Following this post are app-specific walkthroughs for a number of the current iPad eTextbook apps. The two app walkthroughs missing are for the Modality app (Thieme Body Atlas title review, but non-atlas text-heavy title not reviewed yet) and VitalSource app.
Overall Rankings:
- Modality and Inkling
- iBooks
- Kindle
- Nook
- CourseSmart
- VitalSource
Synopsis:
Modality and Inkling have superior handling of visual materials and text compared with the other titles. Modality excels at Atlases (have not seen its interpretation of text-heavy titles) and Inkling overall is a very well-rounded app. Though the highlight/annotate function aren’t as smooth as iAnnotate, Noterize, and even iBooks, the “hold on a word –> magnifying glass –> select text” method for markups is easy to perform and similar to text-select method on any iOS device.
iBooks, Kindle, and NOOK apps have pretty similar markup functionality; though their handling of images/diagrams/tables is variable. The largest downside to these apps is that the files for the texts don’t offer much security, so medical publishers view these formats as less than ideal.
In its current iteration, the highlight/annotate feature of CourseSmart is extremely cumbersome and too inefficient to make markups on a regular basis. Also, the titles are not stored on the device and require an internet connection.
VitalSource currently gets the lowest ranking because it has NO highlight/annotate functionality on the iPad. The next version of the app is reported to have this functionality; though the deploy date has already been delayed.