Does iBooks support pdf files?

http://www.apple.com/ipad/features/ibooks.html is the officially released info regarding iBooks so far.

I know I can load any drm free ebooks(in epub format) into iBooks. Will iBooks support drm free pdfs as well?

My guess would be no, since they most likely would have mentioned that alongside ePub in the Grow Your Library section of the features/ibooks page. But in a few days you can find out for sure.

Tom, unless I am miss-remembering (not unheard of for me), but I thought I have been able to read PDFs on my iPhone. Assuming (yea, yea, I know) that I am correct, how would "drm free pdfs" be any different on the iPhone and by extension on the iPad.

I am looking forward to this weekend so we can finally start getting questions like this answered once and for all.

how would "drm free pdfs" be any different on the iPhone and by extension on the iPad.

Certainly the iPad can read pdf, at least as an email attachment, it says so right in the tech specs, but the question is whether the iBooks app will support pdf, and there I think the answer may well be "no", since Apple has indicated it will use ePub and never mentioned anything else.

Tom Gewecke wrote:

I know I can load any drm free ebooks(in epub format) into iBooks. Will iBooks support drm free pdfs as well?

My guess would be no, since they most likely would have mentioned that alongside ePub in the Grow Your Library section of the features/ibooks page. But in a few days you can find out for sure.

Yes, the iPad does since it is running iPhone OS 3.2 and PDF support has been in the OS for some time. However, whether the *iBooks app* and *iBook Store* will do so directly is another matter. We'll see on Saturday after iTunes 9.1 and the iBooks app are released.

Edit:

Oops, sorry Tom, I didn't see your more recent post.

Message was edited by: romad

There's an app called GoodReader that does PDFs really well that is only $0.99 which will be available right away.
I'm really hoping to hear someone say that iBooks will handle PDF too. It's interesting that you can import PDFs into iTunes already, but it'll come down to whether Apple wrote iBooks to view PDF.

Not really.. I have been testing the iPad on the newest GM version of the iPhone SDK and the simulator.

You can upload your pdfs to your Google Docs account and open them in the iPad's Safari.. works pretty good and fast over the wifi.
You don't get all the goodies of the iBooks app but at least it works pretty decent.

Also there are PDF to ePub converters out there, I still don't know if you can upload your own files into iBooks and I can't wait until Saturday but whatever.. I am happy I can use my GDocs account and all the manuals I have there.

I still don't know if you can upload your own files into iBooks

Apple's info pages already say: "And you can add free ePub titles to iTunes and sync them to the iBooks app on your iPad."

Well then, solved.
1. Convert PDF to ePub.
2. Import newly created ePub books into iTunes.
3. Synchronize your iPad.

voila, your PDFs running in iBooks, now you can search, change fonts, make notes, etc..

make notes

WSJ review today says no way to make notes in iBooks.

Mr. 23K is really picky today...
Does the WSJ also say if you can use the real-time dictionary with imported ePub books?

You can read all this stuff for yourself:

http://topics.wsj.com/person/M/walter-mossberg/1453?mod=quicklinks_waltmossberg

These replies all seem to miss the point, IMHO.

I can't speak for all people who want to view PDFs, but I imagine many of us are professionals. I, for example, encounter a constant stream of technical PDFs in the field of math and physics --- preprints, on the web, downloads from places like arxiv.

(1) Converting to ePub is a useless answer because (as far as I know) ePub's ability to handle technical material ranges from zero to non-existent. Sure there is full unicode support, but that says nothing about the ability to actually handle complex mathematics, not to mention that the conversion tools will probably do a lousy job in the conversion.

I imagine doctors have their own issues with such conversions, likewise engineers and economists --- some math, lots of tables, often multi-column format, diagrams that need to be placed just so, etc. Meanwhile a lot of legal PDFs (in keeping with the generally user-hostile nature of that profession) are scans of paper, not even text.

(2) What one wants in such a solution is not JUST the ability to view these documents, but an integrated solution that also incorporates organizing and categorizing them.

Perhaps in time we will see commercial apps that handle this. But it seems to me that Apple is missing out on a large possible market here. Sure, the population that care a lot about technical PDFs is small compared to the general population. BUT it is a population with money and prepared to spend it on tools that do the job, a higher than average affinity for Apple, and a substantially higher than average interest in the printed word (meaning then taking part in the iBooks economy).

Certainly, however, my ONLY interest in iPad is as a very high quality reader and organizer of technical PDFs from a variety of sources, not as some half-assed device that can kinda sorta read (and can't organize) some files after a whole lot of effort on my part.
Until that's available, I'll stand on the sidelines.