Chapter 12: How Do I Manage My Ebook Library?

Physical books are an awesome invention: They’re portable, easy to use, and fully showoffable, whether being read on the subway or sitting on a bookshelf at home. Physical books aren’t going away anytime soon, but the age of electronic books — ebooks — is upon us. The Amazon Kindle lit a fire under the ebook category, but it’s clunky to use and tied to Amazon. Apple filled in these gaps by offering iBooks, an app that’s easy to use and supports an open ebook format. The iPhone screen is a bit on the small side, but the Retina display renders text sharply and clearly, so reading books on the iPhone isn’t a chore. This chapter introduces you to ebooks on the iPhone.

Getting Your Head around Ebook Formats

Syncing Ebooks via iCloud

Managing Your iBooks Library

Reading Ebooks with the iBooks App

Reading Other Ebooks

Reading Magazines with Newsstand

Getting Your Head around Ebook Formats

If there is one reason why ebooks took a long time to take off (in the same way that, say, digital music now rules the planet), it’s because the ebook world started out as hopelessly, head-achingly confusing. At its worst, at least two dozen (yes, two dozen!) ebook formats were available, and new formats jumped on the ebook bandwagon with distressing frequency. That was bad enough, but it got worse when you considered that some of these formats required a specific ereading device or program. For example, the Kindle ebook format required either the Kindle ereader or the Kindle app; similarly, the Microsoft LIT format required the Microsoft Reader program. Finally, things turned positively chaotic when you realized that some formats came with built-in restrictions that prevented you from reading ebooks in other devices or programs, or from sharing ebooks with other people.

What the ebook world needed was the simplicity and clarity that comes with having a near-universal ebook format (such as the MP3 format in music). Well, I’m happy to report that one format has emerged from the fray: EPUB. This is a free and open ebook standard created by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF; see www.idpf.org). EPUB files, which use the .epub extension, are supported by most ereader programs and by most ereader devices (with the Amazon Kindle being the very noticeable exception). EPUB is leading the way not only because it’s free and nonproprietary but also because it offers quite a few cool features:

• Text is resizable, so you can select the size that’s most comfortable for you.
• The layout and formatting of the text are handled by Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), which is an open and well-known standard that makes it easy to alter the look of the text, including changing the font.
• Text is reflowable, which means that when you change the text size or the font, the text wraps naturally on the screen to accommodate the new character sizes (as opposed to some ebook formats that simply zoom in or out of the text).
• A single ebook can have alternative versions of the book in the same file.
• Ebooks can include high-resolution images right on the page.
• Publishers can protect book content by adding digital rights management (DRM) support. DRM refers to any technology that restricts the usage of content to prevent piracy. Of course, depending on where you fall in the “information wants to be free” spectrum, DRM may not be cool and may not even be considered a feature.

The first bit of good news is that the iBooks app supports the EPUB format, so all the features in the previous list are available in the iBooks app.

The next bit of good news is that iBooks support for EPUB means that a vast universe of public-domain books is available to you. On its own, the Books section of Google Play (https://play.google.com/store/books) offers over a million public-domain ebooks. Several other excellent EPUB sites exist on the web, and I tell you about them (as well as how to get them onto your iPhone) a bit later in this chapter.

By definition, public-domain ebooks are DRM-free, and you can use them in any way you see fit. However, a lot of the EPUB books you’ll find come with DRM restrictions. In the case of iBooks, the DRM scheme of choice is called FairPlay. This is the DRM technology that Apple used on iTunes for many years. Apple phased out DRM on music a while ago, but still uses it for other content, such as movies, TV shows, and audiobooks.

FairPlay means that many of the ebooks you download through iBooks face the following restrictions:

• You can access your books on a maximum of five computers, each of which must be authorized with your iTunes Store account info.
• You can read your ebooks only on your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, or a computer that has iTunes installed.

It’s crucial to note here two restrictions you’ll trip over with DRM-encrusted ebooks:

• FairPlay ebooks do not work on other ereader devices that support the EPUB format, including the Kobo Touch and the Barnes & Noble NOOK.
• EPUB-format books that come wrapped in some other DRM scheme do not work on your iPhone.

However, remember that DRM is an optional add-on to the EPUB format. Although it’s expected that most publishers will bolt FairPlay DRM onto books they sell in the iBookstore, it’s not required, so you should be able to find DRM-free ebooks in the iBookstore (and elsewhere).

