Apple’s iBooks provides one of the best, most accessible ereading experience on the iPad, in my opinion, and it’s pretty darn simple to use.
That said, there’s always room to learn just a few more tricks to make the experience even better for you. Here, then, are five tips to master iBooks on your iOS device of choice.
With iBooks on your iPhone or iPad (or iPad mini, my favorite reading device), you can download electronic books from the convenient privacy of your very own iOS device. You never need to enter a bookstore again (sorry, Barnes & Noble!), making purchases of guilty pleasures and important intellectual tomes equally simple.
A real bookstore, though, lets you browse through the books before you buy them. Heck, you can pick one off the shelf, riffle through the pages, and even (gasp!) read some of it without paying for the book. iBooks has a way to allow you to see inside a book before purchasing it, as well, and I can’t believe I keep forgetting that the feature is there.
If you’re like me, and constantly forget about sample iBooks, here’s your reminder.
Innocent until proven guilty? Not for Cupertino. Apple’s e-book antitrust trial starts on June 3rd, but the U.S. District Judge in charge of the case is already openly expressing her belief that Apple engaged in a conspiracy.
When reading an iBook on your iPad or iPhone, you typically tap the right side of the page to go forward, and tap the left side of the page to go backward, right? If you want to skip to a different part of the iBook, you can tap on the table of contents button in the upper left and tap to the chapter you want to go to.
How do you quickly navigate more than one page forward or backward, though? With a real book, you just flip through the pages until you find the one you’re looking for. In iBooks, you don’t riffle through pages, but you can navigate quickly and visually to other portions of the book.
Is your iBooks library starting to outgrow those beautiful skeuomorphic wooden bookshelves that Apple provided for you? Have you purchased way too many Star Wars novels, only to find them crowding out your beloved Jane Eyre collection?
Well, there’s a simple way to manage an epic, ever-growing iBook collection, of course (why else would I be writing this), and here’s how.
Penguin announced this morning that the company has reached an agreement with the US State Attorneys General to pay $75 million as a settlement for the eBook price fixing claims that have been launched against Apple’s iBookstore.
US authorities have called Apple out for collusion with electronic book publishers, saying that the Cupertino-based company conspired with publishers to raise eBook prices when negotiating iBooks by playing them all against each other and against rival eBook retailer, Amazon.
Here’s Penguin’s official statement on the settlement:
iBooks is not only a fantastic e-reading app on your iPhone or iPad, but it’s also a fantastic study tool. If you need to read books for class or your own learning objectives, you can use iBooks to highlight words or passages, search the text for specific words or phrases, and make notes that appear in the margins as little colored sticky notes.
Using these tools could help you become a much more organized studier, letting you go back to a passage in a book to remember the important things with a couple of taps. Here’s how, using iBooks 3.1, the latest version of iBooks.
When I opened iBooks on my iPad mini the other day, I tapped the Collections button, and selected “Purchased Books” as my filter option, to see what I had in my account that I wanted to read. Oddly, I saw a ton of the same book, over and over, sitting on the shelves.
For some reason, this only happens on my iPad mini. My iPhone only shows one copy of each book, even when I select the same Purchased Books option. Same with my iPad 3. But, it’s still annoying on the mini, so I went online to try and figure out what was going on.
There is a bug here that other users are seeing, as well, and there’s really only one way to “fix it.”
According to Reuters, US authorities have called Apple out for collusion with electronic book publishers, saying that the Cupertino-based company conspired with publishers to raise eBook prices when negotiating iBooks by playing them all against each other and against rival eBook retailer, Amazon.
The US Justice Department accused Apple of price fixing in April 2012 in relation to Apple’s negotiations with five publishers when it was launching the iPad in early 2010. The Justice Department has settled out of court with each of the publishers, which included HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group, Macmillan, and Pearson’s Penguin Group.
A trademark lawsuit brought against Apple in regards to its use of the term “iBooks” was dismissed today in federal court. Black Tower Press sued Apple in 2011, saying that it owned a trademark acquired in 2006 and 2007. The lawsuit also noted that Apple had a trademark for the term “iBook,” which describes one of the distinctive plastic laptop Mac computers sold between 1999 and 2006, but that the current term was being used to describe a delivery method for electronic books beginning in 2010.
The judge did not agree, dismissing the case in a 71-page ruling.
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