So I’ve had my iPad for a little over a month now. By far the thing that I do the most on it is to read ebooks. In fact that was one of my main motivations of buying the iPad in the first place. In this past month, I’ve read at least 3 whole novels on my iPad and this blog post aims to share my experience of using the iPad as an ebook reader.

Books on the iPad comes in many forms, from PDFs that you read with a PDF reader, to apps that only contain a single book, to library-style apps which allow you to download and manage entire book collections. The reading experience depends a lot on what you use to read the text of the book and my review is based on 2 library style apps – Apple’s iBooks app and Amazon’s Kindle app.

(Click on the images for larger versions)

iBooks

Kindle

iBooks vs Kindle

iBooks is a beautifully designed application which makes reading on the iPad a joy. The Kindle app is good enough. Both have some common features:

Automatic sync reading location and bookmarks across all devices that are reading the same book

• Multiple font sizes & colours
• Change screen brightness
• Search
• Table of contents & bookmarks
• Highlights & notes

Additional iBook features

• More fonts to choose from
• Much better highlighting and notes feature
• Pretty much a lot better looking

Additional Kindle app features

• You can also read your Kindle books on other Kindle platforms – the Kindle reader itself, as well as PC or Mac, Android and Blackberry phones.
• You can turn off the page flip (I feel that it’s a bit distracting).

I prefer iBooks’ reading experience over Kindle. In iBooks, the line-height and spacing are a lot better, and it has a helpful ‘X pages left in this chapter’ at the bottom of the page. I can’t understand why the Kindle uses a gray background instead of white. If Kindle switches to a white background I would automatically like it twice as much.

Where to Get Books

Unfortunately, getting books into iBooks and Kindle is a bit tricky.

iBooks & iBookstore

iBooks supports ePub and PDF books. ePub files can be copy protected – meaning you can’t email the files to your friends. ePub is also a popular ebook format that is supported by many online book stores. The bad news is that the iPad can only read copy-protected ePub files from the iBookstore. This isn’t Apple’s fault, it’s a feature that publishers require all ebook readers to have.

Luckily, there are places you can find ePub books that are not copy protected. Manybooks is an example of a directory where you can find legal ePub books for free. I’ll let you figure out how to find illegal ePubs on your own

Finally, iBooks also supports PDF. Unfortunately, PDFs don’t enjoy all the same features like a regular ePub. For example, you can’t take notes and resize the text.

If you download ePub or PDF books from the internet, you can easily transfer them to iBooks by importing them into iTunes and syncing with your iPad.

Kindle & Amazon

Being an Amazon product, the Kindle mainly to help Amazon sell paper-less books, and thus Amazon is the main way to get books for the Kindle app. You simply go to Amazon, find the Kindle version of the book and click the ‘Buy now’ button. Next, launch your Kindle and the newly purchased book will download into your iPad. Pretty magical. The other advantage is that the Kindle boasts the largest ebook library in the world.

The Kindle actually also supports other formats like PDF and copy protection-free ePub files. However, you’ll need to email these files to Amazon and pay them to convert it to Kindle format for you. Bummer. I haven’t tried this feature out myself – I’m not about to pay to get my book converted when I can read it in iBooks!

The difficult part is to create an Amazon account that has access to Kindle books. Amazon only has rights to sell ebooks in certain parts of the world, and Malaysia is not on that list. So if you want to use your Kindle, you need to convince Amazon that you are in a country where they can legally sell you ebooks. It’s a pretty complicated process, so I’m glad that I created my Amazon account long ago before these shenanigans. If you want to create an Amazon account today for use with Kindle, you’ll need to do a little research. Here are 2 articles that may be helpful:

• Lowyat forum post: How to use Amazon Kindle 2 in Malaysia, The What, the Where, the Hows
• Michael Yung: Buy Kindle 2 from outside US

Conclusion

Amazon’s Kindle Store beats Apple’s iBookstore hands down in terms of the breadth of the library. The Amazon website offers more browsing and rating features to help me decide which book to buy.

However, in terms of reading experience and the ease of transferring books to the iPad, iBooks comes out on top.

Personally I prefer reading with iBooks. If I can find an ePub or PDF that is not copy-protected I’ll read it in my iBooks. After all, you don’t buy everything you read right? With real books you can borrow from friends. If not, I’ll buy it from Amazon and put up with the bearable reading experience on Kindle. Hopefully the process of creating ePubs will become easier and more and more independent publishers will release their ebooks in ePub format.

I hope this review helped you in your research!

Gallery

I honestly thought I was dreaming. She woke me and said, “I’ve got a surprise for you. But you can’t leave the bedroom.” And thus I enjoyed my 1st ever breakfast in bed.

