KooBits

KooBits 4.0 bills itself as "the place to shelve my e-books." This free e-book reader for Windows can store and display electronic book in the most common formats, such as PDF and EPUB, but it offers greater interactivity and enriched multimedia content such as games and video with the proprietary KBJ format. It even offers free books.

Koobits opens with a user interface spread out like the open pages of a book. We clicked the welcome screen, which took us to the My Library page. An animated tool tip quickly demonstrated how to create and add new Categories and folders to hold the books we'd shelve there. The main window resembles library shelves with books displaying their full covers, while a left-hand panel gave us access to Free Books, Paid Books, Local Books, and our own Categories as we added them. KooBits displayed a wide range of titles to download. The program remembers your selections and recommends books you might enjoy based on your past choices. The program opens with Free Books displayed, although the initial titles are skewed toward educational and children's literature. However, we were able to download "Irish Fairy Tales" by the great Irish writer James Stephens. The 6.8MB download took mere seconds; when it finished, we simply had to click the cover to open it in the reader. The typeface, page style, and highlighting did a splendid job of reproducing the look of a real book, and the page turning and other actions worked as well as other readers we've tried, and better than most on a desktop PC. A toolbar gave us access to a highlighter, bookmarks, pointer, image cropping tool, and other useful features. We could click open a side panel displaying pages menu-style for quick access.

KooBits will analyze your reading habits and place free books in your Drop Box. As an e-book reader, we found nothing to fault and much to like about KooBits, and we like its easy shelf-based storage. It shows how far e-book readers have come in a short time.