Flipkart e-books is one year old now, and is celebrating its anniversary by offering over one lakh e-books at Rs 99 or less.
Being one of India’s biggest online stores, Flipkart does not limit itself to selling e-books, but has an e-reader platform for Android and iOS, apart from a web-based one.
Flipkart’s web reader uses the ‘Flip-Stream’ technology to render books on the browser. A major update released recently allows the reader to read the books in offline mode - a feature which other web-based readers do not have. The new feature enables the reader to download the books and read it without connecting to the Internet. There is no need to install additional software.
The web reader provides all the features supported on app - day, sepia, night mode, notes, highlights, bookmarks and font size.
Android and iOS apps
Flipkart’s Android and iOS ebook apps also allow readers to side-load their own books (those not bought on Flipkart) and get the same reading experience.
Flipkart reader’s ‘collections’ feature enables books to be organised into different collections based on the user behaviour.
The Text to Speech feature introduced recently in the Android app, which does not have the speak out feature in iOS platform, reads out the books.
All the apps, including the web reader, enable the readers to switch the reading mode to day, night and sepia. They also enable the reader to change the font size and orientation, highlight text, take notes, bookmark pages and refer to a dictionary while reading.
The readers also support regional languages, and claim to be the first in the market to do it.
The Flip Sync technology ensures the readers’ reading behaviour (notes, highlights, bookmarks, last read location) is synced across all devices and the web reader, so that they can seamlessly switch between devices while reading ebooks.
The only catch is that the sideloaded books cannot be synced across devices. They are locally stored in the device only. Books cannot be sideloaded in the web reader.