In this view, you can freely adjust the font and font size. Instead of turning pages, you simply keep swiping vertically-again, just like in Instapaper. All the interactive elements get pulled out to the left margin, with the text flowing across the rest of the screen. When you do that, you bid farewell to the fancy book’s fanciful layout, and instead get a view more akin to one that Instapaper or Safari Reader might provide. The sole exception to this font manipulation limitation occurs when you rotate your iPad from landscape to portrait. (It would also mean that if an instructor asked you to turn to page 27, your page 27 might be different from your classmate’s-no good for the intended classroom audience.) You can’t, for example, adjust the font or font-size when you’re reading an optimized book, since that would mess up the formatting. Unfortunately, though, because of how carefully laid-out these optimized ebooks must be, the ebooks themselves aren’t as flexible as regular ebooks. Tapping to play a movie, or using your fingers to explore a 3D model or interactive graph, is very cool. Though obviously this depends on how the author prepares your fancy textbook, all the launch textbooks currently available offer impeccable, incredible design.
#Highlight books in ibooks update#
(A previous update to the iBooks app offered an option to disable the virtual book look when reading a regular ebook look for Full Screen under Theme in the Font menu.)
Gone too are the overwrought page turning animations, as pages simply slide into view as you swipe-it’s very similar to the Kindle app’s page-turning experience. The experience of reading the books is cruft-free the original iBooks theme that wasted screen real estate showing a skeumorphic bookbinding as you read is nowhere to be found in fancy reading mode. The good news about optimized textbooks like Life On Earth is that they really are beautiful. It’s not surprising that textbooks crammed with 3D models, movies, and other interactive elements would be huge, but it’s something to keep in mind, particularly if you use a 16GB iPad or a slower Internet connection. If you do the math, that puts War and Peace at about 1.8 kilobytes per page, to Life On Earth’s 19 megabytes per page.
Wilson’s Life on Earth, an optimized textbook of which just 51 pages are available, weighs in at 965.3MB. Tolstoy’s 1300 page War and Peace (a regular ebook) downloaded to iBooks in about five seconds on my iPad it’s 2.3MB.
The first thing you’ll note about optimized ebooks is that their file sizes are much, much larger than traditional ebooks. To test out the optimized ebooks, I downloaded several from the iBookstore built into the iBooks app. For the purposes of this review, let’s refer to the original kind as regular ebooks, and the new ones as optimized ebooks. There’s the iBooks of old, for reading basic books with text and images, and then there’s iBooks 2 for reading and interacting with these new, multimedia-laden iBooks Author books. Thus, iBooks on the iPad now feels a bit like two apps smushed together. The new textbook format-or any book created with iBooks Author-works exclusively on the iPad.
#Highlight books in ibooks mac#
The big news with iBooks 2 was Apple’s introduction of iBooks interactive textbooks, along with the new Mac app iBooks Author to create those media-rich, interactive ebooks. The bulk of the improvements Apple made to the app are limited to the iPad. If you generally use the app on an iPod touch or an iPhone, iBooks 2 offers virtually no improvements over its predecessor. The ideal e-reading app should become as invisible as a paper book can, but not shy away from offering the advantages that only digital books can. That I conduct this inner monologue each time I’m charged with such a review is clearly a personal failing-especially because I’m wrong. “If it shows text and you can read books, it’s a fine e-reader.” Whenever I’m asked to review an e-reading app, my first reaction hovers around snarky amusement.
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