[mac4theblind] How To Use Collections To Manage Your iBooks Library
- From: Sarah Alawami <marrie12@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: mack for the blind list <mac4theblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 28 Mar 2011 15:36:24 -0700
a handy tip. the link is at the bottom of the article.
How To Use Collections To Manage Your iBooks Library
Between prior purchases and poor self-restraint, I now have an e-book library
in iBooks several hundred titles strong on my iPad, and it’s growing
constantly. Simply sorting by Title, Author, or Genre just isn’t going to cut
it anymore. Thankfully, the introduction of user-manageable Collections in
iBooks adds some much needed depth to iPad e-book organization.
Collections in iBooks let you create a sort of subfolder in your library
wherein you can house related books. In my case, as you can see from the
screenshot below, I’ve created collections for book series, general photography
resources (the manuals to my cameras are in there, along with e-books about
photography I’ve purchased, since you can mix and match e-books and PDFs),
gaming information, authors (books by and about) and a lot more besides. It’s
all quite easy to do, as you can see from the following instructions.
Managing Your Collections
Step One: Getting Your Books In
If you use iBooks exclusively for your ebook needs, getting your books in is a
piece of cake. If, like me, you’ve got a library spread across multiple vendors
you’re going to need to break the DRM (which you do at your own risk, and only
through means you yourself dig up) on them and then import them to iBooks via
iTunes. I also had a problem managing collections with books I already had in
the library before the update, so, it’s worth re-syncing all of your books
before managing your collections.
Step Two: Creating a Collection
At first, iBooks has two collections: Books and PDFs. Obviously, your ePub
books are in Books, and any imported PDFs are in, well, PDFs. To create a new
collection, simply press New at the bottom of the Collections window. Give your
new Collection a name and you’re good to go.
Step Three: Putting Stuff in the Collection
Press the Edit button on the upper right hand corner of your library. Select
the books you want to move to the collection and press Move in the upper left
corner of the screen. Choose your destination collection and the items will be
moved there. That’s all there is to it.
Limitations
I haven’t run into too many limitations using collections. Most of them I can
work around — using the search I can filter by specific authors, titles, etc.
The biggest problem is that all your Collection management has to happen within
the app; you can’t manage them via iTunes where using the keyboard and mouse is
a tad easier. Apple should really think about adding that feature into iTunes,
which really needs to do some growing up to become the multifunction hardware
and media manager Apple’s positioned it as.
Got any tips about how to best use collections? Share them in the comments.
http://bit.ly/fo1ifu
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