How to use mobile tech to read Latin!
Here you can
then you can go to our Latin Library and pick a book!
For quizzes based on Kennedy and Allan and Greenough see the menu
How this page came about
Our department Head. Professor Buddy, winner of the Gaisford prize for Greek Verse as an undergraduate at Oxford, had a problem. It had been several years since a Moleborough Latin pupil won a place at Oxbridge. Gone were the days when he could teach pupils by declaming the Aeneid and expect them to understand. The current crop of year six pupils are even worse. (Except Paws)
He realised how much time the boys spent looking up words in the back of their text books or in the dictionary. He talked to the head of IT, Minnie Meep, who told him that ebook reader apps on mobile phones would allow the boys to look up words in a split second. So the Professor, an egalitarian kind of fellow, researched apps for the cheaper Android phones.
He systematically tested each app. He jotted the results down on a scrap of paper, spilt coffee on it, and then mislaid it for six months. Eventually he found the piece of paper. Here are his results and an explanation.
Ereader Apps Rated
Quick Answer: It's basically a two horse race between Kindle and ReadEra.
Kindle crucially allows notes, bookmarks and highlights to be saved across devices. This is a huge advantage. It means of course that every time you return to a Latin text you can read or adapt or delete your notes as much as you want for as long as you want on any kindle compatible device. Marginalia, commentary or notes have always been informative in the past, sometimes across millennia, and they may continue to do so digitally.
However its sole Latin dictionary isn't great and it only has a limited library. Books by classic authors are cheap, but often poorly formatted, with introductions, commentaries and translations from the 19th century. For example the Delphi Phaedrus on Kindle has a very good translation by Thomas Riley, but because it dates from 1887, he is rather euphemistic in translating some of the cruder fables, and some of the ruder ones are not translated at all. The kind of books on our Latin Library page are not on kindle at all.
Download Kindle for iphone and for Android
Readera however, allows you to read any well formatted epub, including all of the ones in our library. You can also copy and paste to many third party dictionary apps. I recommend Collins. Readera supports several other file formats. But there is currently no way to save notes etc, to the cloud.
The Prof has found, therefore, that both ebook readers are essential for a serious Latinist. His findings were accurate at the time of his research, but things may have moved on since then. He would welcome any corrections or feedback.
Download readera