Universal Principles of Design, Revised and Updated

It is accurate that this iBook follows a formatting more similar to a PDF than the e-books typically available on iBooks. In doing so, it addresses a pretty major challenge for graphics intensive publications where the location of the graphics relative to text is quite important. Basically, to ensure that the supporting graphics are located in the proper context, the only options previously were to buy a print edition or somehow acquire a PDF file of the book. (A third approach is to do the book as an app; this was the approach of the Push Pop Press-issued Al Gore book. The downsides of that are that they don't go on your Books app, they may lack highlighting, bookmarking capability, etc., and the files can be very very large.)

I am encouraged to see this book available on iBooks using an e-book file approach that is similar to that of a PDF. It won't be for everyone – I do recommend that people who are considering purchasing this book download it first as a sample. Also, I do agree that it is not as user-friendly to read it in the locked PDF style formatting as opposed to the standard, very user-friendly iBooks format. But some books simply don't lend themselves to the iBooks format for the reasons described above.

My hope is, with the release of this very good book in this format, that other graphics intensive books, such as those by Edward Tufte and Steven Few, will begin to hear in iBooks as well.

First and foremost, this is a review of the way this particular book is rendered and formatted by iBook, not a review of the book itself, which is fantastic.

This book is formatted like a PDF and I'm highly disappointed that it doesn't follow what I thought was the standard for iBook publications. You cannot enlarge text like with other iBooks, but instead use the pinch/spread gestures to zoom in/out on various sections of the book. This is lame and robs you of the swipe through pages functionality unless you're zoomed all the way out. This significantly impacts the quality of the reading experience. For a book meant to be about design the publisher seemingly failed to consider the usability of this book in the iBook format in an iPad form factor. That's just lame.

I wish I could get a refund. I love reading on the iPad but not when the books are formatted badly. I dislike paper books at this point, but I'd take the print option over this particular $15 (!!!) iPad option any day.

Don't buy this for iBooks. If you want it get the hardcover. This thing isn't formatted for iBooks in any way whatsoever.