Yeah, I should just title this “Another goddamn iPad article you can’t seem to get away from.”

Here’s what you need to know about reading books on your iPad:

• I think iBooks is a really nice application. I like the layout, I like the page-turning, I like the fact that I don’t need to have the light on in bed to use it. Take that, Kindle. (A friend of mine was in and out of the hospital all last year and said that she couldn’t have used a Kindle, because she always had a roommate and couldn’t turn on the light.) And I already stare at a screen all day; hasn’t hurt my eyes any. You should probably know that, even post-Lasik, I have very bad eyesight. I don’t think it’s the screen, though.

• Buying books from iTunes store: you don’t need to put in your password for any of the free books (at least, I haven’t yet). You do for the books with a price. This actually is an advantage for iBooks, because it stops me and makes me think. The 1-click on Kindle is completely deadly to my bank account.

• You CAN read your own .epub format books on iBooks. I’ve read a number of places that you must buy your books from the iBooks store and this is just not true. Here’s what you do:
  
  1. Drag the .epub files to iTunes.
  2. Sync your iPad

  You’re now done. Have a nice soy latte and read your dang book.

• Scrivener (the thinking writer’s writing application of choice) will soon support saving in .epub format. So you can export your novel as .epub, upload to your iPad, and read (and, hopefully, annotate) soon.

  (I should make this clear, because the developer’s made this very clear: Scrivener itself will not be on iPad! But easy export of .epub files (ie, your novel in progress) for leisurely reading on an iPad = much win.)

• I read many, many confusing webpages on how to make an .epub file, which involved voodoo and changing file extensions and other horrible tasks that frankly I use the modern computer to get away from. Eventually I found Sigil, which is an editor that creates .epub format books. I’ve found that it sucks as anything other than an .epub creator—it’s not the most robust editor I’ve ever run across. But it does create .epub books with only a little effort on my part, so currently I’m using this to create books from text files. If anyone has a better suggestion, let me know.

• The Kindle app is MUCH improved. Before they updated it for use on iPad, all that was available was the iPhone app. So you could read your book on a tiny little section of this giant screen, or you could blow up the app using the 2x button, and the books looked like crap because the text wasn’t scaled, it was blown-up bitmaps. Now it’s designed to use the entire iPad screen with the proper fonts and it looks good. I like the two layouts of the library of books (in a list or as separate graphic images).

• Not anything to do with the iPad, but while we’re on the subject… Here is my take on the Kindle for Mac app: 1988 called, they’d like their GUI back. Seriously, Amazon, did you pass this off to some exec’s 13-year-old kid as their home computing project? Stop it and hire a read Cocoa developer.

• As of today, Stanza and Ereader have not been updated for iPad. This makes them useless. I found them pretty useless before (getting books from Fictionwise and Ereader has been an exercise in frustration for me more than once, and when compared to Amazon’s 1-click… no comparison) and they’re not helping themselves out.

• Screenwriter John August has a whole post on “Reading scripts on the iPad.” He points you to the best .pdf app (as of today, obviously; this situation could change at any moment). As soon as these apps allow for annotation (and export of said notes), the iPad could be very useful for writers.

I haven’t tried writing much on the iPad yet, and we don’t have the keyboard dock or anything. I guess I could use one of Darin’s wireless keyboards, but at the moment I’m spending way too much time playing Flight Control HD. I mean, using one of the book-reading apps.