If you have iTunes 9.2 and iOS4 installed on your iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch, the iBooks app can view PDF files in addition to other e-book formats. That means you can easily bring any PDF with you for reading on-the-go. An anonymous MacOSXHints.com reader found an easy way to add almost any kind of document to iTunes’s Books collection:
If you want to quickly add a document or a Web page to your Books collection in iTunes, all you need to do is to create an alias of iTunes.app and drag it to ~/Library/PDF Services. (You can create the folder if it doesn’t already exist.) Now, when you’re browsing the Web or viewing documents and you decide that you want to read them later on a portable Apple device, just hit Print, click the PDF button on the bottom left corner of the window and choose iTunes. iTunes will launch and receive the PDF. Next time you sync your device, the document will be synced as well.
Reader horkstow points out that if you plug the Web site into Safari’s Reader function before sending it as a PDF, it will be in a much more iBook-friendly format. If you’d prefer not to mess around in the ~/Library folder, reader dute lets us know that you can also click Edit Menu from the Print PDF drop down, hit the plus sign, and add the iTunes application that way. The advantage of adding the alias manually in ~/Library is that you can rename it to something like Send PDF to iTunes, which will then appear in the PDF menu. Finally, script-wizard Doug Adams posted a link to his PDF Adder collection of AppleScripts; among them: Add as PDF to iTunes, a PDF Service workflow that does much the same thing as this tip.