iBooks 1.2 Ups the Ebook Ante
Taking advantage of the holidays and an anticipated flood of ebook gift purchases, Apple recently released version 1.2 of its free iBooks app for the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch. This latest version includes features that improve both the presentation of books and the user’s ability to manage book collections and notes.
Layout Enhancements — Those of us who like to read books in iBooks’ landscape/two-up page format, and who also like to bump up the font size for ease of reading, will be happy with the new auto-hyphenation feature, which reduces the number of ugly gaps in lines that have only a few lengthy words. Like full justification, auto-hyphenation can be toggled with a preference in the Settings app. However, if you haven’t updated your iOS device to iOS 4.2, you won’t get the benefit of this feature, which requires the new version of iOS.
In the list of “What’s New in Version 1.2” on the iBooks page in the App Store, Apple also claims that you can “[e]xperience fully illustrated books, from children’s picture books to beautifully designed art books, available for download in the iBookstore.” I’m not quite sure what this means, since even the very first ebook presented to users in iBooks 1.0, A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh, featured full-color illustrations. However, two screenshots on the App Store page show book pages with text appearing superimposed on an illustrated page background; the illustrations in Milne’s book, by contrast, are presented separate from the text, which appears above and below them.
A quiet change that will be particularly welcome to anyone reading Take Control books (or other heavily linked titles) in iBooks is a new “Back to page X” link that appears in the lower left corner of the page after you follow a link. Now you can follow a link and return to where you were reading easily.
Other under-the-hood improvements (tip of the hat to EPUB expert Liz Castro!) include the capability for publishers to embed fonts into EPUBs (actually available in iBooks 1.1.2, but only revealed under iOS 4.2) and support for page breaks in EPUB files, both of which bring EPUB just a little closer to what’s easy in PDF.
Management Enhancements — If you’ve been using iBooks for a while, it’s likely that you have begun to acquire far more books than fit on a screen or two of your iBooks library, and have been struggling with arranging them in some coherent order. iBooks 1.2 helps ameliorate bookshelf overload with a new Collections feature. On an iPad, a Collections button replaces the Books/PDF button that appeared across the top of the Library in some previous versions of iBooks; on an iPhone or iPod touch, a button which has the name of the currently displayed book collection serves the same purpose as the iPad’s Collections button. You can tap the button to see a list of all of
the book collections you have, and you can tap a collection name to see its books displayed on your Library shelves. The two default collections in iBooks 1.2 are, not surprisingly, Books and PDFs, but those names have become decoupled from their contents: you can now, if you are perverse, put PDFs in your Books collection, and vice versa.
You also use the Collections list to create new collection categories, to delete collections, and to arrange the order in which collections appear. If you delete a collection, you can choose whether the books it contains are removed from your device or returned to the collections from which they originally came.
The order in which you arrange collections is important, especially if you have a lot of collections, or choose to navigate among them by swiping left or right across the bookshelves in your Library instead of choosing them from the Collections list. You probably want to put your most-used collections near the top of the list, and your collection of archived books near the end.
Moving books between collections is simple: tap the Edit button on the Library toolbar and then tap the books you want to move. Each book you tap displays a checkmark badge. Tap Move on the Library toolbar to move the books to a different collection. You can, instead, tap a red Delete button to remove selected books from your Library.
iBooks 1.2 also provides a hidden Search feature: flick down on the Library’s bookshelves to see the Search field that is sequestered just above the top shelf of books. Like an iTunes search, your search results begin to appear on the bookshelves beneath the Search field as soon as you begin typing. You can search for titles and author names; names of categories, such as “fiction,” do not work. (We hope that hiding basic functionality like this does not become an iOS user-interface precedent, given how
utterly undiscoverable it makes iBooks’ search feature.)
Notes on Notes — iBooks has long had the capability to attach user notes to any text selection in a book, but iBooks 1.2 finally gives note-taking readers a way of getting those notes out of iBooks, either via email or in printed form, the latter using the AirPrint capabilities of iOS 4.2.
