Eucalyptus Review: A Library in Your Hand

There is by no means a shortage of book readers in the App Store. Some are single books, and some contain many books. There is even a Kindle app, for reading paid-for books. Well only very recently, after being denied (because of its wide selection of titles), Eucalyptus was accepted into the App Store.

Project Gutenberg contains over 28,000 free titles that you can access from your computer, and now your iPhone too. Eucalyptus is really just an app that allows you to download and then read books from Project Gutenberg. And it does this very well. You can look at the “Picks” or search by author or book. The Picks are good if you are looking for a very classic book, or just don’t know what you want to read. Once you have selected a book you would like to read, you just click Get Book, and a nice animation shows you that the book has gone to your downloads. The only possible improvement for downloading books would be the ability to browse by genre or alphabetically.

When Eucalyptus downloads a book, there are two parts: The actual downloading and the structure analyzing. The downloading is straightforward, and when it says, “analyzing structure…” it basically means that it is analyzing and converting the book to be read with Eucalyptus. There is even a two-part progress indicator to show you how much of each step has been completed. The longer the book, the longer this whole process takes, so be prepared to wait a few minutes for a long book.

Your library of books is sorted in two ways: By title and by author. The Authors tab allows you to see books by specific authors (and also just see what authors you have books by), and the Books tab allows you to see your books alphabetically. There’s not much more to it than that.

As if its huge library of books, and the ease of downloading weren’t enough, the reading experience is outstanding. There are three ways to go through the book: The slider, flipping pages and the “back” view. The slider allows you to traverse through the book very fast, and also shows you what chapter the new location will be in. Sliding between pages is my favorite. There is only one other app that even does page turning similar to Eucalyptus, and I must say Eucalyptus even puts that app (Classics) to shame with the animations. An app like Classics uses static images to flip from page to page, which creates a great animation. But, Eucalyptus seems to use a real 3D engine. The shadow changes based on where the page is, and the page will even wiggle if you drag back and forth very fast. I really love this part of the app. You can also use the arrows at the bottom to go from chapter to chapter (but not page by page).

Another way to get through the book is the “back” view. You can get to this by clicking the icon in the right of the top bar (when in a book). Here you can simply click on a chapter (or other section), and Eucalyptus will bring you there. It also shows you the current chapter (or section). This basically brings a table of contents to the book, that is accessible without having to flip to the beginning of it.

Eucalyptus costs $9.99 in the App Store, and you can easily see the amount of polish and work put into it. It has become my favorite book reader instantly. And because of its huge library, you’ll always find a book to read. However, it is very expensive compared to other readers, but in some of those, you have to pay for books, or you only get a few. Anyone looking to read classic books on the iPhone must at least check out Eucalyptus. I might even say it is one of the most polished apps in the App Store.

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