Apple Adds Audio and Video Capabilities to 'iBooks'

Nice! Apple is being very competitive with iBooks. :)

Hopefully PDF reading really is substantially improved.

Nice update.

Now all they need to do is make ibooks have enough books to be worth using over the amazon app.:rolleyes:

This could lead to some pretty cool interactive factual books and text books. I wonder if anyone would consider using iBooks to distribute magazines, Apple could make a neat simple subscriptions system rather than having all these separate apps for magazines and newspapers as we have now.

iBooks is the nicest eBook reader app that there is no books for. I would love to start buying iBooks (have 5), but I quickly open my Kindle app and buy them there because almost nothing is available in the iBook store.

This could lead to some pretty cool interactive factual books and text books. I wonder if anyone would consider using iBooks to distribute magazines, Apple could make a neat simple subscriptions system rather than having all these separate apps for magazines and newspapers as we have now.

I use the Zinio reader to subscribe to MacWorld magazine. One app puts all my magazines at my fingertips. Not that stupid 1 magazine = 1 app solution that companies are using now. Apple really missed the boat on this one, by not having a distribution method, such as iMags to distribute magazines.

I had a bunch of PDF files in iBooks on my iPad, but when I updated it erased all my PDF's. Kept the ePub books I had, but all the PDF's were gone.

The release notes also had a line about speed improvements for PDF. It was already good, but any improvements are welcome because PDF definitely isn't quite as slick as the ebooks. The iPad is still a magnificent PDF reader though.

Edit: just spotted that ARN also had that line in his summary. Doh. Sorry about the redundant post.

Hopefully PDF reading really is substantially improved.

It's definitely much quicker now for reading PDFs. You still have to zoom in on text from page to page... unlike Goodreader, but despite that I prefer iBooks.

I also noticed that my bookmarks/highlights/etc. in an ePub book I'm reading were somehow synced automatically and wirelessly between my iPad and iPhone. I'm not sure if it did that before this version (I thought before it only synced that stuff if you connected them to your computer?)