Described as “Google Music or Grooveshark for ebooks”, CodexCloud is a brand new online service which will appeal to any kind of bookworm with a tablet.

The service is bound to be met with the same controversy as Grooveshark due to the fact essentially, it allows you to read certainly not just public domain books available through Project Gutenburg, but also allows to upload purchased books to the cloud to share with other people.

While Amazon already allows users to loan their Kindle ebooks to other users for a limited period of time, CodexCloud takes things one step further and simply allows users to share them online with anyone, at any kind of time, and for as extended as they want.



While it was built with the main aim of allowing users to sync their e-books over several mobile devices, and read them through your own browser, the fact remains that publishers and authors are not fans of CodexCloud. The website does bear the disclaimer:

All content on CodexCloud is provided either by user upload or from royalty-free sources such as Project Gutenburg.
All users have agreed to the terms and conditions that prohibit the upload of material they do not have the legal right to distribute. As such, users are responsible for determining that they have the legal right to distribute all material that they upload to CodexCloud. When we are properly notified of content that infringes on the rights of others, we act expeditiously to remove such content from our service.

Thus how does CodexCloud work? After signing up for a free account, we can access CodexCloud’s books from any kind of device with a browser - whether or not on your computer, iOS device to Android device.
Under Bookshelf we can browse the most popular titles, that currently include titles by Neil Gaiman, Kurt Vonnegut, Terry Pratchett and JK Rowling. When you begin to make lists, saving the e-books to the service, your books will appear on the bookshelf.



You can create several lists, and access a set of pre-set lists from a sidebar including popular, suggested for we and many recent uploads.  Whenever creating your lists from books already available on CodexCloud, simply work a search for the title to writer, and then drag and drop the title into the list.

CodexCloud supports many e-book formats, but .epub books are suggested for best results. When uploading other formats including lit, html, pdf, mobi, rtf as well as txt, CodexCloud will convert the books for you making use of Calibre. You can upload books through URL, upload them straight from the computer, or use the services mass uploader, that supports epub just.



Now for the most important part, the actual experience of reading a book. We tested CodexCloud on Chrome, the iPad’s Safari browser, and the Google Nexus S native Android browser. On Chrome as well as the iPad, the experience was good, if certainly not a little buggy sometimes. Turning pages is done on the iPad by swiping or perhaps double-clicking, but sometimes CodexCloud was a small slow to answer. On the Google Nexus S, the small screen turned the menu at the top into a garbled mess, as well as turning pages proven to be tricky.

Our biggest complaint, however, whenever it comes to using CodexCloud as an e-reader is that there is no method to bookmark the place in the book. That said, when you come back to a book you're reading, it will remember the last spot, but just on the device you had been reading it on. Luckily, you can download books in .epub format from the website, as well as read them using your own preferred e-reader app.

Grooveshark has survived 4 years, thus it’s possible that CodexCloud will follow in its footsteps, but definitely not without the same amount of controversy.

Just what do we think of CodexCloud? Allow us know in the comments.


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