Reading books on iPad – Books to download

I like reading books and I also like audio books. It is even possible to find free downloadable audio books. The good thing about audio books is that you can ‘read’ books while you are doing something else, such as walking the dog. My dog needs a quite a lot of walking, so I can do quite a lot of reading. But if for you, the idea of reading is more like sitting in a nice comfortable chair with your feet up, then I think there is nothing better than to read books on iPad. You can get an iPad book into an iPad reader and really relax and get lost in the story.

The advantages are reading books on iPad

There are a number of advantages for reading books on iPad and that has to start with the fact that you can have a large number of books with you at all times. Especially if you are going travelling on a long trip and you need to have some reading material, then you should be making a trip to the i bookstore. You can look in the iBookstore and find books to download and there are plenty of other places where you can find good books to download.

One of the places that I like to read books is while I am having my breakfast or lunch, or in fact any meal where I’m sitting at the table. With an old-fashioned dead tree type of book, it is just about impossible to keep the book open to the page that you are reading. I need to have both hands free for wielding my knife and fork, so there is no way to keep the book on the right page. When you are reading an iPad book using one of the various iPad reader applications, all you have to do is to prop the iPad up and give it an occasional swipe when you need to turn the page. Reading books on iPad this way really works well for me.

Disadvantages of reading books on iPad

Well the only disadvantage that I can think of, is that it is almost impossible to read books on the iPad whilst sitting on the beach. Unless it is cloudy, then why are you sitting on the beach, then the bright sunlight will stop you from doing any reading. That is one good reason to also own a Kindle.

Kindle books on iPad

Although there are quite a few iPad reader applications that you can use to get your literary fix, I find that the one that I use most is the Kindle app for iPad. This is not because it is any better than the Apple iBooks application. It is mainly because I have an automated way of finding free books to download. There is a website called ‘If This Then That’ and I have found an automation recipe that gets me free books from Amazon. Usually the if this then that automation works very well and the book that it tells me about is free. Lately though, some of the suggestions have been books that needed to be paid for, although still very cheap. Right now I have enough reading material on my iPad, in the Kindle for iPad application to keep me going for some time.

Another sort of reading – Textbooks for iPad

With the advent of the superb application called iBooks Author there has been an explosion of textbooks for iPad. There were already ebook text books just the same as there were epub books, but now they are much enhanced. The Apple ebook textbooks built upon the functionality of the old standard epub, with the addition of video, audio, 3-D images and more. This sort of textbook is the way of the future and Apple own this space at the moment. In the spirit of competition, it would be very good to see another software manufacturer produce a competitor for iBooks Author.

There are cost advantages to having electronic books rather than the paper-based textbooks. This is extra important for the homeschooling community who will no longer have put up with tatty used homeschool books. Kids have never looked after the paper books very well and it would be normal to find scribbles and notes in the margins. A paper-based book like that would be quite difficult to sell on. Ebook textbooks are infinitely updatable and therefore more likely to be up-to-date with regards the content. You can take notes electronically using your iOS device either within the iPad reader, or within a separate application.

Textbooks for iPad – Useful and more interesting

It has already been shown that the students reading books on iPad are more engaged with the content. This will have obvious benefits in terms of the learning experience and many school districts have seen the wisdom of having iPads in the classroom. Personally, I have been able to use an iPad in the classroom as a teacher. Unfortunately, within the school where I was working there were no other iPads, so I couldn’t take full advantage of the technology. I would really like to be able to connect up the projector to an Apple TV and wirelessly transmit from my iPad. Working this way in the classroom would give marvellous freedom of movement and this would be beneficial to the classroom management.

Head on down to the iTunes bookstore

At the start of this article it was about the leisure activity of reading books on iPad technology. There are many different types of books though and it is not surprising that I got waylaid and moved on to talking about ebook textbooks. So whether your interest is in reading for enjoyment or reading for educational purposes, I think you should be looking at reading books on iPad. There are plenty of books to download, some are free, some are inexpensive, but all of them have advantages over the old fashioned dead tree-based books.