Tuesday, September 28, 2010

iPad Finger

My finger hurts, specifically my right index finger. It mostly hurts when I tap on my iPad. I can't see anything on it, but it feels more like a bruise than a blister. I have been trying to tap with other fingers or using my finger nail. I haven't really gotten the hang of touch-typing on the iPad so I have only been using the one finger. If I'm going to type, I'll have to try to do more touch-typing. Otherwise, I'm afraid I'm going to start avoiding the iPad, even for typing short messages.

Wednesday, September 8, 2010

ePub Books

The format for iBooks is ePub. This means that the iPad can read anything in that public format. Most books read on the iPad in iBooks are download from the iBooks bookstore, but that is not the only way. I just downloaded (for free) Cory Doctorow's book For The Win (http://craphound.com/ftw/download/), not because I am interested in young adult fiction, but because I am interested in his ideas about copyright law (which are actually summarized in the beginning of the ebook). He has made electronic versions of this book available for free (see the link above). He has also invited his readers to make use of this book in pretty much whatever non-commercial way they see fit. One of the things his readers have done is convert his books to various electronic formats, including ePub.

When you buy a book in the iBookstore, you it is automatically loaded into iBooks on your iPad. For books that are not in the iBookstore, you can download it to your computer and drag it to iTunes, and it will be in iBooks the next time you sync your iPad.

The commercial book that I paid for (The Shallows) works perfectly in iBooks. The table of contents is accurate, and the notice about how many pages are left in the chapter (that appears at the bottom of each page) is accurate. I have had mixed results for the two free books I have downloaded (A Tale of Two Cities downloaded from the iBookstore and For the Win downloaded outside of the iBookstore). A Tale of Two Cities is divided into chapters, but iBooks has trouble figuring out when the next chapter starts so I often get incorrect information about how many pages are left in a chapter. I haven't spent much time with For the Win, but iBooks seems to think it has two chapters consisting of some of the introductory material and everything else. When I got to the Dedication, it said I had 713 pages left in the chapter. I'm not sure if this is a problem with the non-professional translation to the ePub format or if the book doesn't have traditional chapters.