Content: ****  Usability: XXX
mnybks.net/ (HTML5/wml)

ManyBooksManyBooks.net (mobile: mnybks.net) has every Project Gutenberg book, 17,000 books in all, as a free Java or Mobipocket download. The ManyBooks mobile site has a search function which works well. You can also search ManyBook's desktop site to find a book and get a numeric code which you then enter on the the mobile site. Unless you have a smartphone, limit your selection to short stories. Like with BooksInMyPhone each book is packaged as a single Java .jar file. The Java reader is mjBook which has bookmarks, optional auto scroll and text search. You can download the mjBook creator and use it to create your own books from any text file. The creator has an option to automatically split books into smaller separate jars - too bad Manybooks.net doesn't offer that option.The big files were no problem for the Nokia N95, but the single tiny font that ManyBooks uses was. The font was unbearably small and with no way to change it I ended up deleting the books from my phone in frustration. If you have an iPhone or iTouch and are willing to hack it, ManyBooks has books for the iPhone bookreader app.


What's This?

Wattpad

Content: ****  Usability: XXX
m.wattpad.com (xhtml-mp/wml)

WattPadThis site lets you read eBooks online or dowload a mobile Java, BlackBerry, iOS or Android reader app. The reader is attractive and works pretty well. It comes with a few titles preinstalled and you can search and browse the catalog easily to find more.

The Wattpad Android, BlackBerry and iOS readers download full books and support reading offline. Wattpad's Java ME reader works differently. It uses your wireless connection to download a few pages at a time in the background while you are reading, which is fine as long as you have a connection. I do most of my reading on the subway where there is no wireless service. Wattpad offers standalone .jar versions of each of their books which don't require a wireless connection.The standalone books are available as a single .jar file or split into multiple 64 or 128KB files for older or very low end phones.


What's This?

Wattpad Touch

Content: ****  Usability: XXXX
touch.wattpad.com/search (xhtml-mp)

Touch version of the Wattpad eBook site. Wattpad is a community of readers and authors where anyone can publish stories for all to read. Wattpad has native book reader apps for iOS, Android, BlackBerry and Java ME and you can also read online using a reader webapp on the site. There's also a version of Wattpad.com optimized for feature phones at m.wattpad.com


What's This?

Creative Commons Books

Content: *****  Usability: XXXXX
winksite.com/books/cc (HTML5/wml)

Read books published under the Creative Commons license


What's This?

Jagamaga Audiobooks

Content: ****  Usability: XXXX
www.mobi.jagamaga-audiobooks.com/ (xhtml-mp)

Hundreds of free audiobook short stories in AAC(m4a) format for mobile download.


What's This?

Memoware

Content: ****  Usability: XXX
www.memoware.com/wireless/ (HTML5)
Mobile edition of a major site for free and commercial eBooks. The mobile site only has the free books, surprisingly. There are over 2000 Books in a variety of formats for PDAs and smartphones like AportisDOC PalmReader, Plucker, iSilo, MobiPocket, Windows Reader and PDF.
What's This?

Open Source Shakespeare

Content: ****  Usability: XXX
mobile.opensourceshakespeare.org/ (xhtml-mp)

At the mobile version of Open Source Shakespeare, you can read the plays, sonnets, and poems on your iPhone, BlackBerry, Palm, Chocolate, or other mobile device. Large page sizes of up to 40 KB may be a problem on some phones. Source: Oh! Mobile Directory


What's This?

NLB Mobile

Content: ****  Usability: XXXX
m.nlb.gov.sg/ (xhtml-mp)

The National Library Board of Singapore's mobile site has a small collection of short stories for download in Mobipocket format.  The site also has an event calendar, catalog search, "Ask a Librarian" and a blog. Source: Oh! Mobile Directory


What's This?

Love and Words

Content: ****  Usability: XXXX
loveandwords.com/ (xhtml-mp)

Love and Words

Cassandra Tribe is an American poet and filmmaker noted not only for her poetry but also for her readings and videos in which she uses changes in the pitch and timbre of her voice along with music, costume and makeup to achieve dramatic effects.

Love and Words is Tribe's blog where she shares her life experiences, philosophical essays and an occasional poem. The mobile version of Love and Words includes blog posts, a rotating selection of poems and stills from Tribes videos.  Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

 


What's This?

NMW - No Matter What

Content: ****  Usability: XXXX
winksite.mobi/rekipoca/nmw (xhtml-mp)

A cellphone novel of love found and lost by a 17 year old from the Philippines.  Via @davidharper

15-Feb-2013: Site is down


What's This?

Shakespeare

Content: ****  Usability: XXX
wap.tobeornottobe.com/shakespeare/ (HTML5)
wap.tobeornottobe.com/shakespear... (wml)

The complete works of William Shakespeare on your phone, Each page is a complete scene so the pages at around 20KB may be too large for some phone. There's a wml version with small pages at wap.tobeornottobe.com/shakespeare/index_p1.wml

15-Feb-2013: Site is down


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What's This?
QR Code
It's a QR (Quick Response) Code containing the URL of WapReview Mobile. Snap it with your phone's QR Code reader to go to the WapReview mobile site.

Ratings Key :

Content - 0-5 *'s indicating the quality of the site's writing, depth, timeliness and accuracy.

Usability - 0-5 X's indicating the usability of the site on a mobile device, based on ease and intuitivness of navigation and lack of excessive scrolling through ads etc. to reach main content.