CNET Editors' review
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.
Publisher's Description
From KooBits:
KooBits 4.0 is an all-new innovative free e-book reader software that enables you to conveniently view, organize and manage all your e-books in commonly used formats such as PDF, ePub, even those interactive e-books with animation and multimedia in KBJ format. KooBits 4.0 not only has the basic functions as an universal e-book viewer and e-book manager, like organizing a library of e-book collection, purchasing from an online e-bookstore, highlighting in various colours, annotating with symbols or icons using the stamp feature and bookmarking, but enables interactive functions such as page flipping and game elements as well. With KooBits e-book reader, games are weaved into the story plot and incorporated into the e-book to enable easier understanding of the story with the flow of game while reading. Ingenious features such as video playback, audio narration and more available now makes the e-book more visually appealing to e-book readers. Simple drag and drop features also enable for easy categorizing of one's e-books, on top of creating personalized categories for them. The extraction tool also enables copying and pasting of digital content into the scrapbook. The Drop Box function also gives a daily e-book for free, based on users' selection of topics of interest.
KooBits 4.0 offers many additional unique advantages, including: universal e-book viewer: compatible with most e-book formats; e-book organizer and manager: shelve all your e-books in one place; interactive e-book reader: content extraction and annotation; e-book library and store: free e-books delivered right to your doorstep.
What's new in this version: Version 4.0.1.9 may include unspecified updates, enhancements, or bug fixes.
More Popular eBooks downloads
- Calibre
2,292 downloads
- MartView
2,170 downloads
- PDF to ePub Converter
1,393 downloads
- Programming C
1,239 downloads
- Kindle for PC
1,145 downloads
-
All versions:
3.5 starsout of 10 votes
-
Current version:
3.0 starsout of 2 votes
-
My rating:
Write review
Results 1-2 of 2
-
"Pretty, but functionally challenged."
Version: KooBits 4.0.1.9
Pros
Slick look. There are some very good ideas here. Uninstalled correctly.
Cons
Completely without intuitive controls of any kind. Indeed there seem to be no keyboard shortcuts at all (even page down while reading).
Not capable of correctly reading metadata on .epub books. Cannot read or display cover art, publisher, etc. All my books had the same cover in Koobits because it can't read the cover.
Controls are clunky and hard to use. For instance when you create a new collection and click to rename it a dialog appears without the focus on the naming area. You realize this only after you've typed in the name and have to use the mouse to click the area to get focus on it and re-type it.
The reader itself is almost like an add-on. It cannot navigate .epub files correctly. Doesn't recognize start of book, book cover (indeed you can't navigate to the cover at all). Seems to rely completely on the OCX file instead of the TOC or bookmarks.
Does not recognize other ebook formats. Unusable for .mobi files, pdf etc.Summary
This is what happens when poor programmers have good ideas. I can see the promise in this product, but it's too poorly executed at this time to recommend.
I was looking for a pure reader to replace Calibre and/or the Firefox epub plugin for reading epub files. Koobits doesn't deliver at all. Back to converting epubs to mobi in Calibre and using Kindle for PC to read them for me. -
"Brilliant and very useful to have. A great download"
Version: KooBits 4.0.1.9
Pros
Great place to store my e books and ePubs and they are all there in one place readily available. Cannot fault it.
Cons
Sorry but there are none I can say
Summary
Would recommend it for ease of use plus there is a lot I have yet to discover 5*
Add Your Review
Submit your reply
E-mail this review
Report offensive content
See more CNET content tagged:
Previous Versions:
