iBooks & ePeriodicals

Books in their current, easy-to-use, page-turning form have been around since the second century A.D. or so. After a few years of false starts and dashed hopes, electronic books are beginning to woo some people away from the world of ink, paper, and tiny little clip-on book lights for reading in the dark. And as the eBook goes, so go eBook readers. The Amazon Kindle, the Barnes & Noble Nook, and the Sony Reader are among the big names on the eBook reader playground, but they all have one thing in common: drab gray-and-black text.

Enter the iPad.

With its glorious, high-resolution color touchscreen, the iPad takes the eBook experience to a new level. Instead of the blotchy grayscale images typical of electronic magazines, you see the bold, bright, original layouts of newsstand magazines. Turning the page of an eBook isn’t the flash of a monochrome screen anymore, it’s a fully animated re-creation of the page-flip on a real book. And the books themselves have evolved into interactive creations, with built-in dictionaries, searchable text, hyperlinked footnotes, and embedded bookmarks that make the whole reading process more efficient and engaging. So flip this page to see how much fun you can have reading books in the 21st century on the iPad.

Download the iBooks App

Before you can buy and read eBooks on your iPad, you have to do two things: recalibrate your brain, because Apple calls its eBooks iBooks, and then pop into the iTunes App Store to download Apple’s ...

Get iBooks and ePeriodicals on the iPad: The Mini Missing Manual now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.