Book haven

In this digital era when new media is slowly and surely dominating print media, I had always been supportive of the latter, until Rockstand app compelled me to rethink. This free eBook and eMagazine buying and reading app is ought to be in every bibliophile's good books.

Available on Android, iOS and Windows phones, Rockstand app has an enormous list of books neatly listed in different categories such as fiction, non-fiction, travel and lifestyle and children's books. It offers books from distinguished authors of national and international repute. The app offers various magazines, too. You can choose from entertainment, business, sports, adventure and many other magazines. The app lets you create your own virtual library which showcases all your purchased eBooks and eMagazines. Now, standing in a chock-a-block metro train is less painful since the Text To Speech feature reads out my eBook for me. To retain the good old feel of reading a book, you also have the option of flipping pages. You could even highlight important text and save your annotations, besides reviewing and rating eBooks or eMagazines.

The app unconventionally features regional content in Urdu, Hindi, Tamil, Marathi and more. It tries to make reading easier by providing night and day modes, and various options to change font size and style, line spacing, background colour, alignment, etc help enhance users' experience. The Page Bookmark feature takes you to the last read page in case you forget to do so.

The payment process is getting smoother with every update and the developer is constantly addressing issues raised by users. Though it takes time to download image heavy files and the size of the file can't be ascertained until the download is complete, I would still recommend this app to all those book lovers who can't get enough of the printed word in the digital era.