Technologizer

Now Flipboard Helps You Find Books

The "social magazine" has given its iOS apps new sections which let you browse for books in Apple's iBookstore.

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If you love to read and have an iPhone, iPad or Android phone, you should be using Flipboard, the wonderful “social magazine” app. And now its iOS versions have added a new feature which caters to serious readers: books.

No, you can’t read books in Flipboard. Instead, the app had added new sections which amount to catalogs of books on specific subjects. You can peruse any section — there are a couple dozen of them, from Arts & Entertainment to Travel & Adventure — and buy any title via a link that takes you to Apple’s iBookstore.

The new feature is a cool reminder that Flipboard’s magazine metaphor can be used for organizing information of all sorts. (It’s already doing more conventional shopping catalogs.) It also makes me wonder if the Flipboard folks have considered opening their own bookstore which would let you read tomes in their entirety, right within Flipboard. If I could, I would.