Posts tagged with "books"

Safari Books Online Releases New “Safari To Go” iPad App

Safari Books Online is a very popular service that, through a monthly or annual subscription model, allows you to access a vast catalog of design, development and business-related books and video trainings. Depending on your account, Safari Books Online lets you browse through a library of over 13,000 resources, and thanks to release of a brand new app today, this will also be possible directly from an iPad.

Safari To Go, available for free in the App Store, is a complete 2.0 rewrite of SBO’s previous App Store offering that provides a native interface for the iPad that follows Apple’s interface and usability guidelines, yet still enables you to enjoy the library of Safari Books Online, which includes ebooks from publishers like FT Press and O’Reilly. Safari To Go brings the functionalities you’d expect from a native iPad app: page swiping, offline reading mode and in-book keyword search. You can view your recently read books in a different view, mark items as favorites and create bookmarks. Additionally, you can watch videos in-app and perform a search by topic to find exactly what you’re looking for. Ken Yarmosh, one of the developers of Safari To Go 2.0, explains some of the technical decisions behind the app, such as why 3G connection only allows you to read an offline book:

As an example, notes and tags are not initially available in the application. Similarly, we found the performance on 3G to be sub-optimal due to the amount of content that transmits over the air. So, it was collectively decided that only an offline book should be accessible when on 3G for the first release of the v2.0 version.

Because of how we’ve built the app, we’re now in position to more quickly iterate on these and other features. In fact, we’re just now testing an update internally, which should be pushed to the App Store shortly. The Safari Books Online team also has a roadmap for upcoming releases with the expectation to update it and re-prioritize features based on customer feedback.

The free Safari to Go iPad app is available now in the App Store. You can sign up for a 10-day free trial on Safari Books Online here.

Our Choice, Proving Push Pop Press Will Revolutionize Digital Publishing

When Co-Founders Mike Matas and Kimon Tsinteris set out to change the world of digital publishing, not many would have guessed that Al Gore would be at the forefront of their first title until Our Choice was demoed as a TED Talk, where the workings and interactions of the first title built using the new platform were revealed. Today, Our Choice is available at an introductory $4.99 on the App Store for the iPhone and the iPad, delivering rich interactive content via a completely custom app built on a native backbone. The Push Pop Press platform is seeking to revolutionize how content is published and made interactive, and my initial impressions with Our Choice can validate that cause. What’s at stake isn’t just the future of the new digital platform, but a complete rethinking of the traditional digital magazine or newspaper. The App Store is flooded with projects traditionally based on Adobe technologies, and while it was a good first attempt, the content we view needs to be intuitive, interactive, but most importantly fluid and un-static. Push Pop Press is the ideal platform to revolutionize how we think of traditional media, and Our Choice is the launch title proving that this new vision for content is a clear winner.

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iBooks Can Now Open EPUB Files Directly→

iBooks Can Now Open EPUB Files Directly

Adam Engst at TidBITS details an important change in how iBooks handles .EPUB files opened directly on iOS:

The practical upshot of this fix is that you can now transfer EPUB files into iBooks far more easily than before, when the only way was to drop them into iTunes and do a USB sync. For individual users, that means you can send yourself an EPUB via email and transfer the attachment to iBooks, and you can also copy EPUB files into Dropbox and use the iOS Dropbox app to send them to iBooks.

Basically, forwarding books bought / downloaded in Mobile Safari to iBooks got a lot easier thanks to the “Open In…” menu. Project Gutenberg books work great with this method.

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Google Books for iOS Update: Landscape Reading, Faster

Released in December for iPhone and iPad users, the official Google Books app was very promising as it gave everyone access to Google’s 2 million book catalogue, with the possibility to download books locally and read them on-device. The app, however, sported some pretty bad UI inconsistencies and user experience issues, such as the impossibility to read in landscape mode on the iPad or several bugs that turned many users into frustrated readers that had to deal with an unstable and slow app.

