Thursday, June 10, 2010

Shakespeare App

I just want to take a moment to promote one of my favorite iPad applications, the Shakespeare app. It's a product of http://playshakespeare.com/and a required app for anyone who loves language, poetry, or literature. The app contains the collected works -- all of his poems, plays, and sonnets -- beautifully formatted.

Nice formatting is not always a given with ebooks. If you're familiar with other free public-domain ebooks, you know what I'm talking about. For example, when I downloaded the free Kindle copy of Alexander Pope's translation of The Odyssey, it was a trainwreck; Pope's translation is done in rhyming couplets, and the line breaks didn't line up! So, staring at a dense block of seeming prose, I had to keep track of the meter in my head. This is not the case with the Shakespeare app -- characters are clearly labeled, the text is spaced well, etc.

While the Pro verion of the app is a little pricey at $20, I intend to purchase it just to support this wonderful project. Definitely worth checking out. Now, if only someone would build me a Christopher Marlowe app...

No comments: