Thursday, June 24, 2010

Thoughts on iBooks

Perhaps it is because my iTunes account is Canadian, but I have found the content a available on the iBooks store to be very disappointing. Close to useless for anything except old classics. I need to read some of them anyhow. Hands down the selection on Amazon is way better. However, I do think that iBooks is a better book reader than kindle. Oh well. The kindle read works quiet well, but iBooks just has a little extra polish.

What kind of polish? The bookmarks are nice as is the position within chapter and book. It seems less abstract than kindle. The page turn animation gets a lot of oohs and aaahs, but I am not so sure how much better it really makes the reading experience.

The one thing I really like is iBooks PDF feature. I have tons of PDFs; manuals, books, articles that I either want to read, or would like to have handy. A great example of a manual I have placed in ibooks is the manual for my camera.

Do you have a dropbox account? If you don't consider getting one. The drop box app makes it really easy to grab a PDF from drop box and then add it to iBooks. Slick. Get your own account here.[full disclosure - if you use that link I will benefit by getting more space. So please use it ;-)]

One big question remains - i mentioned it awhile ago when I wrote about the kobo. Just how many electronic bookshelves do you want to manage. I think I would prefer one shelf, connected to the amazon store which I could read with iBooks. Unlikely in the short term I think.

One improvement I would like to see to iBooks itself is a better way to manage a large collection of books.

1 comment:

Irma Ladouce11 said...

I want a library approach. One where you can check books in and out on any topic in whatever format they come in.

I Should read the classics. But really, I'm going to look for murder mysteries and interesting white papers.

I wonder, if like musicians started posting directly to the internet for consumption, some writers will start posting their writing for free for iPad consumption...