{"id":778,"date":"2010-04-03T22:01:50","date_gmt":"2010-04-04T02:01:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.dr-chuck.com\/csev-blog\/?p=778"},"modified":"2011-12-17T12:33:04","modified_gmt":"2011-12-17T16:33:04","slug":"reading-downloading-pdf-books-on-the-ipadipod","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dr-chuck.com\/csev-blog\/2010\/04\/reading-downloading-pdf-books-on-the-ipadipod\/","title":{"rendered":"Reading \/ Downloading PDF Books on the iPad or iPod"},"content":{"rendered":"

Update:<\/b> Thanks to a savvy comment, I have now come across GoodReader<\/a>. I purchased the full application with iPad support – and it is quite nice – it does a good job viewing and navigating and can download from the web. All in all a nice product and does a perfectly fine job of letting me read my PDF books on my iPad.<\/p>\n

Original Post<\/b><\/p>\n

\"Tv\"<\/a>While I was buying my second iPad, I was interviewed by the local Television station WLNS<\/a> and so I may look like a total geek on the 11PM news after the basketball games are over. Here is the raw footage of the interview<\/a> shot by Richard Wiggins<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Now that I own two iPads and got home and have been playing with mine while watching the basketball game, my first issue to figure out was how to get PDF books\/files onto my iPad so I can treat the iPad like a book for PDF files I already own. I was able to use a couple of free file sharing tools – and they worked pretty well – they installed nicely and worked pretty easily.<\/p>\n

Files Lite from Oliver Toast<\/a><\/p>\n

mb Drive Free from mbpowertools<\/a><\/p>\n

These both allowed me to mount my iPad as a WebDav drive and drag files (including PDF files) onto my iPad and then launch these files within the app on the iPad. The PDF viewer was a little better<\/i> for Files Lite than for mb Drive free but neither really had anything other than a sequential flip-through the whole 900 page book mode. Flipping sequentially though these books as the only navigational mode is not acceptable. <\/p>\n

I have gotten more excited about Stanza from LexCycle<\/a> – this is a nice ebook reader that runs both on the desktop and on the iPad\/iPod. It allows the downloading of a wide range of books form the Internet and allows synchronizing between the Desktop Stanza on Stanza on the iPod.<\/p>\n

Stanza also converts from PDF to an EBook format and a bunch of other formats. This is an awesome feature all by itself. I loaded and converted my Python for Informatics<\/a> and Jon Klienberg’s Networks, Crowds, and Markets<\/a>. I downloaded both to my Stanza iPad reader. <\/p>\n

And while Stanza kind of removes formatting from the PDF so technical bits are kind of compressed, but the rest of the material is quite readable. All in all I was completely impressed by Stanza Desktop’s conversion of PDF to ePub\/eBook format – for free. Wow.<\/p>\n

Now none of these applications have yet moved to be full-sized for the iPad so I was using them in 2X mode. I really look forward to Stanza in iPad native mode – it will be very impressive. And perhaps they will see fit to adjust their PDF conversion to detect when to keep some fixed formatting for things like code or math. I found the Stanza User interface a little<\/i> tricky to get from screen to screen – such as the navigation from the page reading screen to the get books screen – I am guessing they will make a nicer navigation interface when they have more space on the iPad.<\/p>\n

But all in all while I could not find a perfect solution, Stanza gives me hope that in a month or so, free books will be as welcome on the iPad as the paid-for books on the iBooks<\/a> store.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Update: Thanks to a savvy comment, I have now come across GoodReader. I purchased the full application with iPad support – and it is quite nice – it does a good job viewing and navigating and can download from the web. All in all a nice product and does a perfectly fine job of letting […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-778","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-chuck.com\/csev-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/778","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-chuck.com\/csev-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-chuck.com\/csev-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-chuck.com\/csev-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-chuck.com\/csev-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=778"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-chuck.com\/csev-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/778\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2833,"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-chuck.com\/csev-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/778\/revisions\/2833"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-chuck.com\/csev-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=778"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-chuck.com\/csev-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=778"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-chuck.com\/csev-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=778"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}