How large/what size are iPad books?

I am getting an iPad for my 88 year old MIL, who is an avid reader. But I don't know what size iPad to get (16, 32, or 64 GB)

I anticipate almost no songs, few third party apps, and a few family photos.

What I think will be the driver is the number of books her iPad will hold.

So, how big is an average book?

Tis probably better if one reads before posting-

From this Apple FAQ (Managing your booksâ€¦):

Q: How large are typical books from the Bookstore?
A. The typical book is about 2 MB

unless you want to have videos or a TON of photos, it will be very hard to fill up a 16.

You might check out this review of the iPad as an e-book reader.

Given the limited other uses by your mother-in-law and her age, make sure the iPad meets her needs.

And this just inâ€¦

My MIL now insists/mandates that in addition to all the features I initially mentioned, she wants email (but no texting or sexting

) and Safari & Google.

So I guess Kindle is out. I just hope she has no newly found interest in real-time movie editing or 3D animation and the like.

Originally Posted By: Pendragon

Q: How large are typical books from the Bookstore?
A. The typical book is about 2 MB

Here's what i have so far...

Code:

find /Volumes/Music/MP3s -iname \*.epub -exec stat -f '%8z %N%T%SY' {} + |
awk -F/ '{ printf "%8.1f KB\t%s\n", $1/1024, $NF }' |sort -n

    39.7 KB	The Book of Nonsense.epub
    69.5 KB	Metamorphosis.epub
    94.9 KB	Beowulf.epub
    98.2 KB	The Time Machine.epub
   105.3 KB	Siddhartha.epub
   163.0 KB	Tales of Unrest.epub
   169.7 KB	Dubliners.epub
   204.7 KB	A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.epub
   278.7 KB	Walden.epub
   384.9 KB	The Art of War.epub
   697.6 KB	The Descent of Man.epub
  1174.2 KB	Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome.epub
  1484.0 KB	The King James Bible.epub

Those were all free BTW. [also available is stuff like "The Constitution" and "Tom Sawyer", etc.]

Looking at that last entry, i'd say the average novel is likely less than 2MB.

NOTE: that Terminal command and the search itself was conducted on my MacBook Pro, which syncs to the iPad. Naturally, doing that sort of measurement (i.e., using Unix tools on a command line) is not yet possible with Apple's mobile devices themselves... AFAIK. (i.e., someone would need to write "an app for that" first, and then have it get approved).

~Â§~

EDIT #42:

Hmm... since i divided by 1024 back there, perhaps those are technically â€œkibibytesâ€ (KiB) then, not kilobytes (KB). Shoot, this 'new math' is so confusing.

Anyway, here's a slightly trimmed-down, cleaned-up version...

Code:

find /Volumes/Music/MP3s -iname \*.epub -exec stat -f '%z/%N' {} + |
awk -F/ '{ printf "%8.0f KB\t%s\n", $1/1000, $NF }' |sort -n

      41 KB	The Book of Nonsense.epub
      71 KB	Metamorphosis.epub
      97 KB	Beowulf.epub
     101 KB	The Time Machine.epub
     108 KB	Siddhartha.epub
     167 KB	Tales of Unrest.epub
     174 KB	Dubliners.epub
     210 KB	A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.epub
     285 KB	Walden.epub
     394 KB	The Art of War.epub
     714 KB	The Descent of Man.epub
    1202 KB	Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome.epub
    1520 KB	The King James Bible.epub

Of course, that "/Volumes/Music/MP3s" part will need to be replaced by whatever folder-path holds your epub files.

--

Final disclaimer: those are "text-only" materials above... so, i'd imagine anything with graphics or animations of some sort could leap up in size quite easily (perhaps significantly).

Ah, now I understand kibbles & bits.

Many thanks Hal-