Yen Press has announced that their iPad app is now live and have provided a video showing off what it can do that runs just over two minutes in length. As expected, pretty much everything here is an OEL title that Yen Press has easy rights to put out in digital form. All books are priced at $8.99, which is typically what you find the titles at from retail stores with standard discounts applied, so the app offers no significant or even minor savings overall compared to buy print.
"The Yen Press app will allow you to purchase full volumes of some of Yen’s bestselling series that you can read anywhere! Books on the app will feature crisp artwork, offer spread or single-page navigation, and allow you to save your place automatically. In addition, the app will include special bonus features, like mini comics from your favorite Yen Press artists and some of the short stories you’ve seen in YEN PLUS magazine!"
The Yen Press app feels very close in nature to what Viz Media has done with their app. The app has been developed by Balance Software and has a fairly standard layout when it loads up. The top third has their featured titles, this time being Gossip Girl, Nightschool and Maximum ride, whilbe wlow it has the titles that are available and being promoted the most. Tabs take you to the next pages easily enough (two are available at launch) and the bottom has a My Library section and a Settings section so you can create your account and set how much space you want to allocate to the app itself with what it stores in your iPad based library.
The titles available at launch, all listing for $8.99 each, are:
In addition to the new releases tab, there's a "fun stuff" tab which includes free downloadable things such as an editors commentary and pages from various books, such as previews for Night School, Maximum Ride, Clique, Gossip and Daniel X , a short story form Yen Plus with Prom Night and a column piece from Svet. HyeKyung also shares some thoughts on her favorite characters from Gossip Girl in another piece.
When you download an item, it queues it quickly but when it finishes, it seems to auto-load that item for you. Items you download are not listed in your library, so you have to go back to the fun stuff section to find them, which could be complicated once more items start to populate the store and it doesn't allow you to look at just the items that you've downloaded.
The Browse Store option works well in that it pulls up a particular title page and has the preview along the top you can swipe along to see all the covers.
Looking for more on this title and related material? Check out more articles and reviews here or check out our other recent reviews.
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