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• Bookshare Gets A Makeover
• Amazon Kindle 2 Includes Text to Speech Capability
• Make Your iPhone A Personal Library

Guest post by Julie-Ann Amos.

Anyone who has browsed iPhone apps know that the iPhone can do just about anything. Now it can even be your own personal, portable library. You can use your iPhone to carry around massive amounts of information without having to carry around all those books. The next question is apparent. How can this be done?

Wattpad

Wattpad is the definitive way to carry around your own personal library. While carrying even a few books in their traditional form can quickly become cumbersome, Wattpad offers you more than 100,000 works of fan fiction and other such personal works right on your iPhone and it does this for free. You are limited to reading these mostly personal works that individuals have contributed to the website, but the range of material more than makes up for this. You are not limited to reading the works of others, however. You can also publish and share your own content using this remarkable tool.

This app lets you view all these works at your leisure. You can seek out specific works or you can simply browse the sections labeled What’s New, What’s Hot, and Recommended Books. The features do not stop there as you realize that this app is capable of supporting as many as 20 different languages. You can adjust font type, size, and color to your personal preferences and use a bookmark option to keep your place for next time. You can even set it up so that the pages turn themselves at regular intervals so you do not have to do it every time.

This incredible iPhone app is a personal library all its own. Its over 100,000 titles of contributed works allow you an amazing wealth of information that can always be at your fingertips. Wattpad uses the EPUB format for its ebooks, a commonly used format for digital books and publications. Unfortunately, Wattpad cannot get documents from OS X computers.

Papers

Another iPhone app that can work wonders as it serves as your personal library is called Papers. This app is for the scientifically minded individual. With it, you can carry around all the research literature that you want with ease. You can access it whether you are travelling, in class, or attending a conference.

You can enjoy instant access to hundreds of articles and other informational sources. Then you can share this information with others. You can utilize its special search engines to sort through millions of scientific papers to find whatever information you seek. You also have the ability to organize your library for faster retrieval of relevant sources. In fact, you can even backup your library online and this feature is entirely free. Of course, you can search authors and journals too.

This app is ideal for anyone looking for a personal library with a decidedly scientific bent. The seemingly endless amounts of information that can be stored and searched using this app are perfect for anyone attempting to maintain a library of scientific information or anyone attempting to coordinate research efforts on a large scale. Papers is a way for those seeking a way to maximize their iPhone library’s scientific potential to do so.

It provides you with access to ADS, ACM, arXiv, Google Scholar, JSTOR, PubMed, and Web of Science databases. Papers supports the PDF format for its offerings. As an added bonus, Papers on the iPhone or iTouch works with Papers for OS X computers. Still, when comparing Wattpad and Papers you have to consider what you will need. Some works such as “My Own Kind of Freedom” by Steven Brust will be available using both apps while most will not.

Making your iPhone a personal library is easy with these two apps. Whether you are seeking a general library or a scientific one, these apps can help you to carry all the literature that you need around with you. With such easy library access, everyone can fuel or rediscover their love of books.

- Julie

Julie-Ann Amos blogs about how to choose among the best online universities.