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)
