After revealing the Apple iPad to the world, Steve Jobs also showcased their latest application — an e-book reader dubbed, iBooks. “Amazon’s done a great job of pioneering [ebooks] with the Kindle”, Steve Jobs said, “we’re going to stand on their shoulders and go a little further”.
Surprisingly, iBooks bears a striking resemblance to the interface of Shelfari.com — the online website for sharing book information which was brought by Amazon! The main interface resembles a bookshelf with a button to the Apple Store which can be used to find, buy and download e-books right to the iPad. The Apple iPad uses the ePub format, which is thankfully an open format. iBooks allows you to change fonts, browse a table of contents, flip pages, drag pages, and so on.
Apart from iBooks, Apple has also reworked the iWorks application suite to better suit the Apple iPad. A completely new version of Keynote, Pages and Numbers has been designed for the Apple iPad. You can thus work on spreadsheets, create, edit presentations, and of course write documents using Pages.
Each app in the iWorks suite is going to sell for $9.99.
All images courtesy of gdgt.com