iBooks Changes the Reading Experience
Let me get this out of the way from the start: if you haven’t figured it out by now, I love Apple gear. I’ve been using Macs for more than two decades and waited in a (relatively short) line the first day the iPad 2 was available, as my latest tribute to the platform. That said, I have no affiliation with Apple and I call them out for their mistakes; I’m no apologist. So I hope you won’t discount what I’m about to tell you:
You Need an iPad.
Clear enough for you? : ) There’s been a lot of talk lately about the iPad and Apple’s plans to revolutionize learning and academic text books, and I see no reason to doubt them. While the brand new iBooks Author application (used for authoring books of all kinds for the iPad) is a little rough around the edges — as an author who is actively developing for this platform I’d like to see better import/export for ePUB 3, as well as more WYSIWYG capability — iBooks 2 (the reader application) is a fantastic platform for readers of all types.
No Hassle Bookmarking
Every page you bookmark with a tap of your finger is automatically tagged with a small “red ribbon”, and is logged in a special section of the Table of Contents (which is one click away at all times). This section provides an organized list of the Chapter title or section names you marked, and their page number. All you have to do is tap a bookmarked item in the list and iBooks 2 zips you there in an instant. No flipping through pages, no dog-ears, just efficiency. There’s more…
1981 Called… Wants the “Post-its” Back
The Notes and Highlighting features in iBooks 2 is extremely intuitive and addresses a major problem that many people (including myself) have with paper books: it’s hard to retain all the information, especially with longer books. We’re often forced to stick post-its on a page with notes about why the page is important to us, or worse, run through it with a highlighter (11th grade all over again). Half the time the notes fall out when we revisit the book weeks or months later, and we are likely to lose track of randomly highlighted pages.
iBooks lets you double-tap any phrase on a page and then set a highlight mark for it, including a typed note if you wish. Here again all highlights and notes are saved to a special section of the TOC page, and organized into a list. In effect, your highlights and notes can become an outline of what’s important to you, right inside the TOC, accessible at any time with one tap! That’s Total Recall of another kind, and I dig it!
Bookmarking, highlighting and look-ups are a snap!
Video, Definitions on the Fly, Night Mode
Quizzes? Who wants quizzes in their books? I do! And maybe so do you, if you think about it. Here’s the difference between the books we all had in school, and the ones we buy of our own free will as adults: the books we have now are books we like. They contain topics we’re interested in and ideas we want to integrate into our lives. But what good is all that knowledge if we read through a book in a week and then forget much of what we learned, simply because there was no means of reinforcement? A simple thing like a couple multiple choice quiz questions could allow authors of all types to reinforce key ideas not just by summarizing them at the end of a chapter, but by asking the reader to participate. And hey: no grades to bring home to Mom and Dad!
For Photoshop and Lightroom fans, how cool would it be to have the best of both worlds from your books, getting detailed written examples of how to perform a certain technique, and then videos showing you what the process looks like in real-time? What if you could pan around an image and zoom into parts of it to see more detail relevant to those areas? All of these things are possible in iBooks 2, making the reading experience something much more productive and potentially enjoyable for every reader. You can even double-tap words to look them up on the fly!
What do I mean by “Sleep Zone Safe”? If you’ve ever tried to work with book-lights for “paper-based models” while trying not to throw a bunch of bright light on your spouse or significant other as they sleep, the iPad solves that. You can read books as either black copy on a near-white page (daytime) or white copy on an almost-black background (night). This cuts down on ambient light in a big way, and is still easy on the eyes. For more readability customization, there is also a brightness slider, and plenty of font and font size options you can access with just one or two clicks.
The Biggest Cost is Opportunity Cost
As in: what opportunities are you missing by not having an iPad? iPads are still a relatively new product. Even with other e-reader products coming online all the time, it is still one of a kind. Consequently it is still the premium priced product in the marketplace. Its combination of size, ease-of-use and unlimited potential for books and apps of all kinds is hard to beat. As new versions come along and competitors like Amazon come out with great products like Kindle Fire, iPad prices will likely fall, making them more approachable for just about anyone. (Hey, if you can afford a smart phone with an expensive data plan and lots of apps for the phone… what would it be worth to you to completely change the way you read and learn as an adult, using an iPad?)
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