Paperbooks are expensive to produce and to buy. This recipe will advocate the use of iBooks instead of paper textbooks. These books often come with multimedia features such as video and audio media, photo galleries, links, and so on. With iBooks corrections and updates are also free, eliminating the need to buy a new version every year. Most of the big publishers have their books available on iBooks or on other eBook apps. These eBook apps also support features such as notes-taking, highlighting, flash card creation, and the like, which are especially helpful for teachers.
If you are using the latest version of iOS in your iPad you should already have it on home screen. If not, start by downloading iBooks app from the App Store.
- Open iBooks app from home screen of you iPad. Now tap on Store from top–left side of the screen. This will take you to iBookstore. Under iBooks TextBooks you can browse the available books subject-wise or look up for a particular title using Search textbox and view full details of a book. The next screenshot shows these facilities:
When you buy a book it will show up under Library as shown in the next screenshot:
- The fantastic retina display of the iPad makes the text appear like that of a magazine. To modify the view for your convenience, you can change the brightness, text-size, font, and reading theme from within the app using editing options in the top right portion of the screen.
- Most of us are used to highlighting or underlining text while going through a book. iBooks provides this feature in an iBook! Highlighting in iBooks is easy—just tap and scroll through the text you would like to highlight. This option also lets you add notes clipped to parts of text. You can use these notes to turn them into flashcards for class lessons.
- Another task we often have to do while reading a book is to look up a word in the dictionary. In iBooks, if you don't know the meaning of a word, tap on it and its glossary will appear with the definition! You can even open the Dictionary option from here to learn more about the word. This is shown in the following screenshot:
- Readers can either view the book content in a traditional textbook format or in a graphic-enhanced format. What makes iBooks amazing and much more useful than a paper-textbook is the reader interactivity it offers. iBooks can play videos and 3D animation inside a book page as shown in the next screenshot. It can make tables and figures full screen and easy to read.
Many books also have interactive charts and figures, which can make understanding physics and biology much simpler. The following screenshot gives us an example. Likewise many geography textbooks have interactive map exercises, where the reader can use the drag-and-drop feature to perform these exercises.
All these features hold high importance in situations where a teacher wants to demonstrate something in class, without actually having to arrange for a laboratory setup. With such features complex science topics become very easy for students to understand.
- When you feel like someone should read out the book to you, the iPad presents itself. You can use the Voiceover feature to have iPad read the book's text to you.
When the user downloads a book from the iBookstore, it is stored in the device and can be accessed anytime and anywhere, not requiring the user to be online. These iBooks are not only replacement for, but enhancement to the paper-textbooks due to all their interactive features. These books are stored, organized, and displayed in iBooks library just as a teacher would like his/her library to be.
You can always download a sample part of a book from iBookstore before buying full copy. You can also get updates to books for no extra charge.
K-12 major publishers such as McGraw-Hill, Pearson Education, and Houghton Harcourt have already made most of their books available on iBooks for $14.99 or less.