Bloom Reader for iOS

[Marty]

This assumes you have published your Bloom book as a .bloomd file to your hard drive and then moved it to the Wi-Fi Media Box for distribution.

All a person needs to do is download the .bloomd from the Wi-Fi Media Box and BloomReader should automatically find it. If not, then move the .bloomd file to the folder where it needs to go.

[Gerben_Budding]

This works for sure when you download it to an Android device that has the Bloom Reader App installed, but how does that work for an iOS device without the Bloom Reader App? When I download the .bloomd file to an iPhone will it automagically open it in the Safari browser and will I be able to read it?

[Marty]

Ok. I need to backtrack my previous post. I mis-read what John said about being able to read Bloom books on iPhones. I thought it was through the use of BloomReader on iPhone…that was my mistake. BloomReader for iPhone does not yet exist. Therefore, unless a Bloom book is published to the BloomLibrary on-line (which requires Internet access), it cannot yet be read on an iPhone. I apologize for not reading this chain more carefully.

[Gerben_Budding]

No problem, you just made me very curious!

[Friedo]

Just to confirm that there are people inquiring about Bloom Reader for iOS. Just received such a question today, a project in Eurasia.

[ervinjason]

@LitBeth

LIz Pfeiffer wanted to know how widespread of an issue this is as a “deal-breaker”.
Here in Vanuatu, I, too have been asked, and it was by a government leader who has an iphone.

However, in the far-flung places where it is so needed, most people don’t even have a smart phone of any kind. Many started with them when phones first came to the islands, but later reverted to the trusty and cheaper “button phones”.
The reason I still place lots of hope in the BLOOM reader app is because I hope to go through the Ministry of Education and get android tablets in classrooms. I think showing the tablets will get “buy-in”, and if people know they can get the same children’s books on a phone, they may start buying android smart phones. This would open up the door for SU and adult books to be put on phones through BLOOM Reader app as well.

Bethann

I was encouraged to interact with you all on this subject. I work in North America with Native/First nations groups and basically the only device they use is iOS. I and my colleagues (who have much more experience than me) have not seen a Android device being used by the indigenous groups in North America. We are quite frankly, desperate to find a solution to the iOS problem. It is keeping native/first nations people from using their phones for Scripture Engagement and language development. This is a huge need.

[Bruce_Beatham]

I don’t have an iOS device myself, but I’m preparing for a workshop where the question of reading Bloom publications on iPhones frequently comes up. Is there an iOS app that I could recommend people use for reading books exported from Bloom in ePub format?

[JohnHatton]

Hi Bruce,
Note, ios users can use BloomLibrary.org to view the books in the same format they would get with Bloom Reader.

For ePUB, it gets rather disappointing and complicated. That market is a mess, with no two readers having the same behavior or capability. See Notes on “Publish as ePUB” | Bloom Docs for @ColinSuggett’s research on what will work and what won’t. The one ios option in that table, Apple Books, looks pretty weak. But it has better results for the Android version of Lis-a, and that has an IOS version. If you find a good one, we’d appreciate expanding that table.

Note that we made a big improvement in ePUB output in Bloom 5.4 which will be bet in a couple of weeks. You can see that in alpha from bloomlibrary.org/downloads.

[Bruce_Beatham]

Thanks for these pointers. I’ll let you know if I get somebody to try out the iOS version of Lis-a or any other ePub apps.