To email or print a note, tap the Table of Contents button that appears at the top of any book page, and then, in the Table of Contents, tap the new Share button at the top right of the page to choose between printing or emailing the notes in a book. Note that the notes you print or email do not include the selected text to which they are attached, not even in a non-copy-protected book. What you do get is the name of the chapter in which the note appears, the contents of the note, and, at the end of the notes, a general citation with the name of the book, the author, and the publisher.
Bottom Line — If you have an iOS 4.2 device that can run iBooks, there’s no reason that I can think of not to get this latest version. The 15.2 MB download is free, and the improvements in this version resolve a number of shortcomings in the previous versions. I’d have more to say about the new iBooks, but, well, I’m right near the end of an exciting book, so if you’ll excuse me, I have some reading to catch up on.
Apple has blundered badly with this so-called upgrade. The process for creating collections of books is clunky and unworkable, and this is amazing when we contrast it with the simple intuitive way they recently implemented folders for apps.
"clunky and unworkable"? Interesting. How so? Within moments of first seeing the interface, I was able to create and arrange several collections and move books into them. What specifically do you find clunky and unworkable?
I would argue that to make this more usable that iTunes should use the "Grouping" or other such field to tag which collection the book should go in. That way it would be easy to do a mass update on the computer. Although I would much prefer a new tab in the info screen or whole new application on the computer to handle eBooks. iBooks on the mac, and just use iTunes to sync like iPhotos maybe?
A Mac application to handle ebooks would be nice, as would a more powerful Books tab in iTunes for syncing.
As for using "Grouping" or some other field to determine a collection, I'm not so sure. It might suit your needs and how you manage your media, but I can think of a lot of cases where it would create more problems than it would solve. For example, I have a collection named "Read" into which I move books after I've finished reading them; hard-wiring the iBooks collections to match Grouping metadata categories would make this much more awkward for me.
These are still early days in epublishing (see "incunabula" for historical parallels). iBooks is only a few months old. I suspect iBooks a few years from now will resemble today's iBooks in the same way that Mac OS X 10.6 resembles Mac OS X 10.1: superficially similar but much more powerful and flexible.
Still, as I have over a hundred publications, I expect to be able to manage my publications in list form through i-tunes and not have to load them then drag and drop each one (or groups of them with the Edit feature in ibooks). I agree with the earlier comments that (1) it would be benificial to be able to manage Collections in i-tumes, and (2) to bring e-books into the 21st century i-tunes needs to stop saving them and labling them with metadata appropriate for songs and albums.
As someone who is interested in creating the enhanced ePub documents that only iBooks can display, I have high hopes that Pages will be upgraded to enable the full screen feature. The other thing that authors need is an iTunes function to display ePubs so that we can quickly and easily see how something will look and behave in iBooks. All other media handled by iTunes can be played. Even PDFs are handed off to a player so that would be the minimum.
Good work Apple, keep it up.
I, too, would love to see an Apple EPUB reader on the Mac that can display ebooks from your iTunes library (as well as from elsewhere). It would be nice if one were made available in the soon-to-open Mac app store.
Indeed - my preferred EPUB reader for the Mac is the Firefox extension I wrote about in http://db.tidbits.com/article/11590
But I'd really like to Apple reveal the exact iBooks EPUB engine too.
Has anyone run into the reported bug that puts the same cover on every one of your PDFs? I've also read that there are graphics issues with the "bookshelf" having black gaps in it.
How about the ability to look up an unknown word as easily as in Kindle? With the latter, just touch and highlight the word, and a definition generally appears as a footnote (or you can wikipedia or google it from there, and easily return to the book when done).
I like the illustrations iBooks has but Kindle is my preferred right now.
You can tap and hold a word to bring up a bar of options, one of which includes Dictionary; tap that button and you get the definition as a pop-up window. If you tap the Search button that also appears, there are buttons in the search pane for "Search Google" and "Search Wikipedia".
So, one extra step for each action, but still manageable.
I still don't see the ability to publish graphic novels. The graphic content in this form is secondary to the text. Until the graphic takes predominance, the software is geared to conventional text-based books. Also, a lot is still happening on desktops and laptops. Unless I'm overlooking something, I cannot find a version for X.
I think graphic novels, as created for paper, won't convert well to EPUB as it stands right now. That said, a lot of what's being done with graphic novels may be better done in other digital ways that EPUB does support (or as an app).