- Type the search term "books" in the App Store and you will conjure up more than 2,000 apps. These apps generally invite you to browse, sample, purchase or download selections from their respective collections. Sometimes collections are far-reaching, but often, they focus on a specific author, subject or genre. For example, Inkling focuses on student textbooks, Comixology on comics and the Shakespeare and Logos Bible apps on self-evident topics. Digital book formats vary across apps, but the industry trend is to increasingly offer books in EPUB format, which is the digital format Apple adopted for e-books on the iPad.
- The most popular iPad e-book apps are associated with major book retailers that offer extensive book collections to consumers. These apps include Apple's iBooks, Amazon's Kindle, Barnes and Noble's Nook and Kobo. Among them, iPad is the only e-reader that grants users full access to competing retailers' marketplaces.
- The iPad also accommodates e-book apps with distinctive capabilities. Google Books puts forward millions of scanned classics from the Google Books project, which you can interact with regular e-books or view with their original typesetting and illustrations. Bluefire Reader enables you to borrow books from your public library and read Sony e-reader books, for which no corresponding app exists in the App Store. Stanza supports just about every digital book format there is, eliminating the need to convert books from one format to another before you can read them on an iPad. Ibis Reader enables you to share books over the Web in HTML5 format so that folks with Blackberries, Androids and other e-reader devices can read them. VBookz can read books to you, including Project Gutenberg's more than 30,000 free books.
- Most iPad e-book apps take full advantage of its widescreen, rotation and touch technology to make your reading experience as comfortable and pleasurable as possible. To varying degrees, you can control font faces, type sizes, line spacing, margins, screen brightness and background color. You can press words for their definitions, courtesy of built-in dictionaries, and access Wikipedia and Google to search for historical facts, supplementary pictures, author interviews and book reviews. E-book apps for the iPad also make it easy to search within an e-book's text, access its table of contents and mark your place so you can later pick up where you left off.
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