New ebook findings re: my new Microsoft Surface Pro 3 12″ as an entertainment touchscreen tablet. Which may interest some readers.

I settled on Cover as the free reader for .CBR etc comics. Free, superb, and lovely design/usability. Set a landscape-orientation screen on the Surface, ‘fit width’, tap to scroll down a third of the comic page. Assuming a traditional page-layout, it’s then almost better than guided panel-by-panel view, as at the high screen-resolution you’re effectively on a huge BD-sized page — which means you can focus on a panel but also see parts of the panels around it. Cover is one of the best comics readers I’ve seen, and I tried quite a few on the Kindle (Android OS). Cover is now also my default .PDF reader on the Surface, as it’s lovely for that and can do double-page magazine spreads without a gutter-line.

Sadly, Cover has no .ePUB support other than for any images inside the file. But I need .ePub on a tablet for monthly Instapaper-like bundles of news and magazine articles I save from the Web for later armchair reading. Windows .ePub readers are nearly all deficient in some way, but I’ve found Koodoo Reader just pips the latest Thorium to the post, due to ‘swipe to turn a page’. Thorium only has fixed page-turn buttons, at the bottom of the screen (poorly placed, for a Surface held propped in hands). Possibly I’ve yet to discover some Store app that does .ePubs better, though.

The Kindle app is deliberately dire on Windows, so purchased Kindle ebooks can be read in your favoured browser at read.amazon.com/kindle-library.

The Windows donationware VoiceMacro also looks useful, though has not yet been tested. (Update: tested and useful. The words ‘nine’ and ‘he’ are trigger words that, even when softly spoken, are always recognised). The OS’s built-in Windows Speech Recognition is very flaky at transcribing my speech-words from the built-in microphone, but maybe this freeware will handle a basic utterance. Say “turn”, send a keypress = the book page turns. That’s all I want. One Android comic-book reader has a ‘turn page by any noise’ feature, but that’s the only place I’ve seen the idea implemented.

That’s it, hope this helps some Tentaclii readers with a Windows touchscreen tablet in desktop mode, and reading ebooks of various sorts.