When you turn a book page in Classics, it really looks like you're turning a book page!

Public-domain e-books are a dime a dozen--no, scratch that, they’re free--so why pay $2.99 for Classics? After all, it’s little more than a collection of 12 public-domain titles you can get from any number of sources. The answer is simple: Classics has a kick-ass interface.

Classics is a mahogany bookshelf adorned with the covers of timeless works: Alice in Wonderland, Call of the Wild, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and so on. You can rearrange the shelf just by tapping and dragging the books, or open a book by double-tapping.

Classics really shines when you start reading. Text is beautifully rendered and perfectly formatted, right down to the just-so-slightly yellowish “paper.” You turn pages by swiping a finger, of course, but you actually see an animated page turn and hear a corresponding “fwip” sound. Because of these clever touches, Classics comes closer to duplicating a real book-reading experience than other viewers.

However, it’s seriously limited. You have zero control over font style or size, and you can’t annotate or bookmark pages (though Classics does remember where you left off). There’s a table of contents you can use to jump to any chapter, but there’s no way to find a specific page or search the text. More importantly, you can’t add more books to your bookshelf--you’re stuck with the selected dozen. The developer promises to add more in a future update, but who knows when or how many?

Until the bookshelf gets bigger and the app itself adds more features, Classics is hard to recommend. That said, it sure is cool.