Shortcovers from Indigo Books and Music Inc, is a free ebook reader that offers access to both Project Gutenberg’s public domain books for free, and commercial titles that can be uploaded by publishers.

Shortcovers offers content based around the idea of chapters – small chunks of content that can be cached on your iPhone for offline access. This allows many titles to offer their first few chapters available for free viewing, as a preview, before asking readers to pay for content. This is unlike other ebook platforms, which often just charge for the entire book up front.

Something Shortcovers does really well is in organizing and browsing content. There are categories for different needs: Quick Reads, Books Under 5 Bucks, Oprah’s Picks, along with the more usual bookstore-style breakdown of content types. You can also see related books to those you are reading, making it easy to find books you’re interested in.

Graphically, the application looks good. There are many options for reading modes – font colors and sizes, line spacing, along with a very useful night reading mode and rotation lock for when you’re using Shortcovers on your couch or bed. You can also choose between flipping between pages or scrolling down. However, the scrolling mode is awkward: I wish it included an option for tilt-scrolling or auto-scrolling a la Instapaper Pro. Flipping through pages is all right, but may require you to tap the screen a lot if you are a fast reader.

There are options for bookmarking and sharing – you can tweet, email, and recommend books to your friends. Readers can even upload their own (original) content and it will be made available to other Shortcover users. It remains to see if people will take advantage of this publishing platform but it definitely shows promise.