Back in April, Apple released an eBook reading application for the iPad, called iBooks, and I was skeptical at first, as were many, about reading books on an LCD screen and all the stuff around it hurting your eyes, but I can tell you, it’s not true, iBooks is single-handedly the best eBook experience I have ever had, something far superior to that of the Kindle device and it’s app. The touch gestures are what really sets the iBooks app apart from any other reader in my mind, the way you can smoothly change between pages on the iPad’s 9.7″ screen is nothing short of amazing, I really love how you can change the font and text size of the book you are reading, it really helps if you, like myself have difficulty seeing.
The ease of use is amazing, I find that the interface is so natural, you don’t even have to think about what you are doing when you use the app, in fact the hardest part was choosing what to buy from the iBooks store, which is identical to the iTunes and App stores so I felt right at home.
iBooks also comes with Winnie-The-Pooh, which is an awesome example of what iBooks can do, the illustrations look stunningly clear and the text is also very clear with Anti-Aliased fonts throughout.
In June, Apple added PDF support and support for iPhone & iPod touch.
Books look just as great on these devices, but take a little longer to read as you have to turn the page more often due to there being less text on the screen.
PDFs work great on the iPad, but a little slower on the iPod touch & iPhone, this is not an issue though, because you can always convert your PDFs to the ePub format used by iBooks.
I’m going to end this review with one note…
I knew Apple had done right with iBooks, as soon as I handed the iPad to my 8 year old sister, who loves reading, and she could figure it out right away, with no help from my part.
User-friendliness at it’s finest.
iBooks review by Ryan Taylor
