Apple announced a planned update to its iBooks Es - book market place and reader for the iPad on Monday . But the material story come when Apple CEO Steve Jobs offered some impressive act during his Worldwide Developers Conference tonic on how the app has do since its April launching .
According to Jobs , users have download more than 5 million books — about 2.5 for each machine sold — in the first 65 days of iBooks ’ availability . In summation , five of the six largest publishers have report the app ’s share of their electronic sales event to be about 22 per centum , which is rather impressive for an Es - book reader that has been on the market place for just over two calendar month .
Jobs also outlined newfangled features in iBooks , including the power to highlight text , bestow bookmark and make notes . The table of subject of each book has also been tweaked to list all the bookmark and notes create by the user .
Perhaps more interestingly , the update iBooks will support documents in PDF format . This should extend the app ’s ability to expose books to a tumid number of new form of address , in add-on to all variety of document saved in Adobe ’s portable document format . PDFs can be get at through a freestanding “ bookshelf ” in the app ’s main screen . Jobs did n’t refer whether PDF reenforcement hold out to Adobe ’s proprietary DRM applied science , which would make it possible to import and use Quran purchased through other bookstores that support the format .
iBooks is available for free from the App Store ; it requires an iPad melt down iPhone group O 3.2 or higher . The update containing the features adumbrate by Jobs on Monday should be available later this month .
Jobs also revealed Monday that iBooks will amount to the iPhone with the waiver of the next major iPhone operating system , which Apple has rename iOS 4 . The iPhone version of the app will have the same controls , highlighting , bookmarking , and notes features as the iPad release . It will also let in PDF support , allowing users to redeem PDFs from Mail onto their iBooks shelf .
iPhone users will also have entree to the iBookstore to bribe vitamin E - Word for the app . Jobs said that user will be capable to download the same book to their dissimilar Apple mobile devices at no extra charge .
update at 11:26 a.m. PT to include information on the iPhone version of iBooks .
