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A quick tutorial on how to read PDF-formatted ebooks in iBooks

by Steven Sande Aug 5th 2010 at 8:00AM

When me and my fellow TUAW bloggers Erica Sadun and Mike Grothaus recently had our collaborative effort "Taking Your iPad to the Max" published by Apress in both ebook and printed format, I wanted to make sure that I had a copy of the book on my iPad so I could show friends and prospective buyers examples of the content in the book. The ebook comes in a PDF format, but I wanted to read it in the iBooks app since it does such a wonderful job of displaying the printed word. Was I going to have to convert the PDF file to the app's native EPUB format before I'd be able to read it in iBooks?

Fortunately, no. Apple's recent update to iBooks added the ability to read PDF documents natively. The only thing you really need to do in order to read any PDF in iBooks is to move it to the iPad, and that can be easily done in iTunes:

  1. Connect your iPad to your Mac or PC.
  2. Drag the PDF to the Books icon in your iTunes Library, and drop it. Note that you can edit the name and author(s) of the book if you don't like the way the file name is displayed.
  3. Click your iPad or iPhone in the Devices list, then click the Books tab.
  4. Make sure that the book title box is checked and that Sync Books is also checked.
  5. Click the Sync button.

The sync should go very quickly. Most PDF-based ebooks are relatively small, and even over the somewhat pokey USB 2.0 sync connection, it will move to your iPad in less than a minute. What's interesting is that a new "PDFs" button appears on your iBooks bookshelf, and a tap displays all PDF documents that are in your library. While the PDFs don't have the nice side-by-side view in landscape orientation, they can be searched and bookmarked in the same manner as EPUBs.

By the way, expect to see the TUAW-labeled "Taking Your iPad to the Max" in your local bookstore soon!



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When me and my fellow TUAW bloggers Erica Sadun and Mike Grothaus recently had our collaborative effort "Taking Your iPad to the Max"...
 

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34 Comments

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merrysmith2019

The best way to make it is convert PDF formated eBooks to iBooks ePub foramte. The converted ePub can be perfectly read with iPhone, iPod, iPad and more others.


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August 17 2010 at 8:31 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Rego

Have Dropbox users been able to move all types of files from computer to iPad eg music, images, apps etc (instead of itunes synching)?

August 05 2010 at 3:56 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
MLop

Has anyone noticed on iOS4, if you surf over to a website that has a PDF there, you can open it in iBooks? This is a new feature of iBooks, correct? I don't remember it happening before the iBooks update -

August 05 2010 at 3:02 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
galadriann

Even easier..
just drag and drop your pdf or ebook directly into the iPad, no need to sync... makes life a lot easier.
another option is to use Calibrate to convert it to ebook format...

Peace

August 05 2010 at 1:24 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
3 replies to galadriann's comment
Diane B

I've been opening pdfs in Goodreader but tried emailing and opening in iBooks. Works fine

I checked B & N and Amazon for the ebook but they only have hardcover. I wanted to recommend it to a friend I spend a lot of time with doing printscreens and directions LOL for her Ipad. .

August 05 2010 at 1:20 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Nikki

PDF format is redundant. The "F" stands for Format.

August 05 2010 at 12:09 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
ElM

This is good information to have. It works similarly in iBooks for the iPhone.
I have noticed some peculiar behavior in the books section of iTunes though. In all other sections of iTunes, when you ask to save a particular app or song to a phone it syncs with that one phone and remembers it. When you do the same with a book, it syncs it to all devices which connect effectively giving you copies of the books on more than one device. Its a bit annoying for my wife who doesn't read the same books I do.

August 05 2010 at 10:39 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
alphaman

There's an even easier way than any of the above suggestions for getting PDFs off the web into iBooks. Using iCab Mobile, just download the PDF, then tap on the downloaded file and open it in iBooks.

iCab is like a real browser on the iPad.

August 05 2010 at 10:19 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Linda

I load pdfs via Dropbox and then put them in SmartNotes where I can annotate them.

August 05 2010 at 10:05 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Will

I love being able to open PDFs from Dropbox into iBooks on my iPad or iPhone. Then when I want to read on the other device, I import the PDF from Dropbox and iBooks syncs my place immediately!

August 05 2010 at 9:46 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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