This was followed up with an amazing lunch with chocolate fondue for dessert.

Mmm.. now you know why I’ve put on weight since getting married.

Pei Chyi took a day off for my birthday so we went out to run a few errands, and I got a back massage in Circle Art of Massage at The Curve. First time I tried them and I was pleased with the results. Don’t let the demure Chinese female masseuse fool you – she’s really strong. I also managed to write a blog post about Friendster Group CEO Ganesh Kumar Bangah.

My birthday felt like a nice little holiday in the middle of a crazy busy period at work. Thanks Pei Chyi, I really enjoyed it and spending time with you and the boy.

Goo goo gaa gaa

Thank You Internet (and Real Life) Friends

I received Facebook wall posts and Tweets all day long from all of you. Like I said, I thought I got attacked by spammers when I woke up yesterday. I know that I don’t meet up with you often enough so I want to say thank you publicly on my blog.

I’m really lucky to know all of you and I appreciate our friendship. Thanks for being part of my special day yesterday. Cheers!

This year’s Father’s Day was extra special. It was the first time I celebrated Father’s Day as a son and as a new father. With only 3 months of experience I’m not the most experienced dad.

My experience to date has mainly been cradling baby to sleep at all hours of the day, pulling boogers out of baby Zack’s little nose (don’t ask), baby baths and poop disasters. It’s been quite a ride and can be pretty exhausting. For example, my Father’s Day was met with baby Zack waking up 3 times at night.

Despite the lack of beauty sleep, fatherhood has been wonderful. Every time I look at baby Zack peacefully sound asleep my heart just melts.

I’m looking forward to many more happy Father’s Days to come.

I’ve been wanting to stop buying paper books for a while now. I’ve also been buying ebooks in PDF and ePub format. Reading these ebooks have been less than ideal because I’ve had to read them on my computer (inconvenient) or on my iPhone (too difficult).

Knowing that I was getting an iPad, I started investigating iBooks–Apple’s ebook solution. The other contender was Amazon’s Kindle application. I couldn’t test iBooks since it only works on the iPad (which had not yet arrived) so I thought I would buy a Kindle book. I planned to start reading the book on my iPhone and finish it on the iPad.

I bought Daemon by Daniel Suarez which I had heard rave reviews about and started reading on my iPhone. I found that I was reading more because I always had my phone with me and could whip it out to read anywhere–in the backseat of the car, in the dark room while waiting for baby Zack to sleep, at the in-laws when there’s nothing to do. If I had a hardcover book, I wouldn’t even have bothered to bring it along with me. By the way, I ended up liking the book so much that I finished it in 3 days and immediately bought the sequel, Freedom.

The other really cool thing about the Kindle is that you can send yourself samples of a book. I’ve downloaded tons of samples that I can read before deciding if I want to buy the book. Reading reviews of books isn’t really the same as reading the 1st few chapters, so this feature is really great for me too.

I’ve already started to read more with my Kindle service. 2 books in the last 2 weeks already and already itching to buy a few more. Compare that to the 3-5 books I have sitting on my bookshelf (which I bought!) that are still not read. The amount that I read has greatly decreased since finishing university and in the meantime the only things I read are articles on web sites and blogs which have completely spoilt my attention span and comprehension, so I’m definitely looking forward to reading more books on my iPad.

Quick comparison to iBooks–Apple’s solution also allows you to download samples. However it’s more difficult to buy books (from Malaysia) because you need to have iTunes credit. Amazon also requires a work around but it’s generally easier to buy Amazon credit which I use to pay for the books. Plus, Amazon’s catalog is much wider and slightly cheaper. On the plus side for iBooks, the application is a lot more polished and it’s also easier to import books from other sources. Long story short, eBooks (digital format books) will hopefully get me reading regularly again.

I’m sure that many of your friends and family has asked you “What’s this blogging thing?” or “Can you help me with my blog?”

And then.. you want to help them but sometimes they have so many questions and you need to go off and do your own thing but you’re paiseh to say no to them because this is your friend / favourite auntie…

If that’s ever happened to you before, I’d like to ask you a favour. Please send your friends and family with blogging questions to me, or more specifically my upcoming workshop called Blogging Your Way To Success. Here, I even made a video to explain what the workshop is about.

