MacMost Now 662: Reading Textbooks With iBooks 2 For iPad

The new version of iBooks for iPad allows you to read advanced textbooks. These can include interactive images, 3D objects and even review quizzes. You can add your own notes and then review them as Flash cards.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost Now.
On todays episode let's take a look at iBooks version 2 for the iPad and see how it handles textbooks.
Now I have a free sample textbook for you to checkout, so you can add that and then I'm going to look at it in landscape mode here and you can see that it starts off by showing you a video.
So we're going to skip over that video and go to the Table of Contents page.
Now right away you can see that there's a difference between landscape mode, as we are here, and if I were to go to the portrait mode.
So let's take a look a the landscape mode which is definitely how some of this textbooks seem to be setup to be used.
You can flip through the chapters, you know, you can click on the page there to jump to it, flip through the pages very easily.
When you see something like this there's a video, you can play that.
It's actually an interactive, so I can click on different things on the left there, and you can see it comes up and it shows all this cool stuff.
Here's another interactive and I can click through the different parts here.
There are 3D objects and I can grab, move it around.
And then sometimes they're just pictures and you can just click on them, tap on them, to get a closer look.
And so there's a video right in the page.
You of course also have a glossary.
Here's the glossary term right there in the page. You can also jump to the glossary index and see all of the elements there.
And then of course you can highlight things in the text. So, to do that you can tap-to-select and then hold it down for just a second, and then you are kind of in "Highlight mode."
And you can highlight something like this and once it's highlighted you can tap on it again, change its color or add a note about it.
So I'm just going to write something really simple right here. And I've got that note I can tap there to edit the note.
I can also tap on the page here and go to "My Notes" so I can see I've got that one. One on Chapter 1, one on Chapter 2 and what each one says.
And I can jump to study cards based on those notes, flip it over to see what I wrote about it.
And I can flip through them and also the study cards include glossary terms and you can flip it over to see what the glossary term is.
Let's take a look again at portrait mode here.
If I switch to portrait mode you can see it looks a lot different and you can actually scroll through the text vertically, rather than having to flip through each page.
But I mean look at some pages like here's this page here in portrait mode and then in landscape mode, you can see it looks quite different.
So here's a "Review" section where it has some questions and you can answer various chapter questions like for instance, this just shows you multiple choice for the picture, you can check your answer. You go to the next one and it looks like that.
And here's a great one where you actually have to drag-and-drop items to the locations on the image. 
A map is a really obvious way to use this but I imagine you can do all sorts of other things with other pictures as well.
I didn't do too well.
Now it's important to note that iBooks now differentiates between the new textbook format the ePub2 as opposed to the earlier regular ePub format, that most regular books and novels and such are in.
So if you try to use some of this advanced features, like the flashcards and all, in older formatted books it just won't work.
You need to have books created specifically as textbooks for iBooks 2 for this features to work.
So that's a look at iBooks 2, you can download E. O. Wilson's sample text for "Life on Earth" from the iBooks store. It's featured there and easy to find, so check it out.
'Til next this is Gary with MacMost Now.

MacMost Now 662: Reading Textbooks With iBooks 2 For iPad

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