How Apple’s Books App Has Changed in iOS 16
Most app changes in iOS 16 are subtle, but Apple completely overhauled the EPUB reading interface in the Books app (PDF reading remains unchanged). I found it bewildering at first and figured that you might too. So here’s a quick guide to finding your way around Books in iOS 16.
To be clear, this is all about reading in Books—the app’s library interface for finding and organizing books is largely unchanged from iOS 15, likely because much of it is online content from Apple Books laid out in Web-like scrolling views.
The Reading Menu and Settings
First off, when you’re reading an EPUB (again, as opposed to a PDF), Apple eliminated the toolbar at the top of the screen that could be summoned or dismissed with a tap of the screen. Books now hides most of its controls in the reading menu, accessed by tapping a button that lives by default in the lower-right corner.
Here’s what you’ll find:
- Contents: Shows your current progress in the book and displays the table of contents when tapped
- Search Book: Brings up the search panel
- Themes & Settings: Provides access to preset themes and customization options
- Share: Displays the Share sheet
- Lock Orientation: Locks the orientation of the Books app to portrait, independent of how you’re holding the iPhone or your iPhone’s system setting
- Bookmark: Adds or removes a bookmark on the current virtual page
- Position Indicator: In scrolling mode, the position slider on the right displays your current progress, and you can drag it to navigate within the book quickly.
If you don’t like having the reading menu button on the right, you can switch it to the left in Settings > Books. While you’re there, peruse the other settings, especially Show Status Bar, which keeps the iOS status bar showing at all times while reading, instead of just temporarily when you tap the screen. On Face ID-equipped iPhones, keeping the status bar showing at all times avoids the awkwardness of text disappearing under the notch or Dynamic Island.
Bringing up the reading menu also displays a subtle progress indicator at the top of the screen that tells you how many pages you have left in the current chapter. That progress indicator—plus another one at the bottom that tells you you’re on page X of Y—also appears with a tap on the screen. It’s all the same information that the iOS 15 version of Books kept at the bottom of the screen when the toolbar was showing, but it can be harder to parse due to sitting on top of the book text in a darkish gray-on-lightish gray bubble.
Creating and Deleting Bookmarks
When I first started using Books in iOS 16, I found myself accidentally creating bookmarks. I eventually realized that Books now creates a bookmark when you double-tap the screen, which is easy to do inadvertently. Fortunately, another double-tap removes the bookmark from a page.
When you create a bookmark, a new entry appears in the reading menu: Bookmarks & Highlights, which you can tap to see your bookmarks and highlights. Tap one to navigate to it. When you’re done with a bookmark, swipe right-to-left to reveal a delete icon.
Navigation within a Book
Books now defaults to vertical scrolling instead of horizontal page flips (but that can be reversed in the Themes & Settings panel), and the skeuomorphic page flip animation is gone. You can jump to the start of any chapter using the table of contents or scroll quickly through the book using the position slider.
However, once you start scrolling, even though a line marks your previous location, the slider doesn’t snap to it, making it nearly impossible to scroll back to your previous location. Plus, how would you return to your previous location after navigating using the table of contents or a bookmark?
Fortunately, there’s a solution.
When you jump around in a book using the table of contents, a bookmark, or the position slider, a button appears in the upper left, showing the previous page location and giving you the option to jump back to your previous location. Once you return to a previous location, that left-hand button changes to let you jump back another step, and another button appears on the right to enable you to jump forward to your spot before the jump back. It’s just like the back and forward buttons in a Web browser, but with page numbers.
Finally, in another change associated with the loss of the toolbar from the previous version of Books, there’s no longer a Back button to return to the main Books screen. Instead, tap the ever-present X button at the top right of the screen to return to your library.
Customizing Book Looks
Finally, let’s look at the Themes and Settings panel, which lets you adjust how a particular book looks and works. Most prominent are six preconfigured themes that combine font, size, color, and background settings. They’re the only way to change the background color, but you can change the other settings independently:
- Along the top, tapping the small and large A buttons reduces or increases the text size.
- The next button (a tiny page with a position slider, if you look closely) toggles the book between vertical scrolling and horizontal page flips.
- The far-right button lets you manually choose between Light Mode and Dark Mode. Alternatively, Match Device matches whatever your system setting is, and Match Surroundings uses the sensors in your iPhone to adjust the light mode automatically.
Tap Options to select a particular font (with a few more choices than in the past) or turn bold text on or off. Even more welcome than the new fonts and bold option are the new Accessibility & Layout options. If you turn on Customize, you can adjust line spacing, character spacing, and word spacing; toggle full justification; and allow multiple columns.
If you do a lot of reading in Books, do you find these changes helpful or just different? And have you noticed any other changes from the previous version?
You used to be able to set the brightness while reading separately from the system brightness. I used that quite a bit and still miss after many months of beta use.
Being able to tap a theme and switch the settings in one go is nice, if (as is typcial for Apple) you like Apple’s defaults, but it’s a lot more taps to customize. And I wish you could name a theme and have it sync to all devices.
Also I could’ve sworn I saw a setting for showing real page numbers but apparently Apple added that awhile ago and it’s only if the epub supports it.
Off topic from the books UI:
Briefly way back in early iOS 16 betas there were a bunch of extra shortcut actions for books that were really nice. They disappeared and haven’t reappeared even in 16.1 betas.
I still occasionally have issues with syncing, even epubs i bought from the bookstore vs. uploaded into Books. Between iPad and Mac seems reliable, phone is a crap shoot (all devices on latest 16.1 betas)
Pre-Orders, when they ship, will get stuck in this weird mode where it will only show me the preview and the “buy now” button even though I already paid.