For those of you who prefer to read (or you’re experiencing #streamyxsucks), here are the highlights:

• We’ll start at the basics – how to create a blog & write posts, upload images, etc
• We’ll learn about WordPress 3.0, the latest and the greatest
• We’ll learn how to get more readers, promote your business and everybody’s favourite topic – how to make money online!
• The workshop is suitable for beginners with no experience, people on Blogspot who want to switch to WordPress, those who want to launch a blog shop and those who need a simple website but have no budget

If they have questions, please direct them to my Buzzmedia website to find out the full details & to contact me – http://buzzmedia.com.my/events/nst-blogging

If you don’t have anyone you can think of to recommend to attend the workshop, please go to the event page and click the Facebook Like / Recommend button. At least your Facebook friends will see it and can decide if they want to come.

And if you do refer me a few friends, I will do something nice for you. Maybe I can buy you lunch, or help you with your blog theme or buy you Problogger’s book – I’m open to suggestions.

Thanks! You’re the greatest

Sincerely,

David a.k.a. @blogjunkie

Great video exploring what motivates people. I’m inclined to believe that the video’s findings are true, since I’m someone who’s not really motivated by money.

The one (small) drawback is that Headway puts a notice in the Dashboard every time there’s a new version. For certain clients I really don’t want to have anything to do with them after the project, so I would like to disable the notification. Here’s how.

In Headway’s custom_functions.php, simply add this line:

remove_action('admin_notices', 'headway_update_notice');

Solved. No more nagging client asking me what is this “Headway update thing”.

This was my presentation at the 1st ever WordCamp Malaysia where I was fortunate enough to be invited as a speaker.

Theme frameworks are the next evolution in WordPress themes. They’re still relatively new, so let’s start off by asking…

What is a Theme Framework?

Theme frameworks for WordPress can be a little confusing, and it doesn’t help that there are many blank themes that call themselves ‘theme frameworks’.

In my opinion, theme frameworks are a solid base that serves as a starting point for other projects. A defining characteristic of theme frameworks are theme hooks (actions & filters) and when developing for a theme framework, it feels a little like developing a plugin. Examples of theme frameworks are Thematic and Hybrid.

A Little History

One of the best features of the WordPress platform are it’s themes. From the outset, the community has been creating and sharing their themes – first on themes.wordpress.net and now through the official theme directory. E.g. MistyLook, Andreas, K2, Vigilance

Site owners would install the theme and frequently make modifications to customise the theme to their liking. Inevitably, the theme developers would add new features to their themes e.g. Widget support. If you wanted to upgrade your theme to get the new features, you had to re-do your modifications.

In 2007 Scott Wallick organised a contest to create skins for Sandbox. It was meant to be a contest for designers and not developers, so you were not supposed to modify the templates, only the CSS. To give everyone an equal starting point, the contest made use of Sandbox as the framework. Entries had to be in the form of child themes.

The contest sparked an idea – child themes were a way of customising your site but keep upgrades simple. You start with a parent theme that you like, but make the modifications in a child theme. When the developer upgrades their theme, you replaced the parent theme only. Your child theme was unaffected and upgrades become less of a hassle. Ian Stewart & Justin Tadlock really took the concept further and have been pushing the envelop with parent & child themes.

The themes that Ian & Justin created were the first ones that were real theme frameworks – they were meant to be used as foundations to be customised or for totally new themes.

In the last few years, the premium themes market has exploded. Many premium themes offered exhaustive design options but site owners still resorted to editing CSS & theme files for more advanced customisations. Instead of child themes, premium themes like Thesis, Frugal & Headway separated user customisations into specific files – custom.css and custom_functions.php. That way when the main theme was upgraded, you only had to copy those files over.

Because you were not encouraged to change the theme files of the master theme, they offered a wide variety of actions and filters which you could customise through your functions file. These hooks and filters are a common feature and what I consider to be a defining characteristic of a theme framework.

Why Should I Care?

We’ve already seen one of the main benefits of theme frameworks – easy upgrades. Here are some more benefits for bloggers, businesses and developers

Bloggers: Build a Better Blog

• More cost effective – invest time & money in 1 framework, get many styles
• Easy to customise – point and click, widgets, child themes & skins
• More options that you can shake a stick at
• Better quality themes developed faster

WordPress for Businesses: Even Better as a CMS

Premium theme frameworks have so many features and customisation options, it makes it easy to launch a website with a customised design at an affordable cost. You could, for example, invest in a premium theme from WooThemes, StudioPress or the Headway Premium Theme (my fave!) and launch a business website in a week, at much lower cost than getting a designer to do it for you. I would know, because I charge lots for a custom theme.

Developers: Faster & More Efficient Projects

• Build off a solid foundation
• Add advanced features into projects (without actually knowing how to do it yourself)

To that last point, you can include theme options easily without having to code the theme options completely from scratch. Just use the theme framework’s built in options or API features.

How Do I Start?

