Chapter 10
In This Chapter
Getting the skinny on e-books
Opening up to iBooks
Reading books
Shopping for iBooks
Reading electronic periodicals
Don’t be surprised if you have to answer this question from an inquisitive child someday: “Is it true, Grandpa, that people once read books on paper?”
That time may still be a ways off, but it somehow doesn’t seem far-fetched anymore. Apple is among the tech companies that are major proponents of the electronic-books revolution.
Don’t get us wrong; we love physical books as much as anyone and are in no way urging their imminent demise. But we also recognize the real-world benefits behind Apple’s digital publishing efforts — and those by companies such as Amazon (which manufactures what is, for now, the market-leading Kindle electronic reader). As you discover in this chapter, the Kindle plays a role on the iPad as well.
For its part, the iPad makes a terrific electronic reader, with color and dazzling special effects, including pages that turn like those in a real book.
We open the page on this chapter to see how to find and purchase books for your iPad, and how to read them after they land on your virtual bookshelf. But first, we look at why you might want to read books and periodicals on your iPad.
We’ve run into plenty of skeptics who ask, “What’s so wrong with the paper books that folks have only been reading for centuries that we now have to go digital?” The short answer is that nothing is wrong with physical books — except maybe that paper, over the long term, is fragile, and paper books tend to be bulky, a potential impediment for travelers.
On the other hand, when asked why he prefers paper books, Bob likes to drop one from shoulder height and ask, “Can your iPad (or Kindle) do that?”
Having said that, though, now consider the electronic advantages:
Truth is, this backlit story has two sides. The grayscale electronic ink displays found on Amazon’s Kindle and several other e-readers may be easier on the eyes and reduce fatigue, especially if you read for hours on end. And although you may indeed have to supply your own lighting source to read in low-light situations, at least on some of the devices, those screens are easier to see than the iPad screen when you’re out and about in bright sunshine. And some newer e-ink-type readers include displays that do light up.
To start reading iBooks on your iPad, you have to fetch the iBooks app in the App Store. (For more on the App Store, consult Chapter 11.)
As you might imagine, the app is free, and it comes with access to Apple’s iBooks Store, of which we have more to say later in this chapter. For now, just know that the iBooks Store is an inviting place to browse and shop for books 24 hours a day. All the other books you end up purchasing for your iPad library turn up in the cover view shown in Figure 10-1 or in a view that lists your books by title.
The following basics help you navigate the iBooks main screen:
In list mode, as we like to call it, tap Select as well. This time, blank circles appear next to each title in the list. Tap the circle for each book you want to remove so that a check mark appears, and then tap Delete in the upper left. As before, you must confirm by tapping Delete This Copy or Delete These Copies.
As with other content you purchase from Apple, you can restore (download) any book you’ve purchased by tapping the Purchased icon at the bottom of the screen in the iBooks Store. The books you purchase from the iBooks Store land in iCloud. You’ll know a book is in the cloud (as opposed to being downloaded onto your iPad) when you see the small iCloud icon. Tap that icon to download the book. If you prefer, you can hide books that are in iCloud from your iPad. Tap All Books, and then tap the Hide iCloud Books switch.
Apple has created two collections on your behalf: Books for all titles and PDFs for the Adobe PDF files on your iPad. (Apple doesn’t let you edit or remove the premade Books or PDFs collections.) To create, rename, or remove a collection of your own, tap All Books (labeled in Figure 10-1) to show off your current list of collections and then choose from the following tasks:
Here we are telling you how to move or get rid of a book before you’ve even had a chance to read it. How gauche. The next section helps you start reading.
To start reading a book, tap it. The book leaps forward and opens to either the beginning or the place where you left off. (And you may have left off on an iPhone, an iPod touch, or another iPad because, through your Apple ID, your virtual place in a book is transported from device to device as long as the devices have an Internet connection.)
Even from the very title page, you can appreciate the color and beauty of Apple’s app as well as the navigation tools, as shown in Figure 10-3.
If you rotate the iPad to the side, the one-page book view becomes a two-page view, but the navigational controls remain the same. On newer multitouch books, you may have a scrolling view of a book rather than the typical one-page view.
You can take advantage of the iPad’s VoiceOver feature to have the iPad read to you out loud. The feature may not be quite like having Mom or Dad read you to sleep but can be a potential godsend for people with impaired vision. For more on the VoiceOver feature, consult Chapter 15.
You’ve been turning pages in books your entire life, so you don’t want this simple feat to become a complicated ordeal just because you’re reading electronically. Fear not; it’s not.
