Yeah kwik is definitely worth the money from the looks of things! But my wallet says no for now 
so do you advise the api’s?
M
The best place to begin is Corona University. This is the hub for our guides and tutorials. As a beginner, pay attention to the video tutorials, most of which cover the basics in a straightforward manner. The guides are more comprehensive, and you can read them when you’re more accustomed to the SDK.
http://www.coronalabs.com/resources/tutorials/
Have fun!
Brent
Following on to what Brent said. Corona has been used to great success to deliver interactive children’s books and graphic comic/novels. The reason is these apps are not text heavy but are art heavy and have elements that can be interacted with. I don’t know what your books are like, but just thinking in terms of “books” be it a novel, a short story, a tech manual, the things that are traditionally done as PDF’s are probably not something you want to tackle with Corona unless you went with Enterprise edition and included a native PDF reader. Still that type of content is best as Brent suggested as an EPUB and distributed through a book seller.
With a Corona app (and this may be more toward Carey’s concept) you could easily develop a game to support your book and provide a link to a book store where the book could be bought. You could use in app purchases to let the person download your PDF so that they can use their local PDF viewer to read it. How you download it may be a bit tricky because the regular download API for Corona puts the file in the app’s sandbox and the device’s e-reader wouldn’t be able to access it.
@Rob/Brent,
Thank you so much guys for taking the time to help me out I really appreciate all the wisdom! I’ve signed up to amazon and am taking a look at the EPUB route. I’ll take your advice I think and do ebooks outside of corona. I know it’s possible to do it with Corona but in my current position it’s not the best route. As well as this I’m going to work my way through the entire guide section Brent posted and do my homework to make for better games and apps! Thank you for being supportive and providing so many answers during my learning curve!
M
Focusing strictly on Android and circling back to my question, If the book is being sold in Google Play books, can a user do an IAP purchase of the book from within the app, that will simply make it appear in google books on their device? I know this question is a bit obscure, but I would rather do IAP than take them to the google store via link. As this is an all google solution, there should be a way.
@carey.green, I don’t know enough about how Google Play books work, but in general your app can only download to it’s own app sandbox, unless there are specific OS controlled API’s like the photo library that supports copying files in and out of the photo library. But even if Google has that API for Android, we don’t have it implemented, so I’m pretty sure the answer is no.
What you can do is use system.openURL() to open your book’s download page in the browser which on iOS ends up in the right app to buy the product, and I would hope Android would have the same behavior.
Do you want to turn this into a Corona-powered app? There are tools to help you do so… let me know if this is the case.
Thanks,
Brent Sorrentino
Hi Brent,
I absolutely would! And I could definitely do with some help! My main concerns with this apps are their protection from piracy. Using AppGeyser to turn the pdf into an apk makes alteration of code difficult if not impossible, which then leads to an inability to add the google play licence key. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks,
M
Hi Brent,
If you’re still about I could still do with a hand!
M
Brent,
I’m asking the same question, I think… I have a corona game app I’ve built to promote my book. I want to then sell my book as an IAP to the google play book. How does this work? After IAP I give the user a pointer to the book in Google Play? do I send them electronically the link? etc.
Thanks,
Carey
Michael, can you clarify what you want to do better? Are you expecting Corona SDK to read and present your PDF to the viewer? Do you want it to download your PDF? Or are you wanting Corona SDK to tell a story using different scenes in an interactive way or do you want to build your own book reader that can display text? I’m not real sure what your whole process is.
Carey, in your case, are you wanting to include the book with the app and just unlock it using IAP or have them purchase it then download it somehow? Is your book on some other e-commerce site? How do you intend for the purchaser to actually read your book?
Hi Rob,
I’d like corona to simply present the pdf, scrollable obviously but only up or down just as it would be on Microsoft Word or a pdf reader. Nothing more or complex in design. Just that. For now anyway 
M
Corona does not have facilities to display a PDF that I’m aware of beyond downloading it or showing it in a webView. See this thread for some insite on what can be done with PDFs’
http://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/29499-opening-a-remote-pdf-file/
Note, in my experience the webView only works on iOS. Android will want to download the file from the internet and play it in a pdf viewer app which the user will have to have already installed.
Really? There’s no way the app can display what I’ve written? Without a third party app?
Hi Michael,
An app can display what you’ve written easily enough, but if you want to just “direct import” a PDF, you’ll face the limitations in how it gets displayed. But yes, if you want to take more time and make the same content into an app, you have considerably more flexibility.
Brent
Hi Brent,
I’m quite happy for it to take a little longer. I just worry I’ll upset my customers as I plan to sell the app, which means no ads, but of course unless they’ve paid for their pdf reader as well they’d get ads regardless after having paid for my app. As you can tell I’m brand new to this and just want a clear easily programmable way to sell my ebooks in a way my customers would be most happy. I just don’t have a clue how to do it I’m afraid!
M
Brent/Michael,
focusing on Droid first, I would prefer my app to simply use IAP to give the user the ability to purchase the book and have it appear in google play books on the phone. I believe google play books stores everything in the cloud, so just wondering how i could do this.
Carey
I’m just as new to this I’m afraid, but I’ll offer my thoughts. So it’s a game, that comes with a book? If that’s the case, then you’ll need to have the book you’ve made as a separate app available from it’s own place within the google books store. Using it as a plug-in to the game would surely be very complicated and probably device memory heavy as you’d have an app designed to work as a game suddenly needing to work as a book. You could just place a link in your game directing the user to the google book market to buy the book? Which I think would just be a case of copy and pasting the URL of your book in the game e.g.
“Click here to buy the book! www.googlebookmarketplace.com/justanexample”
If your dead set however in having the one app be both a game and a book reader, you’ll have to ask the pro’s how to code it as it’s way out of my understanding; as is programming a book app (which is why I started this thread).
M
What other options do I have besides “direct import” of a pdf?
M
I don’t believe Corona is ideally suited for e-book creation - you can develop an “app” that presents the content, but this is mainly used for interactive-book purposes.