Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
The Barnes & Noble NOOK app is also worth a look. In fact, both Barnes & Noble and Amazon are
competing against the iPad with smaller, less-expensive tablets, the Nook Tablet and Kindle Fire and
Kindle Fire HD and HDX, respectively. Google is doing the same with the Nexus 7 tablet (with its
Google Play app). And there are numerous other players in the space.
Meanwhile, we haven't tried them all, and we know it's hard enough competing against Apple (or
Amazon). But we'd be selling our readers short if we didn't at least mention that you can find several
other e-book-type apps for the iPad in the App Store. As this book goes to press, you can have a
look at the following apps, just to name a few:
CloudReaders from Cloud Readers (free)
Free e-books by Kobo
Bluefire Reader from Bluefire Productions
See Chapter
11
for details about finding and downloading apps.
Finding free books outside iBooks Store
Apple supports a technical standard —
ePub,
the underlying technology behind thou-
sands of free public-domain books. You can import these to the iPad without shopping in the
iBooks Store. Such titles must be
DRM-free,
which means that they're free of digital rights
restrictions.
To import ePub titles, you can download them to your Mac or PC (assuming that they're not already
there) and then sync them to the iPad through iTunes. There are other methods. If you have Drop-
box, for example, you can bring an ePub into your account, and from Dropbox you can share the
title with iBooks. You can also e-mail them as an attachment.
You can find ePub titles at numerous cyberspace destinations:
Feedbooks:
www.feedbooks.com
Google Play:
http://play.google.com/store/books
Project Gutenberg:
www.gutenberg.us
Smashwords:
www.smashwords.com
Baen:
www.baen.com
Also, check out the free titles that you can find through the apps mentioned in the previous section.