Syncing Ebooks via iCloud

If you purchase an ebook on your iPad or on your Mac or PC, getting that book onto your iPhone requires a lot of connecting and syncing, which seems a tad primitive in this modern age. However, if you have an iCloud account, you can configure it to automatically download any new ebook purchases directly to your iPhone, all without a cable or your computer’s iTunes application in sight.

Here’s how to set this up:

1. On your iPhone, tap Settings in the Home screen. The Settings app appears.
2. Tap iTunes & App Stores.
3. If you haven’t signed in to the iTunes Store, enter your iCloud username and password and then tap Sign In.
4. Tap the Books switch to On, as shown in Figure 12.1.
5. If you want iCloud to sync ebooks even when you have a cellular-only connection, tap the Use Cellular Data switch to On.

Now, each time you purchase an ebook via iTunes on another device, that book is sent automatically to the iBooks library on your iPhone, usually within a few seconds.

Managing Your iBooks Library

In this chapter, I concentrate on iBooks, which is the Apple ereader app. However, it’s important to stress right off the bat that you’re not restricted to using iBooks for reading ebooks on your iPhone. Tons of great ebook apps are available (l mention a few of them at the end of this chapter; see the section “Reading Other Ebooks”), so feel free to use any or all of them in addition to (or even instead of) iBooks.

The iBooks app combines your ebook library with the iBookstore. Tap the My Books button in the menu bar to see your ebook collection, as shown in Figure 12.2. If you don’t see much right now, then it’s time to fill that bookcase with your favorite digital reading material. So your first task is to add a few titles to the bookcase, and the next few sections show you how to do just that.

Browsing books in the iBookstore

What if you’re out and about with your iPhone, you’ve got a bit of time to kill, and you decide to start a book? That’s no problem, because iBooks has a direct link to the iBookstore, the book marketplace run by Apple. Your iPhone can establish a wireless connection to the iBookstore anywhere you have Wi-Fi access or a cellular signal (ideally, at least 3G for faster downloads). You can browse and search the books, read reviews, and purchase any book you want (or grab a title from the large collection of free books). The ebook downloads to your iPhone and adds itself to the iBooks bookcase. You can start reading within seconds!

What about the selection? When Apple announced the iPhone and the iBooks app, it also announced that five major publishers would be stocking the iBookstore: Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin, and Simon & Schuster. Since then, a number of other publishers have been added, including Random House, the last of the major publishers to sign on. So, along with all those free ebooks, you can rest assured that the iBookstore has an impressive selection.

To access the iBookstore, you use the other browse buttons in the menu bar at the bottom of the screen (that is, the buttons other than My Books): Featured, Top Charts, Search, and Purchased. You use these buttons to navigate the iBookstore. Here’s a summary of what each browse button does for you:

• Featured. Tap this button to display a list of books picked by the iBookstore editors. The list shows each book’s cover, title, author, category, star rating, number of reviews, and price. Tap Categories to browse books by subject.
• Top Charts. Tap this button to see charts for the top Paid Books (see Figure 12.3) and the top Free Books.

  

• Search. Tap this button to run a search on the iBookstore.
• Purchased. Tap this button to see a list of the books you’ve downloaded.

Adding a PDF attachment to your library

If you receive an email with an attached PDF file, you can open the attachment right from the Mail app. However, the iBooks app now supports PDFs, so if you’d prefer to read the PDF in the friendly confines of iBooks (where you can search the PDF and bookmark your current location), you need to transfer it to your iBooks library. Here’s how it’s done:

1. In the Mail app, open the message that contains the PDF attachment.
2. Tap and hold the PDF attachment. Mail displays a menu of commands.
3. Tap Open in iBooks. Your iPhone opens the iBooks app and displays the PDF.

Working with collections

iBooks supports both ebooks and PDF documents. In a welcome burst of common sense, the iBooks programmers decided not to combine ebooks and PDFs on the same part of the Bookshelf. Instead, iBooks supports separate library sections called collections, and it comes with three default collections: one for all ebooks (called Books), one for ebooks you’ve bought (called Purchased Books), and one for PDF documents (called PDFs).

