It is undeniably true that a group of people crazily loves books – from fiction to inspiration to self-help and even down to comic books. Once your favorite author releases a new book in the market, you would see yourself frantically going to the nearest bookstore just to get hold of it. When you are travelling, you might not notice that more often than not, you always have a book in tow with you. You can’t deny the fact that a book would serve as a good company especially when you are waiting for someone in the airport or you’re just taking time to relax in the beach. Bringing books with you, however, might somewhat be bulky. But thanks to the advent of e-books, you can now read your all-time favorites right at the comfort of your tablets. With the wide choice of e-readers available in the market, here are the five best apps for 2011:

1. FBReader

One of the most popular and well-performing Android e-readers in the market today is the FBREADER. This e-reading program can read a wide selection of e-book formats, including, among others, plucker, fb2, and ePub. With this program, you can also customize the background of the book you’re reading to any color if ever you’re already bored with the traditional plain white background. Moreover, you can change the color of the texts and hyperlinks and even control the book’s line spacing, margins and alignments. Once you customize the settings of this program, it will automatically be applied to the rest of the e-books that you will be reading in the future, thus, saving you time. With FBREADER, you can also read books either in portrait or landscape format. The page orientation is locked by default but you can still unlock it in the Settings menu. Also, the page turning speed here is quick – best for people who are quite impatient in switching between pages. The only downside with this reader is that a weird trailing line would appear every time you turn pages. If you’re reading a long e-book, then this can really be disturbing. However, given the rest of the program’s features, this issue is somewhat tolerable.

2. Aldiko Book Reader

Another leading e-book reader for tablets is the Aldiko Book Reader. Compared to other programs, Aldiko can only read fewer e-book formats but it works so well with ePub and .pdf files. Once you load this reader, a library showing all the books you have stored will appear right at your screen. To customize your reading experience, you can also choose from multiple options. First, you have the option to switch between day and night modes. You can also make adjustments in your orientation, brightness features, fonts and margins. What’s also efficient with this application is that you don’t have to go through an extensive settings menu to perform advanced options. Aldiko has a minimal interface which is very much time-saving and user-friendly. This reader also has a store portal of its own which brings you, for example, to the latest NY Times Bestseller. It also provides links to other bookstores, like the Books on Board, Smashwords, and O’ Reilly. Compared to FBREADER, this app does not have an annoying trailing line that appears every time you switch pages. To date, Aldiko is still updating and the time will come that this will be the best app available for Android tablets.

3. Moon+ Reader

Moon+ Reader is another Android app that greets you with a bookshelf interface when you load it up. It comes with an automatic drive scanner that looks at your main memory and SD card and imports books into your shelf, complete with arts. This program can read multiple book formats, like ePub, fb2, zip and txt, among others. Once you read a book, Moon+ Reader makes you choose from 11 pre-installed themes with different backgrounds, brightness features and fonts. You can also choose from day and night themes, themes at different parts of the day and even outdoor themes. To automatically select the best theme, you can use the light sensors found in tablets. The drawback of this app is the trailing line that appears by default when you turn pages. However, you can shut this off under the advanced options. Over-all, this is more of a clone of Aldiko’s without the store interface.

4. Cool Reader

Cool Reader is an Android e-book reader that lets you choose from a wide selection of book types – from .doc, .fb2, .txt, ePub to mobi and prc. The interface of this program is very basic, however, lacking the shelf interface that other apps have. Primarily, it is just designed to read books. By default, this app does not have the clean white background to read e-books. Instead, it has that traditional gradient background but the upside is you can fix this by going to Options and changing the book’s texture to a solid color. Although Cool Reader has a simple interface, it comes with features which are not also found in other apps. For one, you can take notes here and even look up words in the dictionary. More of like a balancing feature after all, what do you think?

5. Mantano Reader

Another e-reader to watch out for is the Mantano Reader. This app has a fancy interface which allows you to choose between Notes, Library, and Lexicon. In the Notes option, you can write notes using the Android keyboard or you can write them down via touch screen, depending on what suits you. Lexicon, on the other hand, mainly functions as a dictionary. What’s good about this app is that its page turning speed is quite fast, thus, skipping the delay found in other programs. Also, you can switch between landscape and portrait modes with no hanging time at all. Other notable features of this app are that you can take notes and make highlights or bookmarks on any page you want. Highlighting is even made more awesome with all the color schemes available. This app also has a text-to-speech feature, which reads highlighted text or even the whole book to you. What’s amazing is that the pages will flip by themselves the moment the reading reaches the next page. Your kids might just love this. This app, however, has no option to change margins, line spacing, and fonts but with the text-to-speech feature, this app is surely a winner.

Author Bio: Danny loves writing about the best Android tablets at his blog. You can find plenty of other Android tablet information at Android Tablet Fanatic.

Category: Computers and Technology
Keywords: android tablet, ebook, e-reader, gadget, ebooks, tablet, android gadget