iBooks offers a slick way to download and read books on your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad. The application comes bundled with the iBookstore, where you can download the latest bestsellers at your leisure.
How does iBooks work?
Using iBooks on the iPad is a magnificent experience. The app comes with two free books, Winnie the Pooh and the iPad Starter Guide. Simply tap on one of the books from the gorgeous bookshelf and it will load at full screen resolution. Tilt your iPad on its side and it switches to double-page view, just like reading a real book.
Pages in iBooks are turned by flicking your finger across the screen. This gives a very natural feel and the page turning animation is pretty slick. In the top-right corner you’ll find some tools to assist your reading experience.
What are the main features of iBooks
There’s a brightness control, text search and the ability to adjust the font and text size. iBooks also contains three different themes for different viewing styles. You can highlight a piece of text in an eBook and look it up in the dictionary, bookmark it, or perform a web search. iBooks is still missing a few features though, such as the ability to set background color, and pinch-to-zoom.
The iBookstore that comes with iBooks is handy for buying the latest popular fiction and non-fiction. You can download samples of the books for free and check them out in iBooks before you buy. The store is by no means perfect, and we found browsing to be quite cumbersome, especially when compared with the excellent iBooks experience. Hopefully this will be improved in future updates, though. It would be nice to have the option to browse by author, for instance.
iBooks is one of the flagship products of the iPad and Apple has made a very good job of it. It provides a much more authentic reading experience than you’ll find in Kindle for iPhone, the best eBook reader for small-screen Apple devices.
iBooks should be the first app you download for your iPad, and it takes the eBook experience to the next level.