You have no buttons to press. Instead, to turn to the next page of a book, do any of the following:
To turn to the previous page in a book, tap, flick, or drag your finger in a similar fashion, except now do so closer to the left margin. You’ll witness the same cool page-turning effects.
You can also flick to scroll through a book vertically rather than turning pages in portrait view. Tap the font icon (little A and big A), and then flip the Scrolling View switch.
While in Settings, you can also flip switches that turn on (or off) full justification, leading to neat edges on both sides of a book that you’re reading. There’s also a setting to turn on auto-hyphenation.
When you’re reading a book, you often want to go to a specific page. Here’s how:
The controls are labeled in Figure 10-3.
Tap Back to Page xx at the bottom-left corner of the screen to return to your furthest point. Or tap Go to Page xx at the bottom right to return to a previous page you’ve read.
Most books you read — on your iPad and elsewhere — have a table of contents. Here’s how you use a table of contents on your iPad:
The Table of Contents screen, as shown in Figure 10-4, appears.
Alternatively, tap the Resume button that appears at the upper-left corner of the screen to return to the previous location in the book.
Moving around to a particular location on the iPad is almost as simple as moving around a real book, and as we explain in the earlier section “Turning pages,” Apple kindly returns you to the last page you were reading when you closed a book.
Still, occasionally you want to bookmark a page so that you can easily return to it. To insert a bookmark somewhere, merely tap the bookmarks icon near the upper-right reaches of the screen. A red ribbon slides down over the top of the bookmarks icon, signifying that a bookmark is in place. Tap the ribbon if you want to remove the bookmark. Simple as that.
After you set a bookmark, here’s how to find it later:
Your bookmark is listed along with the chapter and page citations, the date you bookmarked the page, and a phrase or two of surrounding text, as the example in Figure 10-5 shows.
You can remove a bookmark from the bookmarks list by swiping your finger to the left along the bookmark and then tapping the red Delete button that appears.
In addition to setting bookmarks to jump to pages you want to read again, you can highlight words or passages on a page as well as add annotations or comments, which is handy for school assignments. Pardon the pun, but Apple is on the same page. Here’s how to do both:
These two buttons appear side by side, sandwiched along with Copy, Define, Share, and Search buttons, which we address in a moment.
You see grab points along the highlighted word.
If you want to change the way a page looks, begin by tapping the Aa icon at the top right of the screen. You can then change the following:
If you want to find a passage in a book but can’t remember where it is, try searching for it. Here’s how:
All the occurrences in the book turn up in a window under the search icon, complete with a few lines of text and a page citation.
The words you were searching for are highlighted on that page.
You can also search the web (via Google or your chosen search engine) or Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, by using the corresponding buttons at the bottom of the search results. If you do so, the iBooks app closes, and the Safari browser fires up Google or Wikipedia, with your search term already entered.
We love browsing in a physical bookstore, and the experience of browsing Apple’s iBooks Store is equally pleasurable. Apple makes it a cinch to search for books you want to read, and even lets you peruse a sample before parting with your hard-earned dollars. To enter the store from either the cover or library list view, tap one of the buttons at the bottom of the display: Featured, NYTimes, Top Charts, Top Authors, or Purchased. We explore these further shortly.
Meanwhile, a few things to keep in mind: The iBooks Store operates in at least 155 countries as of this writing, with more than 2.5 million available books. Hundreds of millions of books have been downloaded. Not all books are available in all markets, of course. Some works — Jay-Z’s memoir Decoded, to take a single example — are enhanced with video. Meanwhile, the store includes titles from major trade publishers: Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Group, Simon & Schuster, and Random House, as well as several independents. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., is also represented, of course.
Publishers, not Apple, set the prices. Many bestsellers in the joint cost $12.99, though some fetch $9.99 or less. Dear Life from Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro costs $11.99. Apple runs specials from time to time. Leading up to Halloween, for example, the store sold some picture books targeted at the trick-or-treating crowd for $3.99 or less, including Anne Hillerman’s Spider Woman’s Daughter, which once cost $15.99. Free selections are also available. Prices change all the time, so poke around for something you’ll find pleasurable to read and then decide whether the book is worth buying for the price.
You have several ways to browse for books in the iBook. The top portion of the screen shows ever-changing ads for books that fit a chosen category (Children & Teens in the example shown in Figure 10-6). But you can also browse Release Date in the particular category you have in mind. You can scroll to the left or right for more releases to peek at. Or tap See All for many more selections.
Look at the bottom of the screen. You see the following icons:
In the upper-right corner of the iBooks Store is a search field, similar to the search field in iTunes. Tap the search field, and then use the virtual keyboard to type an author name or title to find the book you seek.
