Alongside the iOS4 roll out today. Apple threw the iBooks application up on the App Store as well. Here’s a quick look.
The main interface and pretty much everything else looks identical to the iPad version. The only difference is the fact that the iPhone screen is much smaller than that of the iPad. This however does not seem to affect the performance or viewing and reading experience of the application. I have been using stanza for quite some time, so reading on the iPhone is not a problem to me. I have churned through a couple books on the device over time. I have been waiting on iBooks since it was first announced back when the iPad was released. I was hoping Apple would release it for the iPhone.
Here’s the main interface
When viewing the iBooks store, it’s essentially the same as the iPad, just scaled down a bit. The animations are all the same, they look very good on this small screen. Here’s an example of the iBook store loading.
Here’s what it looks like once you have a book open in iBooks. Click the images to view full size.
All in all the iBooks application seems very solid and it works just like the iPad version. I am extremely pleased. Now I need to take the time to put all of my books onto the iBook app. I have yet to try PDFs, so I am curious to see how those are handled. The iPod touch that I used to do the demo was a 2nd gen and it seems to work very well even on this older hardware. Some search results took some time to complete since the book contains 425 pages. Everything else worked like a charm.
You can download the iBooks app here or you can search for Apple, Inc. in the App Store and it should pop up. The application is free. The books do cost money, there are also tons of free content as well. Check it out!
