Archive for the ‘Tips & Tricks’ Category

Something You Should Know About the New Update (Version 2.1.0)

Tuesday, December 13th, 2011
We hope you enjoy the new update (version 2.1.0). As you may have been aware, we have made some changes to the user interface of the app. In this post, we will highlight those changes to help you adapt to the new UI more easily.
  • My Catalogs
“My Catalogs” is now moved to the Store section. To access “My Catalogs”, please tap on the “Store” icon on the home screen of the Aldiko Book Reader app, you will be linked to the Store section of the app. After that, please tap on the menu key of your device, you should be able to see the “My Catalogs” option. Tap on it and you will be there.

For new users, you may ask how I can make use of the “My Catalogs” feature. If you would like to buy books from bookstore that is currently not in the Store section of the Aldiko app, you can add the URL of the bookstore in “My Catalogs” (just by entering the store name and the store’s URL). After that, you can browse, shop and download books from this bookstore directly inside the  app. (If you would like to see your favorite bookstores integrated into the Aldiko app, we recommend you to send your feedback to the bookstores.)

  • Recent Reads

Many of you requested us to make the “Recent Reads” section like the one in Aldiko version 1.0, we heard you. One of the biggest changes you may notice is the brand new home screen,  there are now 4 icons on the home screen instead of 6 to make the user interface more simple. In addition, we have added the “Recent Reads” section on the home screen. The “Recent Reads” section shows the books that you are currently reading. You can scroll the books horizontally to see the complete list of the books that you are currently reading.

  • Dictionary

Improving the dictionary feature was one of the most frequent request by all of you. The good news is that we are currently working on it; the bad news is that we had to remove this feature temporarily. Therefore, the dictionary feature is not available temporarily in this update. We hope to bring it back as soon as possible.

If you have any feedback or need any assistance, please leave comment below or directly send email to us at support@aldiko.zendesk.com. Browsing our support forum is a good way to learn more as well, you will find most of the info you need. :)

P.S.: We review the comments on the Android Market regularly, however, we cannot reply you directly there due to the limitation of the Android Market. If you have any question, we recommend you to use the above methods to contact us directly, thank you!

Posted in Products & Updates, Tips & Tricks | 1 Comment »

[TIPS & TRICKS] Read or Import Your eBooks from Other Apps

Wednesday, December 7th, 2011

Yesterday, we released a new update for the Aldiko Book Reader app which added some new features and improvements, one of the new functions is that you can read or import your eBooks directly from some third party apps, such as Dropbox, Gmail (for PDF files) etc. Here is how to do it:

Take Dropbox as an example, first, open Dropbox app on your phone or tablet, locate the eBook file that you want to read or import, the format of the file can be either PDF or EPUB.

Select an eBook file and you will see the “Complete action using” pop-up window. If you want to read the book immediately, you can select “Read with Aldiko”. If you would like to import the file into your library in the Aldiko Book Reader and read it later, select “Import to Aldiko”. We recommend you to select “Import to Aldiko” option because when your book is imported into Aldiko, Aldiko will remember your reading position, bookmark etc. “Read with Aldiko” option will not do this. Below we select “Import to Aldiko”

After selecting “Import to Aldiko”, the book will be automatically imported and you will see a “New Content” window and your book at the end. Now you can quit the Aldiko Book Reader. Next time when you come back, you will see your new book right in your library, just go ahead to enjoy reading! If you would like to read or import files from a website or Gmail client (PDF files), the procedures are the same as above.

Posted in Tips & Tricks | 1 Comment »

Using Dropbox with Aldiko

Saturday, October 8th, 2011

At Aldiko, we always want to give you more freedom to choose what you read. You can buy books from different bookstores and you can add your own favorite bookstores in the app; you can also transfer your own books and documents to the Aldiko app through the Import feature.

Today, we’re introducing a quick tip for you to transfer files from your computer to Aldiko app on your Android Smartphone or tablet by using a great tool called Dropbox. Dropbox is a cloud storage service which can sync all your files between different devices, including PC, Mac, iPhone, iPad and Android devices etc.

