When Apple announced the iBooks app for iPad, my initial thoughts on it was that it was cool and that I was anxious to give it a try. As someone who doesn’t do as much book reading as I would like to. I was anxious to try it as this may be something to help steer me back to book reading.
Since the the release of the iPad and iBooks, I’ve done some reading on the device. But admittedly, not near as much as I should be. Not as a fault of the device, it’s more me and where I am at in my life as a husband, father of 5 and geek. There are only 24 hours in any given day. And unfortunately, something has to give. The majority of the reading I do are blogs and tech news. Not much time for anything else.

And then came the iBooks app update 1.1 that supports viewing and syncing .PDF files within the app. This was the game changer…..

For the majority of my professional career, I find myself preaching to people to “RTFM”… As many never or very briefly look at product manuals.
Being that I always try to practice what I preach, I am big into manuals. And they are always my first resource when I need to learn how to do something with a product I own. Or a product that I am researching.

My iPhone and iPad are never far from me, and on them I store downloaded .PDF documents for gadgets that I own and also products I am considering buying, or researching for clients.
The iBooks app allows me to keep the original (if I have it) tucked away safely in a drawer, and the electronic versions always by my side. It’s very convenient, because not only do you have the document always at your finger tips. Its very easy to scroll through pages and chapters to find what you are looking for. This for me, is simply a game changer.

So if you have an iDevice that supports iBooks, the application is free, and I highly encourage you to sync a few product manuals to it. And if you don’t have one yet, maybe this will help you make that decision.

-Doug