One of our subscribers, Patti Deters, asked about getting PDF issues of Photoshop Elements Techniques onto her iPad, and I thought it was worth putting a note here to show you how easy it is.

The free iBooks app that comes with the iPad will let you add PDFs of any type. First, connect your iPad to your computer and launch iTunes. Then, drag the PDF–or PDFs, you can copy multiple files this way–onto your iPad in iTunes’ Devices section. That’s it! The PDF will automatically get added to iBooks. Turn on your iPad, go to the Library and click on the Collections button. There you should see a PDF collection; choose that and you should see your magazines. [click the images below to see them full-size]

Theoretically, you should be able to add them to your book library by emailing them to yourself, but most Internet service providers (like Hotmail, AOL, or MobileME) won’t let you send large attachments via email (most of the PDFs are in the 20MB range, which is rather large for email). If you use a service like Dropbox, you can download the PDFs from there and “send” them to iBooks.

You can also send individual PDF tutorials to your iPad; just download them from the site and put them on your iPad the same way mentioned above. You can email these and load them into iBooks; just open the message, click on the PDF icon to download the file, then open it and click on the “Send To” icon in the upper right corner of the iPad screen. There you have the option of sending the PDF to iBooks.

Yeah, but what else are you doing for me?

We’ve had a more than few people ask for iPad-compatible videos, and we’re working on that, but it’s a bigger project than you would think. The problem is that the iPad requires videos of a lower bitrate than the ones we encode for the site, and we don’t want to lower the quality of the videos we post. What we hope to do short term is offer a “view on iPad” link to the videos, and longer term, a dedicated app (for iPads and Android tablets) to let subscribers see the videos directly, much like the Learn Photoshop Elements Today iPad app we currently sell on the App Store.

[Update: Bonnie asked below about Android support for the PDFs, and noted on our Facebook page that she was able to send a PDF of the magazine by Bluetooth to her Samsung Galaxy Tab, and that it "worked perfectly!" Thanks for letting us know, Bonnie!]