Thanks Michael. I'd had the book on my must buy list for a few days and finally got around to buying it this morning. I was pleasantly surprised to see the price reduction, so I bought it without any further hesitation!
I did have to clear a few things off my iPad to get it to download though. This book is huge!!
BritOnTour, thanks for purchasing it! As far as the size, you are correct - I tell people that in terms of size, they should consider this closer to a movie, than to another eBook. The number of videos, and the number of high resolution images in the book are what packs on the size, but of course, the book wouldn't be the same without them. Thanks again, and let us know what you think once you've had a chance to dig into it! To help out, here are a few tips and tricks:
- If you’ve used an Apple iBook before, navigation through the book should be very easy, but if not, here’s how you navigate quickly around the book. When the book first launches, it will bring you into the introduction video. You can skip through this by swiping to the left, which brings you into the chapter table of content layout (or when the video finishes, it will drop you into this view). You’ll notice thumbnails of the pages on the bottom which can we swipped through to find a good place to start, or, you can swipe through the chapter introductions themselves (you’ll see each chapter’s pages racing along at the bottom when you do that). You can open any page by tapping the thumbnail at the bottom, or, by picking a section title from the chapter introduction page.
- At any point when reading, you can “pinch” the page to move back into the chapter table of content view.
- Nearly every photo, photo gallery, and illustration can be expanded to full screen by “pinching and zooming” (putting two fingers on the object, and then spreading your fingers apart). You can then reduce the size of the object back to its original size by “pinching” it back into place.
- On any photo that has “gallery dots” below it, there is more than one photo available. You can access the additional images by swipping left or right on the image itself. Other galleries have small thumbnails beneath the initial image.
- All of the interactive “widgets” should be expanded by pinching and zooming to open them up. Most widgets have interactivity which is explained at the top of the object, others are just informational. Widgets can be reduced back to their original size by tapping the X in the upper left, or pinching them back into place. You can identify these widgets a couple ways—the most obvious way is that the text and images on the widget are reduced in size, and need to be expanded to be read; the second way is a little less intuitive, and that’s that Apple adds a “play” button surrounded by a rectangular box to the widget. Tapping on this play button won’t do anything, it just identifies the object as being expandable. Actual “playable” video is identified by the play button in a circle. I have a request into Apple to allow the play button to be dropped from the widgets to avoid confusion.
- All videos can also be expanded to full screen by pinching and zooming.
- Bold text indicates that the term is in the glossary. Tap once on the text to open up the glossary definition, and once you’re in the glossary definition, you can tap on “Glossary Index” to see the full glossary, or, tap on “Dictionary” to get a web definition of the term. Once you’re in the dictionary pop-up, you can do a further search on the term on the web, or in Wikipedia.
- Text in red indicates a hyperlink, which if tapped, will leave the iBook, and open Safari to the linked page.
- If you’d like to highlight text, you simply drag your finger across the text, and it is magically highlighted in yellow. Tap on that text again, and you can remove the highlighting, change the color, or add your own notes.
Hope those tips and tricks help!
Michael
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