After opening a book you can start reading :).
When reading, action bar automatically disappears after a few seconds to avoid disturbing while reading. Just tap on top title or bottom percentage bar to show it again, you need action bar to go to advanced features or just go back to main library.
Main Menu
Swipping down from top you will se main menu with options to customize text to your eyes:
- Font: Select the most suitable font for your eyes.
- Night/day/sepia theme. Changes colors to adapt screen to light conditions.
- Font size: changes font size. You can also make a zoom gesture in text to increase/decrease font size.
- Line spacing: increase/decrease space between lines of text.
- Margin: increase/decrease side margin.
- Bright: increases/decreases screen bright.
In Playbook you have some more controls moved to reading settings on Blackberry 10.
- Rotation: Allows Playbook autoroate Playepub or not. Playepub will remain always on the same orientation.
- Page anim: Adds page animation and page change “sound” when changing page.
- Clock: Sets 24h or 12h clock mode.
- Standby: Lets you decide if Playbook should go to standby mode after some time of inactivity. When reading, standby could be launched before you finish to read a page, so it might be annoying. Deactivate standby mode but keep in mind that you will have activate it again, close PlayEpub or manually go to standby mode or you’ll kill your battery as it will be always on.
- Style: Choose between using book or default styles. If you have any visualization problem with book styles, use default ones. See the diferences between generic and book styles, second one looks better.
- Columns: number of columns to read on landscape mode. Default is two columns, but you can change to just one.
Text selection context menu
Long tap on any text will let you highlight some text and will show you a context menu with many options to do with it. You can move start and end marks to change your selection.
After you have selected the text you want you can:
- Add/delete bookmark: Adds a bookmark to current page. If it had previously been bookmarked, you can delete this bookmark instead of adding another one.
- Add note: Lets you add a note in the current page with selected text. You can customize this text.
- Add/delete highlight: Lets you highlight selected text. To delete an existing highlight, select the SAME text and this icon will delete that highlight, it will have an X on it to show the delete option. You can choose highlight color from reading settings screen.
- Dictionary: search selected word on dictionary.
- Translate: Allows you to translate selected text.
- Search on Google: Opens default browser searching selected text on Google.
- Share: Lets you share the selected text with compatible apps in your device (Facebook, Twitter, SMS, BBM…).
- BBM: Lets you configure the selected text on your BBM profile.
- Copy: Copies selected text to clipboard to use in any other apps.
If you tap on any link in your book and destination exists inside book, book will go to that place (many books have broken links). If it’s an external link it will be opened in default device browser.
Navigation menu
Ebook files does not have a concept of “pages” as we all think on them on a paper-book. Instead, ebooks are made up of a set of files where each one represents a chapter or just a portion of the book. Because of this, Playepub does not have a “page” counter but a percentage counter, meaning the same, how long you have progressed.
When inside a chapter, there is a page counter in the bottom bar that gives you an idea of how long you are from finishing current chapter, but not the whole book.
Some books have only one file and in this case the page counter is completely real, but most books are splited into many files.
At the bottom of read screen you can see the % you have read. You will also see a little mark showing the end of current chapter.
Tap there to show action bar and percentage slider.
You can use the percentage slider to move along the book. You can also use the start/end buttons in action bar overflow to move to the start and end of the book.
The action bar has also some more options: