The amount of time devoted to Books in the keynote was not encouraging. Then we learned just prior to Apple's WWDC keynote that a new version of Books would be touted.
This year, for the first time since 2010, Kindle became my only reading app. I'd been gravitating towards Amazon anyway, reluctantly, but the iBooks deletion situation was the last straw. George Orwell himself could not make this shit up. No matter how many times you would try to re-download them, they would be tossed into the memory hole. You read that right: In an unnecessary, unrequested hunt for an extra gigabyte or two, iOS considered books (which average a mere 500 kilobytes each) to be expendable.
#Ibook app for mac use it free
Finally, with the help of some engineers, I discovered that this was supposed to be a feature, rather than a bug: My iPad had less than 5GB of room on it, so it was actively trying to free up space. What was truly disturbing about the iBooks disappearances was that nobody in my local Apple Store or on the Apple Support phone line could tell me what was going on. (And if we break our glasses we can always increase the font size.
This was like a high-tech, no-fun game of whack-a-mole.Ĭall me old-fashioned, but I like to have my entire e-library actually with me at all times - for reading on a plane, or reading on a beach far from WiFi or cell service, or reading with a solar-powered charger after some future apocalypse.
#Ibook app for mac use it download
I'd still see the titles in my library, but no matter how many times I tapped the cloud icon next to each - this was another truly annoying feature, the fact that you had to download each book literally one by one - the cloud icon would reappear next to the book a few hours or days later.
#Ibook app for mac use it cracked
But even that feature wasn't all it was cracked up to be - as I learned when my iPad started mysteriously deleting downloaded versions of most of my iBooks, making them iCloud only. The amazing disappearing iBooksĪt last, in 2016, Apple let you store your iBooks library in the cloud. You had to remember to bookmark the page you were on when putting down your iPad if you wanted to pick it up later on the iPhone. Seems like a key feature, right? Like something Apple could manage easily with iCloud? Amazon had Whispersync, a feature that let you pick up a book exactly where you left off, no matter which Kindle device or app you were using. The final straw came when my iPad started deleting booksīut in the post-Jobs era, iBooks fell behind. It took Amazon until March this year to add scrolling to the Kindle app, and even now it's only available for books you buy on Amazon. When iBooks 3 launched in 2012 alongside the iPad Mini, it added continuous scrolling for all books, a feature I raved about at the time. (It was easier to strip the DRM out of Kindle books than Apple-bought books, but paradoxically that just let you read Kindle purchases on iBooks rather than the other way around.) It allowed you to upload EPUB files, the open format for e-books, while Amazon preferred proprietary formats like MOBI. The iBooks app was front and center on launch day.Īpple was going to change the e-reading game, and for a hot minute it did. We forget now how much energy Steve Jobs expended selling that groundbreaking tablet as an e-reader. Here at last was a device and an e-bookstore that could challenge the dominance of Amazon and its Kindle, which was then three years old. I've been an iBooks booster ever since the first version of the app launched, alongside the original iPad, in 2010. There's still time to make Books great before iOS 12 officially launches in the fall. Luckily, the problem can be solved with a few crucial design tweaks. Which leads me to wonder whether the Apple CEO is genuinely invested in the literary category - or whether he's just treating Books as another opportunity to sell stuff (the Books store is much more prominent in the new app) or as window-dressing for his big education push.
The bad news is when it's working as intended, Books still seems like an app built more for show than for serious readers. The good news is I found fewer bugs than expected, and that Apple Books has some usability improvements over iBooks. IOS 12 preview: Serious upgrades to security, speed, and smarts
0 kommentar(er)