You can use the following techniques to work with your iBooks collections:

• Switching to another collection. Tap the name of the current collection at the top of the Bookshelf and then tap the name of the collection you want to use.
• Creating a new collection. Tap the name of the current collection at the top of the Bookshelf, tap New Collection, type the name of your collection (such as Fiction or Nonfiction), and then tap Done.
• Moving an item to a different collection. Tap the Select button, tap the item you want to move, and then tap the Move button. In the list of collections that appears, tap the collection you want to use as the item’s new iBooks home.
• Deleting a collection. Tap the name of the current collection at the top of the Bookshelf and tap Edit. Next, tap the red Delete icon beside the collection you want to remove and then tap the Delete button that appears. If the collection isn’t currently empty, tap Remove when iBooks asks you to confirm. For a nonempty collection, iBooks returns the items to their original locations (for example, ebooks to the Books collection).

Adding other EPUB ebooks to your library

With the ascendance of the EPUB format, publishers and book packagers are tripping over each other to make their titles EPUB friendly. As a result, the web is awash in EPUB books, so you don’t have to get all the ebook content on your iPhone from the iBookstore. Here’s a short list of some sites where you can download EPUB files to your computer:

• epubBooks: www.epubbooks.com. This is a terrific site for all things related to the EPUB format, and it offers a wide selection of public-domain EPUB books.
• eBooks.com: www.ebooks.com. This site has a variety of books in various ebook formats, although most won’t work in the iBooks app because most of the EPUB books use the DRM scheme from Adobe. However, you can go to the Advanced Search page (www.ebooks.com/search/advancedsearch.asp) and select “Unencrypted ePub” in the Choose a Format list to see the iBooks-friendly titles that are offered.
• Feedbooks: www.feedbooks.com. This site offers public-domain titles in several formats, including EPUB.
• Books on Google Play: play.google.com/store/books. This site offers more than a million public-domain titles, many of which are free, plus a lot of current releases that you can buy.
• ManyBooks: http://manybooks.net. This site offers a nice collection of free ebooks in a huge variety of formats. When you download a book, be sure to choose the ePub (.epub) format in the Select Format drop-down list.
• Smashwords: www.smashwords.com. This intriguing site offers titles by independent and self-published authors. All ebooks are DRM free, and each book is available in the EPUB format.
• Snee: www.snee.com/epubkidsbooks. This site offers a lot of children’s picture books in the EPUB format.

After you download an EPUB title to your computer, you can import the book into iBooks or iTunes. You do this through the Add to Library dialog:

• In OS X Yosemite or Mavericks. Open iBooks, choose File ⇒ Add to Library (or press +Shift+O), locate and click the EPUB file you downloaded, and then click Add. iBooks adds the ebook to the All Books section of the library.
• In earlier versions of OS X; all versions of Windows. Open iTunes, choose File ⇒ Add to Library (or press +O), locate and click the EPUB file you downloaded, and then click Open. iTunes adds the ebook to the Books section of the library.

Editing the iBooks Bookshelf

When you add a book to the iBooks Bookshelf, the app clears a space for the new title on the left side of the top shelf of the bookcase. The rest of the books are shuffled to the right and down.

This is a sensible way to go about things if you read each book as you download it because it means the iBooks Bookshelf displays your books in the order you read them. Of course, life isn’t always that orderly, and you might end up reading your ebooks more haphazardly. This means that the order in which the books appear in the Bookshelf won’t reflect the order in which you read them.

Similarly, you may have one or more books in your iBooks Bookshelf that you refer to frequently for reference, or because you’re reading them piecemeal (such as a book of poetry or a collection of short stories). In that case, it would be better to have such books near the top of the bookcase where they’re slightly easier to find and open.

For these and similar Bookshelf maintenance chores, iBooks lets you shuffle the books around to get them into the order you prefer. Here’s how it works:

1. In iBooks, tap My Books.
2. To move a book, tap and drag the book cover to the position you prefer.
3. If you want to remove a book from your library, tap Select, tap the book’s cover to select it (as shown in Figure 12.4), tap Delete, and then tap either Delete This Copy (to remove it from just your iPhone) or Delete From All Devices (to remove it from every device that has a copy).

