THE SPOOK'S APPRENTICE EBOOK

Its controls disappear when unused, and a swipe (or tap on the left or right side of the screen) will cause the pages to turn. The Spook'S Apprentice Ebook' page-turning is smooth and engaging, with page corners digitally curling toward you as you advance, but this behavior is only a minor cosmetic difference between what you'll find in other digital readers. The Spook'S Apprentice Ebook also includes a progress bar to show how far you are along in a book, and you're able to change the reader's font size. Also like other e-readers, you can add bookmarks, define individual words, do quick Web lookups, and add notes. You also can underline words, sentences, and paragraphs for later viewing. All five major book publishers stock The Spook'S Apprentice Ebook' digital shelves (Penguin, Harper Collins, Simon and Schuster, MacMillan, and Hachette), which makes the content stack up against competing apps and electronic bookstores. The Spook'S Apprentice Ebook 2 added support for textbooks and gave students the ability to purchase and download course textbooks that are supported. Newer features launched alongside the new iPad give users the ability to highlight text in a number of colors with the swipe of a finger. The interactive media and features for textbooks will definitely be useful to students. It's hard to say how many schools will adopt all iPad textbooks because of price limitations, but it will be interesting to see how it plays out as we get closer to the new school year. The Spook'S Apprentice

Ebook is a dice-rolling simulator, a handy aid for any sort of game that uses dice--from Yahtzee to Trivial Pursuit to Dungeons & Dragons. The Spook'S Apprentice Ebook lets you roll traditional six-sided dice, along with rest of the holy hexad of polyhedral nerd dice: the d4, d8, d10, d12, and d20. The Spook'S Apprentice Ebook emphasizes its elegant interface, foregoing the more complex functionality of other dice-rolling apps: you slide out a "tray" on the right side of your screen, then drag and drop your desired dice onto (or off of) a virtual black tabletop

one by one. You roll by shaking your device, with semi-realistic (but weirdly low-gravity) physics, and you can "lock" a die by tapping it, so other dice can't move it. The Spook'S Apprentice Ebook also lets you save 10 groupings of dice on different screens that you can swipe through. The best things about The Spook'S Apprentice Ebook are its convincing sound effects, dice collisions, and slick, simple, attractive interface, so look elsewhere if you want for more complicated dice features such as customizable formulas or more-exotic dice types. Unfortunately, The Spook'S Apprentice Ebook's price hasn't come down and its features haven't gotten any richer since its creation over a year ago--and there's definitely room for small but substantive improvements while still maintaining The Spook'S Apprentice Ebook's streamlined feel (for example, by allowing different colors for different dice of the same type, which would be a boon to RPG players). The Spook'S Apprentice Ebook is one of the better--and better-looking--dice-simulation apps, but check out the competition before you buy. UHear is a free, self-administered hearing test, a