Viewing large books on iPad 2018

[Lorenzo F]

I had an Air 1 on iOS 11.3. I sold it because every time I used iBooks to read large books, it would crash.

One of my books is 782 pages, 28.2 mb in size, PDF format. I plan to use the 2018 iPad to highlight text and the Apple Pencil to write notes as well.

Does anyone know if the 2018 iPad can handle large books?

Is there a specific app that people recommend to view books and write notes?

 

[Schranke]

That is odd, I too have an Air 1 and use it for large books. Never had a problem like that.
Did you trie to restore your iPad completely and see if thet resolved the problem before selling it?

But to answer you're question, yes the 2018 iPad should be able to handle it.

as for apps I use Bookari for reading, not sure how it is to take notes in. but a good reading app.

 

[RevTEG]

I don't recall iBooks ever crashing on me. while reading PDF's even on older iPads. Although, I haven't used iBooks in a long while. I prefer PDF Expert a million time more than iBooks for reading and marking up my PDF's.

 

[Loge]

GoodReader, still my favourite though hasn't been updated in a while (a big update is coming I believe). I have many PDFs much bigger than that in terms of number of pages and file size and it has no problems with any of them. Plus it allows doc-specific cropping so it's easier to read larger pages without scrolling.

 

[960design]

I had an Air 1 on iOS 11.3. I sold it because every time I used iBooks to read large books, it would crash.

One of my books is 782 pages, 28.2 mb in size, PDF format. I plan to use the 2018 iPad to highlight text and the Apple Pencil to write notes as well.

I use an IPP10.5 to read pretty large books using iBooks. I average about 1-2 hours a day, of course some days I read 8 hours and have had the occasional crash. Two of the larger books I currently have on board are between 785 - 900 printed pages ( textbook sized ) . Neither of those have crashed yet, they are in PDF format.

In the past year I have read several novel sized books with over 1200 printed pages ( iBooks format ) with no issues that I recall.

My gut feeling is the only times I've had iBooks crash is a corrupt PDF download. It will read properly for a couple dozen pages then crash, if it does not crash almost immediately.

I think a newer iPad may help out quite a bit.

 

[rosyapple]

I use iPad 2017 to read PDF textbooks with 300MB to 1.2GB in size (about 500 - 1500 pages) using iBooks. iPad 2017 has (almost) the same spec as iPad 2018 (iPad 2017 has slower processor and no Pencil support, but the same amount of RAM).

iPad 2017 can handle these PDFs easily, even when I scroll very fast trying to find the pages I need. There's no slow loading time between pages. My PDF textbooks are also picture heavy.

My iPad 1 crashes when I use it to read my 300MB or more textbooks.

 

[ctg7w6]

I used to read 300-500 MB books on my iPad 2. It was fairly slow but it didn’t crash. And honestly it only got slow because I updated iOS lol. It’s the reason I bought an Air 2 years ago. But when the iPad 2 was new with whatever iOS version it came with, it had no problems with 300-500 MB books!

 

[Lorenzo F]

Thanks for all the tips everybody. I ended up getting an Apple Pencil and just use the Files app to view my textbook (PDF) and annotate. But now I am looking for an app that’s good all-around for reading and annotating. Several of you have recommended Goodreader and PDF Expert. In other forums, I have heard about GoodNotes and Notability.

Does anyone know if any of these apps will specifically show the Table of contents (TOC) embedded into the file of my textbook? When I view the textbook on Preview on macOS, I can choose the sidebar to show the TOC. In this TOC, I can click on various sections of the textbook and can jump directly to those chapters. Very useful. I can’t seem to do that on Files on iOS however.

 

[kristalsoldier]

Thanks for all the tips everybody. I ended up getting an Apple Pencil and just use the Files app to view my textbook (PDF) and annotate. But now I am looking for an app that’s good all-around for reading and annotating. Several of you have recommended Goodreader and PDF Expert. In other forums, I have heard about GoodNotes and Notability.

Does anyone know if any of these apps will specifically show the Table of contents (TOC) embedded into the file of my textbook? When I view the textbook on Preview on macOS, I can choose the sidebar to show the TOC. In this TOC, I can click on various sections of the textbook and can jump directly to those chapters. Very useful. I can’t seem to do that on Files on iOS however.

You could also trial Liquid Text (pdf only).