Future book releases in iBooks can be earmarked with an alert. You’ll get an e-mail when the book is available. It’s simple to do.
The home page of iBooks is so well designed on the iPad that you may well never notice that you can scroll down further to see several additional items. (It’s not quite so nice on the iPhone.) For example:
iBooks main page is pretty, looks complete
However, if you scroll down you’ll find a special section in a box called “Quick Links.” You can inspect the most popular books that are on pre-order, and you can manage your Alerts. (Shown in the red circle.)
iBooks — the bottom half
If you touch “My Alerts,” you’ll get a somewhat unexpected page on which Apple tries, one more time, to entice you to buy more books from the same author you’ve purchased from before.
Alerts Entry Page
On the upper right, however, is another button that will finally get you to your alerts page. Like this:
Alert Details
Unfortunately, the “View My Alerts” button doesn’t provide more detail; it just takes you back a page. All you can do is select or deselect authors in the list. (You can also trigger automatic new book alerts for authors you’ve previously downloaded with the slider button.)
Creating Alerts
If you’ve never perused a book that hasn’t been published yet, you may not have seen the “Alert Me” option on that book’s description page. Here’s how it looks for Walter Isaacson’s upcoming biography of Steve Jobs:
Touch that “Alert Me” button, and you’ll be notified of all new books by that author by e-mail to your AppleID when they’re published.
That’s all there is to it. I suppose the Quick Links could be easier to find, and Apple might have made accessing your alerts a one step instead of a two step process, but it really is easy once you’ve done it.