Recipe for making iPad’s iBooks easier to read

Recipe background

My great-great-great-great-grandfather once sat me on his knee and said, “You know what kid? People read books for the words.” He then wrote that insight down as a magic recipe.

Today, I’d like to share that recipe with you for improving Apple’s new iBooks.

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Remove lots of unnecessary eye candy pixels around the edge of your book picture, ensuring it’s still easily recognisable as a book.
  2. Move the page number up to the header, so it doesn’t waste 1,000 acres of space in the footer.
  3. Profit! Resize your content so it’s 10% bigger but still easy to read.

Alternative recipe

Instead of making your content bigger, show more content on each page.

Serving suggestion

Here’s one I prepared earlier. (New approach on the left, old on the right.)

Two-page iBooks page spread, with the updated version on the left page, the original on the right.

One response

  1. Zina says:

    Alex, love it! As a writer, I can really appreciate these sublties. Before I reviewed your recipe, I already noticed that the left page looked far more appealing to the reading eye than the right. Can you twist Apple ibook’s burly branches to implement this as standard before I publish my first ebook? ;)

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