Aside from the Mail app, iBooks is probably the most used app on my iPad – and even gets used occasionally on my iPhone 4 (thanks to the great readability of the “retina display”).
Things I love about iBooks:
- the ability to highlight important bits of text
- storing notes (great for programming books)
- automatic wireless syncing between iPad/iPhone
- downloadable sample books, that you can store in your library (helps me keep track of some books I’m interested in buying)
Things I don’t love about iBooks
- highlighting and notes don’t work for PDF’s, only ePub
- a lot of content I’m interested in isn’t available in the iBooks store
- doesn’t support Kindle format books (I’d much rather use iBooks over the Kindle app)
After reading Craig Hockenberry’s “iPhone App Development – The Missing Manual” in ePub format, it’s hard to go back to PDF. I would love it if Apple offered all of its developer documentation in ePub format (and it should notify me when new versions are available to download). I’ll assume they’re working on it…
There are a few big publishers I’d like to see support ePub as well… Apress and Addison Wesley, please? For now I’ll live with either purchasing the Kindle version of their books, or buy the hard copy. (After further research, some of their books appear to be available in ePub on ebooks.com – but it’s “ePub for Digital Editions”, which I believe uses Adobe’s DRM and is not iBooks compatible. So, buyer beware…)