Below is the step-by-step guide of how to use Dropbox to transfer files from computer to Aldiko:

1. Install Dropbox app on your computer. Dropbox gives you 2GB free cloud storage. (You only need to do this if you are a new Dropbox user).

2. Put the book and document files that you would like to transfer to Aldiko app in the Dropbox app and wait for these files to be synced.

3. Install Dropbox app for Android on your Smartphone or tablet. After that, you should be able to see the list of book and document files that you have previously added to Dropbox app.

4.Click the book and document files in the Dropbox app to download the files and select Aldiko app if the action window pop-up.

5. Enjoy reading your books and documents with Aldiko app.

Note: In step 4, if you would like to import the files into Aldiko app, you can follow the below instructions:

(1) Click the book and document files in the Dropbox app to download them.

(2) Tap on the “SD Card” icon at the home page of Aldiko app.

(3) Locate Dropbox folder and then locate the book and document files.

(4) Check the box next to the files.

(5) Tap on the “Import to Aldiko” button at the pop-up window at the bottom.

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Posted in Tips & Tricks | 1 Comment »

Tips & Tricks: Edit Metadata of a Book

Wednesday, November 10th, 2010
When we develop the Aldiko Book Reader application, we want to offer users the best user experience in discovering, purchasing, downloading, reading and organizing books. In addition, we also want to provide users choice: users can choose what they read and how they read. We offer features that make it easy for users to transfer books to Aldiko; we offer options that allow users to fully customize their user experience. We will highlight one of those features today in the Tips and Tricks section, more will come in the following weeks.

If you would like to edit the metadata of a book, you can simply do a long press against a book in your bookshelf. A context menu will pop up where you can change the title, author, rating, cover art, tag and collection of a book.

If you have any feedback or suggestion about the Aldiko Book Reader application, please email us at feedback@aldiko.com, or tell us through twitter: @Aldiko or facebook page: http://goo.gl/4oXGp .

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Instapaper + Aldiko = Great tool to solve information overload

Tuesday, October 5th, 2010

When you surf the Internet, you open a web page.  You find some of the links in it useful, you click on those links, thus you open more web pages. Again and again, you click on more and more links , open more and more web page and this will take you a lot of time to read all of them at once. This is one kind of information overload: you want to read a web page at the first place, but you end up reading a lot of pages.

Instapaper is a simple tool to save web pages for reading later. When you find something that you want to read it later, you can save the web page to Instapaper. Instapaper will make the web pages that you save mobile friendly, you can read them on your mobile device. What’s more, Instapaper offers ePub file for your unread web pages, that means you can download the ePub file of all unread web pages and read them with Aldiko . With Aldiko’s reading experience and Instapaper’s innovative reading-later feature, you will never feel that you have no time to read a good article or a web page.

Here is the details of how to use Instapaper with Aldiko:

In desktop browser, you can add the Instapaper Read Later bookmarklet to your bookmark bar. When you want to save a particular web page to Instapaper, you just need to click the Read Later bookmark and the web page will be automatically added to your Instapaper’s unread list. If you are using Firefox or Google Chrome, you can install the Instapaper addon for Firefox and Chrome.

If you are using Android device, you can install the Read Later app from the android market. When you want to save a particular web page to Instapaper, you can share the link of the web page through Read Later app, and the web page will be saved in your Instapaper account (see screenshot at the end of the post).

At the time when you want to read your saved web pages, you just need to go to instapaper.com through the Android browser, and you will see an unread list of web pages as well as  ePub download link on the right (see screenshot at the end of the post).

Click on the ePub link, the epub file of all your unread web pages will be downloaded to your Android device. Open the epub file and import it into Aldiko, you then will be able to read these articles anywhere anytime.

Many Aldiko users like the import feature in Aldiko very much. You can also download the ePub file and import it into the Aldiko library.

If you have other ways of using Instapeper and Aldiko, please let us know in the comment. :)

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