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Hi there,
The dictionary functionality in iBooks is a keypoint to me, so I went ahead and did some further investigation.
Since I have a jailbroken iPad, I poked around in the file system and found six dictionaries under /Library/Dictionaries, the same six dictionaries that are bundled in SnowLeopard and available in the Dictionary application there.
Three of the dictionaries are for English; the other three are Japanese. The English ones are:
Apple Dictionary
New Oxford American Dictionary
Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus
and the Japanese ones are:
Shogakukan Daijisen
Shogakukan Progressive English-Japanese Japanese-English Dictionary
Shogakukan Ruigo Reikai Jiten
So next, I made a test with a Japanese book from Project Gutenberg (I verified that it has the correct language setting in the ePub file ('ja') and did not use Calibre to transfer it, since apparently Calibre 7.10 does reset the language code to 'en', which makes it unusable in this case). And indeed, I can now look up Japanese definitions in the dictionary. In fact, the Gutenberg blurb at the beginning of the file, which is in English, makes also use of the English dictionaries.
Unfortunately, in both cases, the dictionaries used are monolingual dictionaries, that is English to English or Japanese to Japanese, which is not ideal for beginners of the language, who would rather have a dictionary that explains foreign words in their own language. It is to be hoped that future versions of iBook allow more flexible settings for the dictionaries, including the installation of additional dictionaries.
As it happens, I poked around in the iBooks application itself and found a file called
"BKDictionaryManager_LanguageToOrder.plist". As the name suggest, this file lists a list dictionaries in their order of preference for the languages "ja" and "en". A change to this file (adding the English-Japanese dictionary to the "en" list and moving the Japanese-English dictionary in the first position) did indeed cause iBooks to show the bilingual dictionaries first, so this change is possible and indeed straightforward on jailbroken devices. It might even be possible to make additional dictionaries for other languages available in this way. I will try if dictionaries for Mac OS can simply be copied over and used on the iPad next time I have time.
Ctop
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