The venerable, and always interesting site TidBITS, is reporting this today. Here’s a snippet:
In another instance where it would have been nice of Apple to publish more-complete release notes, we totally missed a significant change in the iBooks app until recently. Back in “Take Control’s Problems with Apps and Docs in iOS” (25 July 2010), I complained about how hard it was to distribute files to iOS users via the Internet due to limitations in iOS. Although some limitations went away in iOS 4.0 and 4.2, others (no centralized file storage area, no OS-level support for Zip files) remain. Luckily, one notable limitation — iBooks failing to register itself as being able to open EPUB files from other apps — has now been rectified.
The practical upshot of this fix is that you can now transfer EPUB files into iBooks far more easily than before, when the only way was to drop them into iTunes and do a USB sync. For individual users, that means you can send yourself an EPUB via email and transfer the attachment to iBooks, and you can also copy EPUB files into Dropbox and use the iOS Dropbox app to send them to iBooks.
Much more of interest in the full article.
This also works with a web link, either http:// or ePub://
Smart move on Apple’s part. I personally really like the iBooks interface but ended up using other programs that can read epubs because of this restriction.
One caveat: I assume that this only refers to non-DRM’d epubs and PDFs, since iBooks uses a different DRM scheme…
Late to the party. This was added to/by the iBooks app several revisions ago (Can’t remember the exact version but it was several months ago.)
This also works with a web link, either http:// or ePub:// if the web server hosting .epub files has the proper MIME type configured. That should be: Content-Type: application/epub+zip
Otherwise, the server will send the file with the default MIME Type which is usually text and that will look like gibberish to most humans.
That’s great news! Thanks for posting. Will tweet to our followers!