Lost Notes

I was just typing something in the Notes application. I switched to check for some information in email. When I returned, my changes were not saved. I noticed that the time of the last save is listed on the left in the list of notes. If it is blank, the last changes will not be saved. I also believe, but am not sure that the saving happens when the keyboard goes away so if you are typing and hit the Home button, you lose.

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.

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.

Aligning Pages

Amazon lets you read several pages from books online, and I believe the pages on Amazon match directly with the pages of the original book. I tried to get the pages to match up by adjusting the size of my text on my iPad. While I could get close, I could not get it to work exactly. No matter what font size I chose, I was always off by a little. Additionally, iBooks doesn't recognize things like forewords, prefaces, and tables of contents as being Roman-numeral pages (the cover of the book counts as page 1) so even if I got the font size just right, I would still be shifted by 10 pages.

ePub Format in iWork

I just read an interesting article about how the ne update to iWork (Apple's version of Office) will allow export to the ePub format, making it easy to use to create books that can have full functionality within iBooks. This could be quite useful if a school or class decided to use iPads for all students in the class. Instructors could easily create handouts as books that could have all the iBooks benefits mentioned in my earlier postings.

Last Words on iBooks

Overall, I really enjoyed reading with the iPad. Because I was mostly offline, I wasn't interrupted with email (or the urge to jump to the Web every other paragraph), but I could imagine that being a problem. The glare is a show-stopper if you are primarily reading outside, but for reading inside, I loved it, and I think it would work very well in an academic setting. Considering I paid less than half for the electronic version of the book I read, I could see this being a great money-saver for students.

The print quality (when there is no glare) is clear. I am not a big fan of reading long things online, but I had no problem reading for 30 minutes at a time or more on the iPad. The text is sharp and clear and can easily be resized to suit my needs.

The biggest concern I have is life outside the iPad. Books can't be shared or borrowed or sold (no used textbooks, but when the books are so much cheaper to start with, that is not a big problem). How will libraries fit in with the iPad? And it is not clear what happens to notes and highlights beyond one particular device. Also, because there are so many competing devices, it might be hard to get everything you need on one device. The iPad has Nook and Kindle apps so that might not be a problem (but the Nook app just changed, and I read that if you replace your old Nook app with the new one, you will lose your Nook highlights).

It's fun to read with the iPad. Give it a try. Many books are 10 dollars so it's not a big investment to try it out.

A Few More Points

I really like searching. If I read a name or a term, I can highlight it and hit search and find all occurrences of that name or word in the book. Maybe that's not so good in a novel if it shows you information about the character later in the book that you don't want to see, but it is great for a non-fiction book so you can look back (or forward) to see what else the author said about it.

The dictionary is great. If I come across a word or phrase that I don't know, I can select it and hit dictionary. It seemed to find some pretty obscure things (I recently looked up "cri de coeur," which means "a passionate appeal, complaint , or protest").

I would like to be able to copy and paste short passages from the book. I can understand why they don't let you do this (and maybe it is a benefit for classes), but I might want to include something directly from the text in my notes or in an email message.

I'm sure over time I'll think of other things, but these last few posts have included the major points I wanted to make.