Apple iBooks 1.2

E-books take a lot of space in your digital shelves and often start to look cluttered and unorganized unlike the large library shelves that house physical books. Apple’s iBooks 1.2 allows you to enjoy fully-illustrated works, get your notes out of your e-books, and more.

Collections

Collections lets you organize your titles into separate shelves of your creation. That allows you to dedicate a shelf entirely for science-fiction novels, sort product manual PDFs, self-help books, user guides, business proposals, project plans and more. Tap the Store button and the bookshelf flips around like a secret passageway to reveal the iBookstore, where you can browse thousands of free public-domain books. Browse by title, author or genre and when you download the book, it appears on your bookshelf so you can start reading right away.

Titles

Moving titles is as easy by tapping the Edit button in the main bookshelf, selecting the items you want to move, and tapping Move. You are free to mix PDFs and e-books between collections. Switch between collections by tapping the button at the top of any shelf or simply swipe left or right. The iBooks app uses the ePub format – the most popular open book format in the world. That makes it easy for publishers to create iBooks versions of your favorite reads. So you can also download and add other free ePub titles to iTunes on your Mac or PC and sync them to the iBooks app.

Full Color Illustrations

iBooks 1.2 includes support for fully-illustrated books. So those children’s books, art books and other titles where illustration is a prominent component can now be downloaded right from the iBookstore, in gorgeous full-page color. No restrictions to text or black and white anymore. You can flip through pages, add bookmarks and highlights, or zoom in for a closer look.

This feature just might take the cake. iBooks sports the ability to print iBooks notes right from the app via AirPrint. So no need to plug in to the nearest computer just to print. If you don’t have printer support, you can also e-mail them though unfortunately, notes don’t include the e-book text that they’re linked to. Of course you can also e-mail or print the PDFs in your iBooks library.

Extras

Change the text size. Even change the font. Touch and hold any word to look it up in the built-in dictionary or Wikipedia, or to search for it throughout the book and on the web. iBooks also works with VoiceOver, the screen reader in iPad, so it can read the contents of any page aloud. iBooks is a universal app for both iPhone and iPad. When you take a break from reading, iBooks automatically saves your place across all your devices. So you can start reading a book on your iPad and pick up where you left off on your iPhone or iPod touch, without having to plug into a computer. It requires any device running iOS 3.2 or later.