Is there a way to format and read PDF on iBook, just like a book?

[Semidevil]

I'm able to drag PDF files into my iTunes and sync to my phone iBooks app. However, when I view it, I want the format to be a bit better. When I view a page, it shows the entire page which makes it hard to read and I have to always zoom in and out. Is there a way to get it to look just like an iBook page(size wise)?

 

[dave_the_nerd]

No. You'd have to convert the PDF to a dynamically-repaginate-able ebook format like a ePub or something.

And probably do a lot of reformatting yourself - pdf text extraction is... messy.

I think it's ePub. Mobi is for the Kindle app.

 

[dawks]

There are a few programs that will try, but as dave says its messy. You loose a bunch of formatting, paragraphs get screwy, images and tables get borked.

What I do is actually read PDFs in Adobe Acrobat for iPad (I tried avoiding it for months, but found it works best - simple, easy, reliable). You can double tap and it zooms to fit the main paragraph. I was using iRead since it had a neat feature that would lock horizontal scrolling of PDF's when zoomed (acrobat doesnt), but it was constantly crashing on me.
Oh and the key feature for me is continuous scrolling. No page turning, no snapping. I also used Goodreader for a while, but you have to pull to the end of a page, release, then pull again to get to the next page. iRead and Acrobat will just keep scrolling all the way through.

Try iRead first, zoom in, then lock horizontal scrolling so it stays focused on your content. Maybe it wont crash as much for you.

 

[Subyman]

Sadly, its pretty hard to do correctly. If the book is a novel without much typography expect chapter titles, paragraphs, and page breaks then the common methods work well but if its a text book, don't even think about it.

 

[miadavies]

It's impossible to convert a PDF format to iBook directly, but a third-party program may help you. You should just search PDF to ePub Converter on google. There are lots of apps like that, however, it seems most of them aren't free.

 

[Printer Bandit]

how about using "iBooks Author" from the Mac App Store?

 

[Tyranicus]

how about using "iBooks Author" from the Mac App Store?

iBooks Author does not support importing PDF files.