A couple of questions before taking the plunge

[Dave Berk]

I'm considering buying an iPad mostly for reading pdf books (math and technical). Sadly I'm clueless when it comes to all things Apple since I don't own an iPhone/iPod/iWhatever, so I have a few questions I hope the more knowledgeable members of the forum can help me with.

My questions is:

1. What's the best pdf app for reading technical books, heavy with math and code?
2. For epub books, does the iBooks app have support for dictionaries? Does it cost more to add dictionaries? Any built-in?
3. What the best app for reading comics (pdf+cbr)? [preferably free]
4. Does Calibre works well with iPad as a device or only with the iBooks app (is there a difference?)

Thanks for any help

[harakiri]

3. What the best app for reading comics (pdf+cbr)? [preferably free]

In my opinion comiczeal. Its commercial, but the price is 7.99 I think.
Compared to the price of the iPad itself its nothing.
Works perfect for .cbr and .cbz files

I am not so much into PDF, but so far iBooks did not let me down. Not sure about dictionaries though. Also I must admit that the time I read books containing any mathematic formulas is over for me

So I hope other people can answer the other questions you had better than I could

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Dave Berk

1. What's the best pdf app for reading technical books, heavy with math and code?

I don't read PDF books myself, but the consensus appears to be that "Goodreader" is about the best PDF reading app.

2. For epub books, does the iBooks app have support for dictionaries? Does it cost more to add dictionaries? Any built-in?

iBooks has a pretty good English dictionary built in.

4. Does Calibre works well with iPad as a device or only with the iBooks app (is there a difference?)

Calibre only supports the iBooks App (via iTunes). Yes, it works well.

[dwharrison]

HarryT, Calibre also supports Stanza; it actually has a Stanza-compatible server built in so that you can transfer books into Stanza over wifi.

[Dave Berk]

Thanks harakiri & Harry.

Another question if you don't mind.

In the iBooks app is it possible for books to belong in more than one category? I couldn't find any way to do it from iTunes and Calibre appear to have spread the books all over iTunes by giving discarding tags and keeping only one for each book.

If not, how can I move books from one category to another inside iTunes?

Sorry for the rather stupid questions.

[xristy]

Goodreader is indeed most excellent. I read a great deal of math and physics PDF papers and books and it works really fine for me. I have folders and sub-folders and so on to organize my PDFs in Goodreader. They are working now on supporting highlighting and annotations so that should provide a pretty self-contained app.

[Sischa]

Originally Posted by Dave Berk

I'm considering buying an iPad mostly for reading pdf books (math and technical). Sadly I'm clueless when it comes to all things Apple since I don't own an iPhone/iPod/iWhatever, so I have a few questions I hope the more knowledgeable members of the forum can help me with.

My questions is:

1. What's the best pdf app for reading technical books, heavy with math and code?
2. For epub books, does the iBooks app have support for dictionaries? Does it cost more to add dictionaries? Any built-in?
3. What the best app for reading comics (pdf+cbr)? [preferably free]
4. Does Calibre works well with iPad as a device or only with the iBooks app (is there a difference?)

Thanks for any help

1. My 100% vote goes for Goodreader - best PDF Reader but there is so much more you can say about this app. You can se up a fixed zoom mode for PDF's with borders for example it is one of the best file managers besides the reader capabilities so you can access cloud accounts like dropbox or your own FTP Server like your own NAS. You can setup folders and if you want/need with password protection. Simple said ... the best.

2. It depends on the tool you use to read the epubs it not so much depend on the file format. So yes if you use iBook to read your epubs you'll have full disctionary support and there is already some useful dictionary built in.

3. For comics in PDF format use goodreader.

You can use iTunes on PC/MAC to categorize your books comfortable at you desktop.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Dave Berk

Thanks harakiri & Harry.

Another question if you don't mind.

In the iBooks app is it possible for books to belong in more than one category?

No. The category is a simple text string in the ePub metadata.

[Dave Berk]

Thanks to everyone who recommended the Good Reader app. It Is amazing. Specially, the ability to set two different manual crop on a PDF book, one for each side of a page is unblievable. The fact that it cost only .99 cent makes it the most worthwhile app on the app store to me.

[Over]

Cloudreader is good for comics and it's free.

[Mike_73]

Goodreader as recommendation from my side, too. It's not free but it has some real cool features. I don't know if the price is still at $0.79, but it should be fairly inexpensive.

[acidburn517]

+1 for goodreader and for .99 it's practically free. I'm glad to hear that they're working on annotation since Iannotate is a good PDF reader too with annotation features but it's a bit pricey at 9.99.

I personally use comiczeal for my comicbooks. It works great. Not as polished as the readers from Marvel and Imagecomics but it does a pretty good job for CBRs and CBZs. Unfortunately not free. Cloudreader is a good free alternative but comiczeal does have a few more features.

[David Munch]

#1 If you are doing scientific articles, and on a Mac, I'd recommend that you take a look at Papers for Mac and iPad. It doesn't get more amazing than that. You have everything tagged and searchable, and the iPad syncs your library directly from the Mac.