I don’t have an iPad yet, but thanks to reader Paul’s report below, I know what my books look like on it. He sent the following to me in a note yesterday:
[The 2010 edition of your stock book] looks just like your paperback books, but with a few extras.
In the iBookstore you can get a sample of the book, which in your case is the first chapter and an internal link to buy the book. Once selected it is downloaded to the iBook App and appears with “preview” stamped across one corner. This seems like a huge advantage over the Kindle Store because you get started with the preview and feel compelled to purchase the rest of the book. When you do purchase it, the iBook app library downloads the rest of the book and the preview icon goes away.
After tapping the icon in the iBook App you get an animated opening to the first page, and when you return later it opens to where you left off. It looks a lot like your paperbacks, but with a slider along the bottom showing the pages and buttons across the top for library, table of contents/Bookmarks, brightness, font size and face, and search. Using the eBook is really nice because you can read through, or you can search for words that you are interested in, such as “How Stocks Trade” and then by pressing on those words you can add a personal bookmark, look it up in the dictionary, or search for other incidences of that term. When you look at the bookmarks you have made it tells you when you added it, what chapter it is and also what page it is on. Not sure how important this is, but you can subsequently recolor the bookmarks on an individual basis if you wanted to “code” them in some way. Tapping the center of the page shows and hides those features.
If you go back to the content or bookmark page, a red tag appears with the word “resume” on it. When you tap it, you go back to the last page you were looking at.
On thing I really like about the iBook and the iPad Kindle is that it is not covered in buttons like the hardware kindle. My inlaws both have Kindles and I could never get a hang of what all the buttons did and where they were. I would pick up the Kindle and accidentally press a button, and then not be able to figure out how to get back. This is not the case with the iPad. On both the iBook and Kindle apps, you touch the right side of the page to move forward, and the left side to move back.
Thanks, Paul!
