How to Read Ebooks on the iPad with iBooks & Amazon Kindle for mac

As an avid reader of books, I'm finding the experience of reading e-books on the 9.7″ screen of the iPad worth at least half the price of the device, especially after having read about five e-books on the Kindle version for the iPhone.

Downloading Books

Both Amazon and Apple allow users to download sample copies of their e-books. My decisions to purchase or not purchase an e-book has many times been influenced by reading a sample copy first.

Reading E-Books

Simple reading of e-books in both applications is pretty much the same as well. In both apps you tap on the right and left side of the iPad screen to "turn" pages. Each app includes a little animated feature in which if you "turn a page" slowly it replicates the look of turning a real paper book. This feature is not turned on, I think, by default in the Amazon reader.

You can also change the font style and size of pages as you read, in both readers. Also very useful is the ability to dim the light of the backlit screen, which can be done in both apps. If you need to look up a word in the dictionary, each app has a tool for that.

Page Locations

The most frustrating part of reading in both of these apps is getting lost when you turn too many pages.  In iBooks you can move your finger across the bottom of each page to select a page number in a chapter. Also , the bottom-right side of each page tells you how many pages are left in each chapter.

The Kindle reader is similar, but not as practical. The page numbering in the Kindle does not come close to the actual page numbering in the paper version of a book. The numbering can go into the thousands, when the paper version is actually say 296. And it only gives you the percentage of pages read in an e-book.

Making Annotations

If you're needing to make annotations in the books you read, both apps offer some basic tools in this area. They including highlighting, bookmarking, and in the case of the Kindle, note taking.

With each of these tools you press down on the word where you want to start highlighting and drag your finger across to where you want to end the highlight. In the Kindle app you tap on the upper corner of a page to bookmark it, whereas with iBooks you must use the highlighter tool as a bookmarker. Ironically, the tool is called Bookmark, but what you're really doing is highlighting.

More useful information you can read from ipubsoftwordpress.com