So if you wanna be more efficient with your blog customisations, here’s how to get started. But first, we need to understand what types of theme frameworks exist. This is because customisations for each type is different.

Based on the different ways that these frameworks are customised, I’ve divided the different theme frameworks into 3 different models.

Child Theme Model

Theme frameworks in this model make use of a Child Theme to customise the theme framework. Example themes in this category include Sandbox, Thematic and Hybrid. To customise theme frameworks in this model, you need to create a Child Theme.

Your Child Theme needs to be in the themes directory, together with the framework. Within your Child Theme folder, there needs to be a style.css file. And in the file, you would have something like this:

/*
Theme Name: Child Theme
Description: Example Child Theme
Template: parent-theme
*/

/* Import the parent theme style (if you want) */
@import url(../parent-theme/style.css);

In the code above, the Template: parent-theme line tells WordPress to reference the parent theme when loading the Child Theme. Here’s an example of how this looks like if you’re using the Thematic theme framework and loading the Thematic Power Blog Child Theme.

I really like the Child Theme model, except that it’s pretty confusing especially for non-geeks. If your clients aren’t very web savvy, you could end up with the situation where they accidentally delete the Parent Theme, not knowing what it is.

Separate your Customisations

The next way you can customise your theme framework is to separate out your customisations into custom.css and custom_functions.php. Depending on your theme framework, these may be different.

Here are the steps to separate your customisations:

1. Create a file called custom.css in your theme directory

2. Tell your theme to include this file in the <head> of the theme. Some theme frameworks will do this automatically for you, otherwise you’ll need to modify your header.php file like this:
<body class="custom">

3. Optional: modify your body tag to make it easier to override the theme framework’s CSS

4. Make your customisations in custom.css, e.g.

.custom #header {
/*custom styles for header*/
}

Now when your theme gets upgraded, you can simply copy these 2 files to your new theme to re-apply your customisations. Easy-peasy.

The new default theme that comes with WordPress 3.0 onwards–Twenty Ten–is actually a great starting point for your theme customisations, if you’re not using something like Thesis or Headway.

Learn to use Hooks

Hooks allow you to inject code into different points of your theme, without having to mess with your core theme files like header.php, etc. However, to use hooks effectively, you’ll need to know quite a bit of PHP. Here’s an example to get you started.

Let’s say I want to add a footnote to the end of every post. If I were to do it in the theme files, I would have to modify  index.php, single.php and archive.php. Or, I could put it into my functions file like this:

// create the function
function insertFootNote($content) {
$content.= "
?>
<div class="\&quot;footNote\&quot;">

Don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS feed so you never miss a post!

</div>
";
return $content;
}
// tell WP to add the function at the_content hook
add_filter ('the_content', 'insertFootNote');

That bit of code will now be injected everywhere the_content() appears on my site. Cool!

In the example above, I’m simply using one of WordPress’ many many hooks. If you use a theme framework like Thematic, you get even more hooks to use.

Conclusion

The new features and increased Child Theme support introduced in WordPress 3.0 makes the potential of theme frameworks even more powerful. I expect to see theme frameworks taking advantages of features like custom header and background images, simple navigation menus and custom post types and taxonomies.

And when your theme upgrade does add these new features in, you’ll be able to upgrade painlessly because you separated your customisations into a Child Theme or separate custom.css and custom_functions.php.

I foresee that Theme Frameworks are really going to be the future of WordPress themes. As the premium theme market heats up, premium themes will start adding new functionality like Theme Hooks to cater to power users. Regular themes like Twenty Ten may start adding Theme Hooks too so that it becomes even more viable as a Theme Framework.

And best of all, site owners like you and me will ultimately benefit from the increased maturity of the WordPress themes ecosystem.

* * * * *

If you liked my presentation, please share it via Twitter or Facebook, leave a comment and follow me on Twitter – @blogjunkie. Thanks!

The workshop is aimed at beginners and hobbyists who want to get serious about using blogs to promote your business, reach your customers and make money from your passion. The workshop will have a strong focus on WordPress, the publishing platform that powers this blog and other popular sites like Mashable, Smashing Magazine, Paul Tan’s Automotive News, and Hong Kiat.

Help needed – what topics would you like to know about?

I’ve already got an outline, but I would love your feedback and suggestions, especially on specific stuff. Let me know what you think

Day 1: Getting Your Hands Dirty

• Blogging Basics
• WordPress Crash Course
• Setting Up Your Blog
• Beyond Blogging
• Managing Your Blog

Day 2: Blogging Strategy

• Blog Content Strategy
• Blog Marketing & Generating Traffic
• Search Engine Optimisation
• Blogging Your Passion Into Income
• Business Blogging

Pei Chyi & Zachary