iBooks – downloading from iBookstore and importing PDFs (Should know)
The best way to read books on the iPad is with iBooks. iBookstore carries a huge collection of books. Classics, such as Shakespeare's plays, and children's books, such as The Ugly Duckling, are available for free. Many books, especially those for children, offer amazing multimedia within the book itself, with the ability to tap on images for sounds or move them around the page.
iBooks is also a great application for reading PDF files. It renders the documents wonderfully and helps keep them organized and accessible for offline viewing.
In this recipe, we'll go over everything you need to know about using iBooks, from purchasing books and importing PDFs to organizing your collections.
iBooks does not come built-in to the new iPad, so let's open the App Store app and download it. Tap in the search box located in the upper-right corner of the screen and search for iBooks. The app is free, so tap on the Free button, and then tap Install App.
Now, let's open up the app and get started by downloading some books.
How to do it...
Let's begin by tapping Store in the upper-left corner of the screen, as seen in the following screenshot. This will take you to iBookstore, Apple's book version of the App Store. It looks and works in the exact same way as that of the App Store:
There are a lot of different ways to browse the store. We'll be looking for free books. In the lower navigation bar of the store, we see Featured, NYTimes, Top Charts, Categories, Browse, and Purchased. All are great ways to explore. For the sake of time, let's click on Browse, as shown in the following screenshot:
You'll get a list view in the left column with the default view being TOP AUTHORS.
Select Free from the upper-left corner, and you'll get a list of all free books sorted in the alphabetical order of the top authors. Select a free book by tapping on the Free button next to the book of your choice.
This will save it to our book library, where it's available for offline reading.
Let's try an alternative way of getting good free books. Go back into the store by tapping Store in the upper-left corner of the screen, as we did in an earlier step. In the lower navigation bar, tap Top Charts. We have hundreds of free books to browse through and download.
The ability of iBooks to import, display, and organize PDF files is one of its best features. To illustrate how easy it is, we'll download a PDF file from the web and import it into iBooks. Go to http://www.reneevaldez.com/ibooks.pdf in Safari, either by clicking on the link (if you're reading a digital version of this book) or by typing the URL into Safari manually.
When the PDF loads, we see Open in "iBooks" and Open in... in the upper-right corner within the browser window, as shown in the following screenshot:
Select Open in "iBooks". That imports the document to our iBooks collection.
Importing is easy and can be done from many applications, e-mail and a web URL being the most common.
There's more
The following topics cover how books can be imported into iBooks via other applications and how we can organize our library:
Importing via other applications
To import via any other application, keep an eye out for an Open in "iBooks" button available in the share icon. See the following screenshot for an example:
Organizing your library using Collections
With iBooks, organizing books is as easy as organizing apps. Tap Collections, and we can create a collection or view collections that we've already created. The following screenshot shows a list of collections with the New and Edit buttons:
To move books or PDF files into a category, we need to tap Edit in the upper-right corner of the screen. This changes the top menu so that we can select the items we wish to move into a category or delete. The following screenshot shows the Move and Delete buttons. We're now able to organize our library:
