How to: Get eBooks [ePub] onto the iPad
In the process of trying to find Chinese language ePub books — can you say, Commentary on the Third National Chinese Communist Party Congress? Ugh! — I found a simple way to get tittles from the web, into iTunes and, now that it’s here, onto the iPad.
Yes, Apple has loaded the store portion of iBooks with 30,000 titles from the Gutenberg Project, but that are 100,000 more books available through the group’s partners and affiliates. How do you get those off the web and onto your iPad?
Well, the lads at 9 to 5 Mac discovered that you can simply drag ePub book downloaded from the web into iTunes. Alternately, you can also use iTunes’ “Add to Library” command (iTunes > File > Add to Library, ⌘ + O).
As noted, Project Gutenberg shelves tens of thousands of books, which are also available via iBooks. However, there are hundreds of thousands more ePub books available scattered across the web, including places like ePubBooks.com and Google Books.
Gotta sweet source for ePub titles (Chinese ePub books presented complex characters)? Pop up a note with a link in the comments…
April 5th, 2010
[...] How to: Get eBooks [ePub] onto the iPad [...]
April 5th, 2010
[...] How to: Get eBooks [ePub] onto the iPad April 5, 2010 — No comments [...]
May 21st, 2010
Ah, that worked! thanks.
June 23rd, 2010
Excellent advice. Thanks a lot!
July 27th, 2010
The iBook store (as viewed from Hong Kong) does have of a few of the Chinese classics, the Ah Q stories and four great novels. Chinese legal documents… ugh hate those, hahah
September 12th, 2010
Works like a dream. Should perhaps tell people they have to drag the pdfs and epubs to the upper right of the itunes window – the LIBRARY tab which blues over and then registers the docs in the itunes’ books folder. They then click on the ipad tab go to Sync books and click on selected books. Import away and bob’s your beloved uncle.
October 15th, 2010
Thanks
February 4th, 2011
The drag and drop for ePub to iTunes, or the import option does not seem to work for Windoze iTunes
April 4th, 2011
you can set up a dropbox account. drag epub into dropbox and open in drop box on IOS device. when it says unknown go to the context menu and tap ibooks which imports to your ibook library
October 17th, 2011
Simplest way to transfer epub to iPad is as follows: 1. Download epub from sites you know 2. Email the epub file to yourself (eg. GMail) – do not zip or rar it 3. Open up the email in your iPad, and click on the attachment (the epub file) 4. Choose “Open in iBook” and that’s it. No need iTunes sync for that.