16

Reading books and magazines

equipment_needed.eps Equipment needed: An iPad with an Internet connection.

skills_needed.eps Skills needed: Experience installing apps (see Chapter 14). Experience using the iTunes Store (see Chapter 10) is helpful but not essential.

If you're an avid reader, you've probably noticed the publishing revolution that has taken place in the past few years: the ebook. This is a digital version of a book that has been created for reading on dedicated ebook reading devices like Amazon's Kindle or on multipurpose devices like your iPad.

Although more people still read paper books than ebooks, it tends to be the most passionate readers who have gone digital. Why? It's so convenient. You can buy a book anywhere you can get an Internet connection and start reading in a minute or two. In the summer, you can take 30 books on holiday without paying for excess baggage. You can increase the text size and enlarge photos, search an ebook for particular words or names and add bookmarks. Sometimes the content is enhanced with videos, audio recordings, or interactive animations.

Apple has an ebook-reading app called iBooks, which is supported by its own bookstore. There's also a part of the App Store for magazines called Newsstand, and you can use a Kindle app to read books from Amazon's store, too. In this ...

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