   

4. Tap Done. iBooks closes the library for editing.

Creating a custom ebook cover

If you’ve obtained any free books from the iBookstore, or if you’ve downloaded public-domain books to iTunes, you’ll no doubt have noticed that many (or, really, most) of these books use generic covers. That’s no big deal for a book or two, but it can get monotonous if you have many such books in your iBooks library (as well as making it hard to find the book you want). To work around this, you can create custom book covers from your own photos. Your first task is to convert a photo (or any image) to something that’s usable as a book cover. This involves loading the image into your favorite image-editing program and then doing three things:

• Crop the image so that it’s 420 pixels wide and 600 pixels tall.
• Use the text tool in the image-editing program to add the book title to the image.
• Save the image as a JPEG file. If the image is already a JPEG, be sure to save it under a different name so you don’t overwrite the original file.

Now you’re ready to use the new image as a book cover, which you do by importing the cover image into iTunes on your computer:

1. In iTunes, click the Books category. iTunes displays your ebooks.
2. Right-click the book you want to customize, and then click Get Info. iTunes displays the book’s Info dialog.
3. Click the Artwork tab. This tab includes a large box for the book cover image.
4. Use Finder (on a Mac) or Explorer (on a Windows PC) to locate the new cover image. On a Mac, you can also locate the image in iPhoto.
5. Click the new image and drop it inside the large box in the Artwork tab.
6. Click OK. iTunes applies the new image as the book’s cover.

Reading Ebooks with the iBooks App

If you’re a book lover like me, and you have your iBooks Bookshelf groaning under the weight of all your ebooks, you may want to spend some time just looking at all the covers. Or not. If it’s the latter, then it’s time to get some reading done. The next few sections show you how to control ebooks and modify the display for the best reading experience.

Controlling ebooks on the reading screen

When you’re ready to start reading a book using iBooks, getting started couldn’t be simpler: Just tap the book you want to read and iBooks opens it.

Here’s a list of techniques you can use to control an ebook while reading it:

• To flip to the next page, tap the right side of the screen.
• To flip to the previous page, tap the left side of the screen.
• To “manually” turn a page, flick the page with your finger. Flick left to turn to the next page; flick right to turn to the previous page.
• To access the iBooks controls, tap the middle of the screen. To hide the controls, tap the middle of the screen again.
• To access the book’s Table of Contents, display the controls and tap the Contents icon, pointed out in Figure 12.5. You can then tap an item in the Table of Contents to jump to that section of the book.
• To go to a different page in the book, display the controls and tap a dot at the bottom of the screen.
• To search the book, display the controls and tap the Search icon in the upper right corner. Type your search text and tap Search. In the search results that appear, tap a result to display that part of the book.
• To return to the iBooks Bookshelf, display the controls and tap Library in the upper left corner.

Formatting ebook text

I mentioned near the top of the show that the EPUB format supports multiple text sizes and multiple fonts, and that the text reflows seamlessly to accommodate the new text size. The iBooks app takes advantage of these EPUB features, as shown here:

1. While reading an ebook, tap the middle of the screen to display the controls.
2. Tap the Fonts icon, pointed out earlier in Figure 12.5. iBooks displays the Font options, as shown in Figure 12.6.

   

3. Tap the larger “A” to increase the text size. Tap the smaller “A” to reduce the size.
4. Tap Fonts. iBooks displays a list of typefaces.
5. Tap the typeface you want to use. iBooks reformats the ebook for the new typeface.
6. To change the colors (such as a sepia background or white text on a black background for night reading), tap Theme and then tap the option you want to use.
7. Tap the middle of the screen to hide the controls.

Adding a bookmark

Reading an ebook with the iBooks app is so pleasurable that you may not want to stop! However, you have to eat at some point, so when it’s time to set your book aside, mark your spot with a bookmark:

1. Display the page where you want to set your bookmark.
2. Tap the page. iBooks displays its controls.
3. Tap the Bookmark icon, pointed out earlier in Figure 12.5. iBooks saves your spot by creating a bookmark at the location you chose.

To return to your place, follow these steps:

1. Tap the page. iBooks displays the reading controls.
2. Tap the Contents icon. iBooks displays the table of contents.
3. Tap the Bookmarks tab. iBooks offers up a list of the saved bookmarks.
4. Tap the bookmark. iBooks returns you to the bookmarked page.

