Over the past few weeks I have presented quite a few workshops where I have talked about making custom bookshelves within iBooks for self-selected reading time – or just for making a range of books available for students to enjoy! One of the resources I have been using to contribute to custom bookshelves is TarHeel Reader books, imported into iBooks. TarHeel Reader, as I’ve said before, is a fabulous resource and gives you over 20,000 potential eBooks for your iPad through iBooks. I’ve had several requests to write this process up as a step-by-step – and so here goes!
Before you start this process, make sure that you have downloaded Apple’s free eBook reader iBooks and have it available on your iPad, iPod touch or iPhone. If you need assistance with this process there is a video with the process at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0QaycZGtE0.
Now let’s start getting a TarHeel Reader book ready to go! To begin, go to www.tarheelreader.org. Search for a book you think your reader might be interested in – or you can use a book that you already know that they enjoy reading of course!
Once you have selected a book in Tar Heel Reader, make sure you select the Setup button on the title page of the book.
Once you are into Setup a range of options are now available to you. The one we are interested in is “Download as PowerPoint”. Download the TarHeel Reader book as a PowerPoint and save it on your computer.
Once you have the book on your computer, open the TarHeel Reader book in PowerPoint and then save it as a PDF. Depending on your computer and your operating system the process for saving it as a PDF will be different. Saving as a PDF is built into the Macintosh operating system – but on a Windows computer you will need a 3rd party program to do this with. If you don’t have a PDF program already loaded, try a free PDF converter like CutePDF.
Clik here to view.
Clik here to view.
Once you have saved the book as a PDF then you just need to drag and drop it into iTunes on your Mac or PC. Make sure you drop it into the top left hand corner of iTunes, as per the screenshot below.
Now you need to sync your iPad, iPod touch or iPhone and the book will go across. You might just want to double check that your iPad is setup to automatically sync books by clicking on your iPad (on the left hand side in iTunes) and then clicking on the Books settings (at the top of the screen) and checking that “Sync Books” is ticked. See the screenshot below.
Once your iPad has finished syncing, grab your iPad and open iBooks.
The PDF will automatically have been added to the PDF bookshelf. To get to this, click on the Collections button on the top menu bar and then select “PDFs”.
You can now use the same Collections button to make new bookshelves and create custom bookshelves for individual students or on different topics. You can then use the edit button to move PDFs, purchased books and other ePubs where you want them. Two examples are below:
I hope you enjoy using TarHeel Reader to expand your iBooks collection – and let me know if you have any questions Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.