Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Tips & Tricks iPad Secrets by Jon Bonnick et al

Tips & Tricks iPad Secrets by Jon Bonnick et al, e-book or app.

I recommend it. The chapter on the iPad keyboard alone has taught me a host of things I had no idea the iPad keyboard could do. And it's simple to read for us with modern short attention spans: one simple tip per page.

(By the way, why can't we buy Apple-published ebooks in iTunes? All the other content for iPad can be bought there, but iBooks ebooks only on the iPad itself. Worse yet, iBooks is clearly already part of iTunes Store, since you buy with that account, so there seems to be no reason you couldn't buy via your desktop computer too. And like this, there is no way you can link to a book, which is silly.)

Interestingly, the ebook version of this collection of tips costs only two dollars, unusually cheap for an ebook, while the iPad app version of it with the same content is even cheaper at only one dollar! Like I said before, perhaps Apple or somebody has gone too far in suppressing the prices of iOS apps. Normally I complain that ebooks are too expensive at $15, but this may be going too far in the other direction.  I think that if a book (by definition more than a pamphlet) has any value, then surely it must be more than a dollar. I'd say five bucks for a smaller book, ten for a normal book might be reasonable. For books of extraordinary size or value, maybe fifteen for a volume.

By the way, for the authors of this book I would comment that the title is too generic. There are so many, many books with names including the words tips, tricks, and secrets, that it makes it harder to spot this book in the forrest either when searching or browsing. Also, while the ebook version is really nicely layouted ("laid out"?), in the iPad app version it looks like it has been blown up from an iPhone app, so the text is unattractively large.

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