Chapter 8. Read iBooks and ePeriodicals

image with no caption

Books in easy-to-use, page-turning form have been around since the second century or so. Now, after a few years of false starts and dashed hopes, electronic books are wooing many people away from the world of ink, paper, and tiny clip-on book lights for nighttime reading. And as the eBook goes, so go eBook readers. The Amazon Kindle Fire, Barnes & Noble Nook, and Sony Reader are among the big names in the eBook reader playground.

Enter the iPad.

With its glorious, high-resolution color touchscreen, the iPad takes the eBook experience to a new level. True, the Kindle Fire and Nook have color screens and the Fire is dramatically cheaper, but the iPad’s big bright display makes books, newspapers, and magazines look amazing. And turning the page of an eBook no longer involves one screen abruptly replacing another—it’s a fully animated re-creation of the page-flip on a real book.

The books themselves have evolved into interactive creations, with built-in dictionaries, searchable text, hyperlinked footnotes, and embedded notes and bookmarks that make the whole process of reading more engaging and efficient. So flip this page to see how much fun you can have reading books on your iPad.

Download the iBooks App

Before you can buy and read an Apple eBook on your iPad, you have to do two things: recalibrate your brain, because Apple calls eBooks iBooks, and ...

Get iPad 2: The Missing Manual, 3rd Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.