Ebook Tips

On this page you will find tips for making use of the ebooks from Books for Learning—from getting Adobe Reader to viewing your ebooks on-screen. You may click on the links below to jump to specific topics.

What is an ebook?
Getting Adobe Reader
Downloading and saving ebooks to your computer
Tips on viewing ebooks on-screen

What is an ebook?

Ebooks from Books for Learning come as a digital file in Adobe PDF format. The acronym PDF stands for 'Portable Document Format'. A PDF is a digital document that can be viewed on any computer without the content or layout being changed. (Documents in other formats, such as Microsoft Word, can change considerably as they move from one computer to another, depending on each computer's settings, etc.)

Learn more about PDFs and Adobe, the software company that invented them.

Getting Adobe Reader

To be able to read Adobe PDFs you should ideally have Adobe Reader installed on your computer. This program is free and comes already installed on most computers. You can download the latest version of Adobe Reader from the Adobe website. Click the link below and look for the Get Adobe Reader button. ∆

Downloading and saving ebooks to your computer

When receiving ebooks by email, you can save them to your computer in various ways:

If you are using a remote email account (such as Hotmail, Gmail or Webmail), double click on the attachment to open it, then click the Save button (disk icon at the top left of the menu bar) to save the document to your computer.

If you are using an email program for downloading email to your computer (such as Outlook, Entourage etc.), you can click once on the attachment and save it to another location on your computer. Otherwise double click the attachment and save it to another location on your computer as above.

When downloading an ebook from the Books for Learning website, click the Save button (disk icon at the top left of the menu bar) to save it to your computer. ∆

Viewing Portrait PDFs on-screen

There are some useful options for reading ebooks on your computer or handheld device, as detailed below.

Modes of screen viewing

There are tools in Adobe Reader that allow various different viewing modes.

With Adobe Reader open, the bottom right corner offers four viewing modes: Single page, Continuous, Continuous-Facing, and Facing. The two modes most appropriate for Books for Learning ebooks are Single page and Continuous. Single Page displays one page at a time, allowing readers to advance pages with a simple click. Continuous allows pages to be viewed in a continuous series for easy scrolling.

In the middle of the toolbar at the top of screen there are the options of Fit Page (which fits a single page on screen) and Fit Width (which expands the document to fill the screen from left to right.

At the bottom left of the screen is the option to Hide Toolbars, which allows a little more space for viewing the document.

Bookmark and Page Tabs

Down the left side of the screen are various tabs, two of which are of use. Click Bookmarks to find a list of selected references within the document, such as chapter titles and comprehension pages. Clicking these allows you to jump easily to key places in the document. Click Pages to view thumbnails of all pages in the document. Click on any thumbnail to go directly to that page.

Resizing text

You can over-ride document formatting to enlarge the document’s text. At the top of the page, click View > Reflow. Then click the Zoom In / Zoom Out buttons on the toolbar at the top of the page.

NOTE: you cannot save or print these changes.

PDA viewing

Handheld PDAs are popular tools for viewing ebooks. Books for Learning PDFs are able to reflow for small screen viewing.

Opening an ebook where you left off

You can set Adobe Reader to open documents where you left off, instead of at the first page. To choose this setting, do the following:

Edit (Windows) or Adobe Reader (Macintosh) > Preferences > Startup > Reopen Documents to Last Viewed Page > All files.