New feature in iOS4 - iBooks

This is the first book on my iBooks shelf:

Surprise! It's Winnie the Pooh! Oh well, I'm not a fan, but I downloaded it because it's the top free book. Anyway, it sure looks like it's sitting nicely on the shelf. Notice the word "New" on the book? That's how iBooks marks a newly downloaded book.

This app is really cool. It's definitely better than many of the previous book apps that I've seen. So let's take a peek inside:

Ok, there's Pooh and Eeyore

I find that Apple has given a real good thought about the whole design. The bookshelf looks really good with books sitting on it. It's virtually realistic. Right from the moment you choose the book from the iBooks shelf, it jumps out at you and opens up like a real book. The inside of the book really has a nice paper feel to it, including the page turning effect. Of course, it's more than just a book. It's a book that suits itself to you - the reader.

You can easily bookmark any page that you fancy by just taping on the ribbon symbol on the top right corner. When it's bookmarked, it becomes a prominent red ribbon. There's also a slider at the bottom if you prefer to glide through the pages quickly. On the bottom right corner, lies a little motivation for you - there's an indicator that tells you how many pages left before the end of a chapter.

Just like a real book you can highlight selected text. There are five colours to choose from - yellow, green, blue, pink and purple. Even the highlighting effect looks so real that it would seem as if you took a pen highlighter to do it. Besides that, you could also choose to lookup a word in the dictionary, add a note or search other parts of the book for the selected word. All this can be done by holding down on a specific word and then release it, just like how you would do it for copy and paste. When I selected dictionary, it says that there is no dictionary available for this language. I suspect that I would need to purchase a dictionary to make this function useful. 

If you add a note to a certain passage, the passage would be highlighted and there would be a piece of note stuck at the edge of the page to signify it:

An overview of all your bookmarks, notes and highlights can be accessed through the triple horizontal line icon at the top of the page, which will lead you to the view shown here:

If you fancy a book that has Times New Roman font rather than Palatino font or a slight larger font size for easy reading, just tap on the double A on top of the page. You can also change the colour of the paper to be have a more nostalgic feel by turning on the sepia effect. 

You also get to adjust the brightness of the page to your comfort by clicking on the sun symbol. This is important especially when we are reading off a LCD screen instead of a real paper. This would also mean you can read easily in most lighting conditions. 

All in all, I find this app to be interesting and fun to use. I've not read through a whole book with it yet, but it's sure very inviting! So go ahead and download your iBooks app today! 

The books that you purchased can be synced to iPad and iPod touch as well. This includes all your bookmarks, notes and current page. That means, you only need to purchase a book once and you can read it on multiple devices, picking up from exactly where you left off.

A note of caution - since the books are purchased and downloaded via the iBooks app itself, you might want to keep an eye on your telco data usage if you are not running on WiFi. Otherwise you might land yourself a hefty bill. 

Do you think you will enjoy reading books on iPhone/iPad/iPod touch more than on print?