To find out more about a book that you come across, you can check out the details page and other readers’ reviews or read a sample of the book:
The best thing you can do to determine whether a book is worth buying is to read a sample. Tap Sample, and the book cover almost immediately lands on your bookshelf. You can read it like any book, up until that juncture in the book where your free sample ends. Apple has placed a Buy button inside the pages of the book to make it easy to purchase it if you’re hooked. The word Sample is plastered on the cover on the bookshelf to remind you that this book isn’t yours — yet.
When a book meets or exceeds your lofty standards and you’re ready to purchase it, simply do the following:
Upon doing so, the dollar amount disappears, and the button carries a green Buy Book label. If you tap a free book instead, the button is labeled Get Book.
The book appears on your bookshelf in an instant, ready for you to tap it and start reading. You get an email receipt acknowledging your purchase via the same mail account in which you receive other receipts from iTunes for music, movies, and apps.
On the iPad Air 2 or iPad mini 3 with the Touch ID fingerprint scanner, you can authorize the purchase of a book by pressing your finger against the Touch ID scanner when prompted.
The business world is full of examples in which one company competes with another on some level, only to work with it as a partner on another level. When the iPad first burst onto the scene in early April 2010, pundits immediately compared it to Amazon’s Kindle, the market-leading electronic reader. Sure, the iPad had the larger screen and color, but the Kindle had a few bragging points too, including a longer battery life (up to about a month on the latest Kindle, versus about 10 hours for the iPad), a lighter weight, and a larger selection of books in its online bookstore.
But Amazon has long said that it wants Kindle books to be available for all sorts of electronic platforms, and the iPad, like the iPhone and iPod touch before it, is no exception. So we recommend taking a look at the free Kindle app for the iPad, especially if you’ve already purchased a number of books in Amazon’s Kindle Store and want access to that wider selection of titles. The Barnes & Noble Nook app is also worth a look.
Competing against the iPad with smaller, less-expensive tablets are Barnes & Noble’s Nook Tablet and Amazon’s Kindle Fire, Kindle Fire HD, and Kindle Fire HDX. Google is doing the same with the Nexus 7 tablet (with its Google Play Books app). And you can find numerous other players in the space.
You can find several other e-book–type apps for the iPad in the App Store. To name a few:
See Chapter 11 for details about finding and downloading apps.
To import ePub titles, you can download them to your Mac or PC, and then sync them to the iPad through iTunes. There are other methods. If you have Dropbox, for example, you can bring an ePub into your account, and from Dropbox you can share the title with iBooks. You can also email an ePub as an attachment.
You can find ePub titles at numerous cyberspace destinations, among them
(Note that not all the books at Google Play are free, and Google has a downloadable app.) Also, check out the free titles that you can find through the apps mentioned in the preceding section.
People in the newspaper business know that it’s been tough sledding in recent years. The Internet has proved to be a disruptive force in media, as it has in so many areas. It remains to be seen what role Apple generally, and the iPad specifically, will play in the future of electronic periodicals or in helping to turn around sagging media enterprises. It’s also uncertain which pricing models will make the most sense from a business perspective.
What we can tell you is that reading newspapers and magazines on the iPad is not like reading newspapers and magazines in any other electronic form. The experience is slick, but only you can decide whether it’s worth paying the tab (in the cases where you do have to pay).
You might follow two paths to subscribe to or read a single issue of a newspaper or magazine. The first path includes several fine publishing apps worth checking out, including USA TODAY (where Ed works), The Wall Street Journal, TIME magazine, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Reuters News Pro, BBC News, Vanity Fair, and Popular Science. We also highly recommend fetching the free Zinio app, which offers more than 5,000 digital publications, including Rolling Stone, The Economist, Consumer Reports, Forbes, Macworld, Car and Driver, Maxim, National Geographic Interactive, Spin, and Bloomberg Businessweek. You can buy single issues of a magazine or subscribe, and you can sample and share some articles without a subscription.
In some cases, you have to pay handsomely or subscribe to some of these newspapers and magazines, which you find not in the iBooks Store but in the regular App Store, which we cover in Chapter 11. You also see ads (somebody has to pay the freight).
The second path is Newsstand. This handy icon on your Home screen purports to gather all your newspaper and magazine subscriptions in a single place. Newsstand is a special type of folder rather than an app.
You purchase subscriptions in a section of the App Store, which you can also get to by tapping Newsstand on your Home screen and then tapping the Store button, which opens the App Store (see Chapter 11) to the Subscriptions section.
Numerous publications have adopted the Newsstand paradigm, though some choose custom apps or Zinio, and many do both.