Google wants to change this today with a major update to Google Books for iOS that introduces landscape reading on the iPad, a “find” feature that shows matches for a specific keyword as you scroll down the book and a useful “Get eBooks” button that will automatically sign you into the Google eBookstore with the same username you used to log into the app.  The app is now faster, bugs have been fixed and the iPad on iOS 4.3 also gets a nice 3D page curling effect. Google claims they have improved the book downloading experience, too, as well as the whole responsiveness of the app.

If you’re a Google Books user, you can find the app here. The update is propagating in the iTunes Store now.

 

iPad Helping Remove Bookshelves, Save Space in Japan

With Japan’s cramped living quarters, arrival of the iPad and other tablets and it’s non-existent e-book market, there has been an explosion of start-ups offering consumers to turn their paper books into e-books that can be used on such tablets as the iPad. Japan currently has the largest market for paper books and magazines, worth over $24 billion a year, yet the e-book market is currently earning less than $1 billion per year, driving customers to alternatives such as scanning books into PDF’s for use on tablets and e-readers.

One such start-up, Bookscan was founded by Yusuke Ohki and childhood friend, Shinya Iwamatsu last April and has done gangbusters, expanding its workforce to 120 people in less than 12 months. Ohki said to Bloomberg “the iPad’s release is the biggest factor in making this business possible” and said his inspiration for starting the business was the 2000 physical books that were crowding out his small Tokyo apartment.

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Children’s Picture Books Go Live In The iBookstore

With the release of iBooks 1.2, Apple added the possibility to display illustrated books in its ebook reading application. The illustrated books weren’t available in the Store on the iBooks 1.2 launch day, but they are now. And they’re featured in the homepage of the iBookstore with a series of banners that want you to notice the availability of the Children’s Picture Books.

Most of the books in the Store are sold at $9.99, but there are many ranging from $3.99 to $12.99. The format of illustrated books is different, and you’ll have to manually zoom in iBooks if you want to get a closer look at the details. I don’t get why the app doesn’t open them in full-screen by default. Anyway, go check on the iBookstore, as there are plenty of them.

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Apple Releases iBooks 1.2

iBooks 1.2 just showed up in iTunes. The new version features a new Collection functionality to organize books and PDFs, AirPrint support, possibility to experience fully illustrated books available in the iBookstore.

iBooks can now also fit more words per page using automatic hyphenation, although this feature is only available for iOS 4.2 users. Read more

Official Google Books iOS App Goes Live

Google launched its official eBook store earlier today, and promised an official iOS app for iPhone and iPad would follow in a few hours. The app is now available for free in iTunes here.

Google Books allows you to check on Google’s 2 million book catalogue and download ebooks to read them on your iPhone and iPad. The app comes with the same page turning animations of Apple’s iBooks, but the overall interface is quite different and similar to Google’s standard color schemes. Google Books features an offline reading mode to read books when you don’t have an active internet connection (useful on WiFi iPads when on the go), possibility to search within a book and adjust a font’s size, a night reading mode.

Surprisingly enough, the app doesn’t seem to support landscape mode on the iPad. I found the scrubber at the bottom to be particularly useful to jump between chapters of a book. Last, the app lets you download 3 books for free: “Pride and Prejudice”, “Frankeinstein, or, The Modern Prometeus” and “Wonderful Stories for Children”.

Check out the full changelog and more screenshots below.

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“Creating Flow with OmniFocus” Is The Book Every OF User Should Read

October has been a great month for iOS app development-related books: iPhone App Entrepreneur by David Appleyard and App Savvy by our friend Ken Yarmosh are two of the best pieces anyone interested in getting started with iOS development (or anyone interested in iOS, period) should read.

November brings another great book with it, this time tailored to Mac users who have found their productivity setup in OmniFocus. “Creating Flow with OmniFocus”, written by Kourosh Dini, MD – “a Chicago based psychiatrist, musician, author, husband and father who also happens to really enjoy technology” - is the ultimate resource that covers OmniFocus from the very first steps (setting up new projects and contexts) to advanced functionalities such as the much popular and loved Perspectives. Read more