More on ebooks (yes, more!)

Friday, February 24th 2012

Last month, I wrote a couple of posts about reading ebooks on my Blackberry using the free Kindle application (see Kindle for Blackberry and Kindle for Blackberry revisited). I mentioned that Tigger had recently acquired an iPod Touch and that it had impressed me though I thought I would stick with the Blackberry for now rather than splash out on an iPod for myself. Something has just happened to change that.

Anyone who, like me, thought the iPod was nothing more than a glorified MP3 player might be surprised to discover the true nature of its latest incarnation as the iPod Touch. This is virtually a palmtop tablet PC, like an Android tablet but a lot smaller. How small? Well, the display (the actual display) measures about 7 cm by 5 cm and the whole thing overall measures just under 11.5 cm by 6.5 cm – small enough to slip into one of the interior pockets in my handbag.

The iPod provides email and messaging, a camera, and lots of other interesting stuff (oh, yes, and music too), including functions you wouldn’t find on an Android tablet such as FaceTime, a videophone application which allows you to see the person you are talking to. Users have access to the by now usual “app store” from which to download applications, some free, that perform all sorts of tasks.

iPods come in several models which differ in the size of their memory: the larger the memory, the more expensive the model. Tigger bought the 8 gb version to start but has now upgraded to the next size up. I bet you can guess what comes next. Yes! I made a contribution to the purchase of the new iPod and inherited Tigger’s original one. Why? Because I was impressed with the iPod’s ebook reader and the fact that the iPod screen is larger and better for reading than my Blackberry’s. Moreover, even though there is a Kindle app available for the iPod, its native ebook reader is not the Kindle and is therefore independent of Amazon and the Kindle format (it reads epub and pdf).

The first thing to do was to find the reset section and to clear the iPod completely. This enabled me to set it up from scratch as owner. This is quite important because you cannot do anything much with the iPod without first creating an Apple ID for yourself. The ID consists of an email address and a password. The email address looks like myaddress@me.com, where ‘myaddress’ is some name that you agree with the system (it has to be unique, so finding a name that hasn’t already been used isn’t easy…).

Once you have registered your ID, you can open the App store and search for an app called iBooks. (When you search, you have to specify “iBooks” exactly as I have written, it because case is significant.) When iBooks pops up, you click to download and install it (it’s free, by the way). This is where your ID comes in because before you can install the app, you have to input your password.

Once installed, iBooks presents the by now standard bookshelf. Attached to it is a book store and from this you can download books. Some of these you have to buy and some are free. This was of minimal interest to me, however, because I want to be able to read any ebook, not just those available through a specific online bookstore.

The question then was: how do I put an ebook on the iPod? I tried connecting the iPod to the PC but only managed to download photos from it. There didn’t seem to be any way of moving files from the PC to the iPod by wire. Let me say at this stage that I am very far from knowing all about the iPod and it is quite possible that there are ways of moving files other than photos between it and the PC. If so, I haven’t so far found it.

Then I had my brainwave: what if I send an email to the iPod with an ebook as an attachment? No sooner thought of than put into practice: I emailed an epub-format book to my me.com address. When the email arrived, I opened it and clicked on the attachment. Up popped a message asking whether I wanted to open the attachment in iBooks. Yes, of course I did! The book duly appeared on the iBooks bookshelf. Problem solved: I can now put onto the iPod any ebook I want to read.

On the Blackberry, I was reading The Life and Travels of Mungo Park. It is perfectly readable on the Blackberry though the small screen causes it to be divided into very small chunks. So I put the same book on the iBooks reader and compared them. The iPod reader presents a larger screen and is pleasant to read. The Blackberry is already quite good but the iPod definitely has the edge.

So I now have a library that fits in the palm of my hand (or in my handbag or in my pocket) and can be taken everywhere with me. I don’t know what the future of ebooks holds for us. Perhaps miraculous developments are just around the corner but for me, for now, I think I have found the perfect portable solution to reading ebooks in the shape of the iPod Touch.

Update

Using the iPod’s Web browser, I was able to go onto the mobile version of the Gutenberg Project (at m.gutenberg.org), and download a book. As with the email extension, I was asked whether the download should be received by iBooks. The book duly appeared on the bookshelf. Thus, books can  downloaded directly onto the iPod.

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