-Hi I'm Scott Stein senior associate editor at cnet.com, and we're gonna show you how to get PDF books on to your iPad.
Now, the reason we're bringing this up is because the iPads are fantastic e-reader.
There are numbered of e-reading software options on there, iBooks, the Kindle, Barnes & Nobles app and more in fact.
And they're all compelling and all great except for there's a question of unless you purchase them, how do you get stuff onto it from outside.
Well, you may already know that if you have an ePub file, but what if it's something else; in fact, what if it's something that you've written.
I'm a writer and other people may be, too, or you may have documents you wanna bring on there and glance at 48 as well.
Well for that, PDFs are much easier way to use the e-reader functions on your iPad than ePub.
While there some other great PDF readers as well including Good Reader for 99 cents, a very diverse program that allows you to also import directly from the web or even from Google Docs.
It can go onto the file server and pull the documents down.
iBooks is a lot easier in the sense that it's built in already and it actually looks really nice and pretty.
We'll admit it.
Step one and maybe the most challenging step is actually saving your document as a PDF.
Now, if you haven't done it before you maybe confused as to how exactly to do it.
On a Mac, it's that simple.
You actually go from the print menu and you can actually save as a PDF from there from any document or any program that you're working on.
And it's actually very simple.
A lot of modern word processors can save as PDFs, screen writing programs and Google Docs can save automatically as a PDF as well.
From there, we find that the easiest way to do it is just e-mail the document to yourself.
We just downloaded a free ePub.
There are a lot out there.
There is David Copperfield by Charles Dickens, a 3.9 megabyte file.
Once it's downloaded, you can click on it and it opens a preview within e-mail.
Now at the top, there's an open in button.
You just tap that and it actually shows you all of the apps that can read that.
We'll pick iBooks and it imports it really quickly.
And then it adds to a library.
That's a parallel library to what's on your book collection on your iBooks app.
Now the difference here is that you can't really change the font sizes, and as you notice, there's no pretty page turning.
You're gonna have to deal with just side by side scrolling if you can bear it.
As far as chapters, they're really aren't that either.
If you press the chapter button at the top, it actually brings up all the pages of the PDF which can get a little annoying if you're dealing with a tremendously large file.
It's not the greatest for large files if you're reading a novel on that regard although you can search the text within the PDF.
Another nice thing about PDF files is they'll retain all of their color graphics as well.
So if you have big brochures or digital magazines, those work great too.
Now if you don't wanna e-mail it to yourself, you can always simply do it from iTunes the same way you would with ePub or other files.
When you connect it within iTunes, you can choose to add it.
Within iTunes under the documents area, you can add the files that you want, so that's it.
We would love if you able to take notes within the PDFs or be able to do some editing as well.
Obviously, that's not available with current technology.
But hopefully in the future, that type of cloud document support will become easier and easier to use on devices like the iPad.
But for now it's a more diverse e-reader than you think and it's really easy to get files from your e-mail if you're using PDFs.
I'm Scott Stein and this how to read PDF ebooks on your iPad.
