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GoodReader is GREAT

Anyone who knows me knows that although I have about every Apple product they make (iPad, iPhone, iPod, Airport Express, AppleTV, MacBook, etc), yet I HATE Apple.  Why?   Because they make fantastic hardware that is super easy to use, but the content is ridiculously controlled.  I loathe iTunes, because it's the only way Apple wants you to move songs, movies, and ebooks.  In a perfect world, I could plug in my iPad, and it would show up as a drive on my laptop, or I could open a wirelessly connected NAS and download/upload media at will.   But NO, Apple wants iTunes to lock everything down and prohibits even the easiest transfer of media.  Worse, their buggy apps have (I'm talking to you iBooks) on multiple occasions caused me to lose downloaded content.  

Recently I was trying to get iBooks to display some pdf ebooks that I downloaded from the web, and the application barfed hard, and for the last time.   Here's a screenshot.


Anyway, all of my ebooks were unreadble, AGAIN, so I was fed up and decided to dump iBooks for good.  Incidentally, for all you hackers out there, this is a clear indication that the cover-art rendering engine of iBooks is vulnerable to a hack, so hackers please wack this app, which is downloaded by default on ALL iPads, so that Apple gets their crap together and fixes it.   

Anyway, I decided to remove all my ebooks from Apple's control, and manage them myself somehow.   Enter GoodReader.   http://www.goodiware.com/goodreader.html

This app costs about $5 on the Apple Store, but it allows you to manage your content outside of big-brother Apple's control.  It works great connecting to my wireless NAS, and lets me upload/download content to it at will, WITHOUT iTunes!  YES!   What's more, it even plays audio files, and you can upload a lot of audio books for FREE and listen to them like you would with Audible.    

Check it out... go to http://www.booksshouldbefree.com/Top_100 and check out the audio books they have FOR FREE.   I downloaded a few of these as mp3 formatted books, and put them on my NAS, connected wirelessly with my iPad and pointed GoodReader at them, and it sucked these books in easily.   Now I have a bunch of audio books to listen to, and it cost me nothing.   

How does it work for ebooks?   It works GREAT.   It allows you to manage your own content, outside of iTunes, and you can even annotate your pdfs!   It's my eBook reader of choice, and I may even look into moving my music there!  

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