Today at the WWDC, Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced an magical update to its iBooks application, as well as announcing that the iBook app was headed to the just-unveiled iPhone 4. While it’s nothing revolutionary, the enhancements to the eBook app should prove to be very helpful.
First off, they’ve added support for reading PDF files. Users can now read PDF files just as they would the usual E-PUB format that iBooks supports. With the updated iBooks app, there will be no need to convert PDF files into a supportable format to read on your iPhone 4 or iPad. This is an attractive feature because there are a lot of free books in the PDF format but it’s nothing completely astounding. It’s definitely something people will be happy about. But that’s not all that’s coming in the update.
Another enhancement to iBooks is the ability to make bookmarks. You can also write notes, in a “sticky-note” style sort of way, which can easily tell you notes you’ve written on a chapter, or other things of the sort. Other things like highlighting text, and bookmarking page are easily done with just a tap of the finger.
The highlight feature is has to be the wireless sync. The new iBooks will allow you to sync your books to all of your iDevices, as well as all your bookmarks, where you last stopped reading, and notes you’ve added. WIN. That’s about it, but with these new updates, this is a great way to make the books you read on your iPad more like real books.
So, what could make a small, but great update even better? How about adding all of this functionality to the iPhone itself? That’s exactly what Apple is doing with the new iPhone 4. Now you’ll be able to enjoy all of the books that you read on your iPad, right from your iPhone if for some reason the iPad is too big to take around with you. Which would be odd if that was indeed the case.
Expect this update to hit later this month!
With these great additions of iBooks, what else would you want to see from the app for the iPad and iPhone. I honestly couldn’t think of any other features they could add, this is a great update!