Looking up a word in the dictionary

While you peruse an ebook, you may come across an unfamiliar word. You can look it up using any of the umpteen online dictionaries, but there’s no need for that with iBooks:

1. Tap and hold the word that has you furrowing your brow. iBooks displays a set of options.
2. Tap Define. The first time you do this, iBooks tells you that it needs to download a dictionary.
3. Tap Download. iBooks loads the dictionary, looks up the word, and then displays its definition.
4. Tap Done to close the definition.

Highlighting text

If you come across a word, phrase, sentence, paragraph, or section of text that strikes your fancy, there’s a good chance you’ll want to return to that text later on. The easiest way to do that is to highlight the text. This not only makes the text stick out from the surrounding prose by displaying it with a yellow background, but iBooks also bookmarks it so you can quickly find it again. To do so, use the same steps described earlier for returning to a bookmark.

Follow these steps to highlight text with iBooks:

1. Tap and hold a word in the text you want to highlight. iBooks selects the word and displays a set of options. If the word is all you want to highlight, skip to Step 3.
2. Use the selection controls to expand the selection to include all the text you want to highlight.
3. Tap Highlight. iBooks adds a yellow background to the text and creates a bookmark for it (see Figure 12.7).

Adding a note

Sometimes when you’re reading a book, you feel an irresistible urge to provide your own two cents’ worth. With a paper book, you can grab the nearest writing implement and jot a margin note, but that’s not going to work too well with an ebook. Fortunately, the iBooks programmers have taken pity on inveterate margin writers and provided a Note feature that lets you add your own comments and asides. Even better, iBooks also creates a bookmark for each note, so you can quickly find your additions.

Follow these steps to create a note with iBooks:

1. Tap and hold a word in the text you want to comment on. iBooks selects the word and displays a set of options. If the word is all you want to work with, skip to Step 3.
2. Use the selection controls to expand the selection to include all the text you want to use.
3. Tap Note. iBooks displays a text box that looks like a sticky note.
4. Type your note.
5. Tap Done. As shown in Figure 12.7, iBooks adds a yellow background to the text, displays a note icon in the margin, and bookmarks it.

Reading Other Ebooks

In this chapter, I focus on the iBooks app, mostly because it’s an excellent app that’s optimized for the iPhone and integrates seamlessly with iTunes. But the iPhone is arguably the best eReader available today, so it seems a shame to ignore the massive universe of ebooks that aren’t iBooks-compatible. If you want to turn your iPhone into an ultimate eReader that’s capable of reading practically any ebook in practically any format, then just head for the App Store and install the appropriate eReader apps.

A complete list of ereader apps would extend for pages, so I’ll just hit the highlights here:

• eBookMobi. This powerful app (it costs $1.99) supports an amazing variety of ebook formats, including EPUB, PDF, and Mobipocket.
• eReader. This app supports the eReader format.
• i2Reader. This app supports EPUB books and PDF documents.
• iSilo. This app (which costs $9.99) supports the iSilo and Palm Doc formats.
• Kindle. The Amazon Kindle app is the way to go if you want to read Kindle ebooks on your iPhone.
• Kobo. This app is supplied by the same folks who make the Kobo ereader, and it supports both EPUB books and PDF documents.

Reading Magazines with Newsstand

Magazine publishers have been coming up with all kinds of innovative new tools and techniques that make reading a digital version of a magazine a more interactive and media-rich experience than reading the print version.

If there’s a problem with iPhone-based magazines, it’s that you have to manage a different app for each magazine, which gets clumsy after you have more than a half dozen or so magazine apps scattered around your Home screens. You can try plopping all your magazine apps into a single folder, but then it makes it hard to see the icon badges that tell you a new issue is available.

To solve these kinds of problems, your iPhone offers Newsstand, an app specifically designed to manage magazines. Newsstand is really a special folder, and when you tap it, you see a replica of a magazine shelf (see Figure 12.8). For magazine apps that know how to work with Newsstand (in the App Store, open the Newsstand category), when you install such an app, it loads the most recent issue in the Newsstand interface, which lets you browse your available issues in a single spot. As I write this, a number of magazine publishers have signed on to support Newsstand, including Condé Nast (Wired, the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and many more), National Geographic, Hearst, Bloomberg, and Disney. Newsstand also supports newspaper subscriptions, so in addition to the likes of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, expect to find many other major newspapers.