Reading eBooks on Your iPhone
Maybe you’re sitting on the bus or train on your way to or from work or school. Maybe you’re standing in line for a movie or food. Maybe you’re just sitting on your couch, wasting time. In any case, you’re bored and looking for something to pass the time. Wouldn’t it be great to pull out a book and do a little reading?
Unfortunately, you don’t always have a book with youespecially when you’re out and about. But you do have your mobile phone, and that phone can be used to read your favorite books.
That’s right, a mobile phoneespecially a smartphone, like the Apple iPhonecan be used to read electronic books. In fact, the iPhone is a great little eBook reader, assuming you have the right apps installed.
Want to learn how to read eBooks on your iPhone? Keep reading and I’ll tell you how.
What are eBooks?
The printed book has been around since the 15th century, when Gutenberg invented movable type and the printing press. In the five centuries since, books have been distributed in printed format, with ink on paper.
The printed book (let’s call it a “p-book”) is still a great way to distribute novels, how-to information, and the like; it’s small and portable and easy to read. But the p-book now has a competitor in the form of the eBook, an electronic book distributed in digital format.
An eBook is simply the content of a traditional book stored in a digital file. eBooks can be read on personal computers (just like reading any other type of digital file) and on dedicated devices called e-book readers, or e-readers, such as the Amazon Kindle or the Barnes & Noble NOOK. You can also read eBooks on tablet computers, like the Apple iPad. And, though you might not realize it, you can also read eBooks on today’s smartphones, like the Apple iPhone.
You see, an eBook is just another type of digital file, like a word processing or spreadsheet file. The content of the file is formatted in a way that looks good onscreen, and somewhat resembles a traditional printed book page. You read through an eBook file by clicking or tapping from page to page, just as you turn the pages in a traditional p-book.