You know those cool fish identification books that you can download to your tablet?
Well, the folks at New World Publications, who have put out nine books in PDF ebook format that can be bought from the fishid.com website, have taken it one step further.
The company’s Florida Reef Fish Identification ebook is now fully interactive with search functions like you’d see in an app.
Eric Riesch, Managing Director at New World Publications, has been tinkering with the book’s layout and design over the past year and developed a version custom-made for the iPad with multi-touch functionality. Riesch tells DeeperBlue.com:
“Each chapter begins with thumbnails of all species included in the chapter. You can immediately click the photo to enlarge a picture or click the text to go directly to that species page. Within a chapter, family sections also begin with thumbnail photos of all species in the family that function the same way. A species page has multiple photos and drawings that can be expanded to full page viewing. It also has a big yellow button in the top right corner of the page that takes you back to the family introduction in case you want to look for similar species. At any time within a chapter, you can pinch the page and drag in to the bottom then easily scroll back and forth within the chapter. You can also click the main chapter picture and quickly scroll through the 12 chapters.”
The new book not only has thumbnail searches and hyperlinks for moving around within it, it also sports an additional 201 photos and five more species than the printed and PDF versions. With each species given its own page, the book is a bit fatter than the printed version at 712 pages.
The one big drawback to this format is size: The Florida Reef Fish ID book is 1.2 GB and Apple has a store limit of 2 GB, according to Riesch:
“Because of the current limitations by the Apple iBooks Store, putting the Tropical Pacific Identification books into this format is not possible. It also takes a long time to build since we are custom building all species pages and laying out 2 sets of thumbnails. At this time, this is the only book we have planned for this format.”
That said, it’s still a pretty cool book which retails for $39.99/35.49 Euros. Check it out via Apple iTunes here.