RIP skeuomorphic page turn. I suppose its days have been numbered for quite a few years now, but I still am sad to see it go. I enjoyed the whimsy of it. That said, I mostly am used to / like the changes they’ve introduced. I like being able to see the % complete in a book without having to return back to the main book listing page.
Add: For most of the iPad OS 16 beta, the overlays when you tap have been poorly placed and clashed with the text of the actual book. I’m glad to see they have fixed that in the latest beta.
Until Apple Books is capable of doing a simple author or title sort correctly, none of the rest matters. For a decade or more half my authors have been sorted by last name, the other half by last name. In fact, the Apple Books author sort of titles by some prolific authors lists half their titles under their last name and half under their first name. Title sorts show the same sort of nonsensical arrangement. Some titles are sorted by a, an, or the, while some are correctly sorted by the first word after the article. Earlier versions of iBooks let the owner alter the file metadata, but recent versions do not. (Just as well, I suppose, because I really don’t feel like spending months editing the metada of 600 EPUB files.) Anyway, iBooks/Apple Books has sucked since very early on, and it still sucks. Apple should just cede the territory once and for all to Kindle, and stick to video. (I was going to say “or music,” but if you’ve taken a look at your Apple Music library lately, the sorting there is even worse, and that’s not even taking into account duplicates, split albums, incorrect versions and album art, etc., etc.) “Apple is now a services company.” Yeah, right….
Still very frustrated by the store search results. Why would I want to see results for books in foreign languages that I cannot read?
It should be possible to only get results for selected languages.
My problem with the Books app is that I am unable to consolidate date my purchases across from my and my wife’s devices (pads, phones, and Macs). For example, I can’t find a Reading Now page on the Macs or the Account button (my face) that allows me to Family Share. Some it may be that some devices are intentionally held at Mojave for use of crucial 32-bit apps.
Has anyone else had these problems and been able to resolve them?
It used to be possible to load ANY epub into Books. A few months ago this changed. Now one can only load books downloaded from Apple.
Is there any way to bypass this restriction, so that non-Apple epubs may be read in Books?
I have been reading books on my phone and iPads for over 10 years…from the very beginning as an original iPhone and iPad user. I’ve read close to 600 books.
That being said, I feel the IOS 16 interface is change for the sake of change. MUCH less user friendly. I can no longer easily/quickly get to the table of contents, brightness, font size/type or see where I am in the book.
I may need to check out Kindal again which I hate to do as a Apple Fanboy.
I may as well vocalize while I’m at it that I don’t care for the current library which changed some yeas ago from the old bookshelf library which I loved and found so easy to use. Especially the ability to sort by authors or date read in a clear list format.
Thanks for listening!!
Bill who loves TidBITS.
I don’t see the problem. I downloaded a non-Apple epub on my iPhone running IOS 16.0.2. I then opened Files and the Download folder and tapped the newly downloaded epub. It opened. Closing the file showed it as the most recent addition to Apple Books (which I confirmed by opening Apple Books on my computer).
I read epubs on my iPad, not iPhone. I used to get a new (old) into books by dragging them into iTunes on my iMac, then onto Books in iPad.
If there’s a way to get non-Apple epubs into the Books app on an iPad, I’d be grateful. I did contact Apple who said yes it used to be possible but now it is not.
2012 iMac 10.15.7
I just did this the exact way listed in the post above you (to quote):.
I had an .epub file (which I created myself from a friend’s draft of a book he published), which was in iCloud Drive. I tapped the file, and it immediately opened the Books app, with the ePub file in the list.
iPad Air running 15.7.
Thank you! How do I get the epub into iCloud Drive?
That I just copied on my Mac, but if you can download it in Safari on the iPad you can save it to iCloud Drive. (It doesn’t need to be iCloud Drive - it could be Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, it could be in local storage on the iPad - basically any provider that works in the Files app.)
On the Mac, just double-click the epub. If Books is your default app for epub, that will import it. (Otherwise, Open With Books.) As long as Books is set to sync in iCloud, that will also copy it to your other devices.
My go-to epub reader is Marvin 3, which is highly customizable but hasn’t been updated since 2018. One great aspect of this app is that it also runs reasonably well on an M1 Mac. However, with iOS 16 and the iPhone 14 Pro, Marvin is starting to show its age. It’s still functional, but the custom contextual menu is gone, and the top line of text is partially obscured by the dynamic island of an iPhone 14 Pro.
The problem is that there seem to be no good alternatives out there, probably because Books is “good enough” for a lot of users. I like the updates to Books, but of course there is just one niggly feature missing that prevents me from using it. That feature is the ability to adjust the side margin width to fit more text on the screen. I’m too distracted by those gigantic side margins that make a column of biggish text on an iPhone only four to five words wide.
For now I’m limping on with Marvin, but I’d be thrilled if Books or another app were sufficiently customizable to replace it.
Unfortunately there’s no version for Mac, but for iOS Mapleread is quite good.
https://www.maplepop.com/web/mr/index.php
There are three flavors, CX (free with limitations), CE (full features for epubs), and SE (full features for epubs and pdfs). It can edit metadata, access and serve OPDS/HTML, pretty good notation, and you can export notes in several ways. (I email notes to myself in a simple enough html that they’re adequately of readable in plain text and they live in a dedicated mail folder.) User interface is pretty flexible. It’s drm-free books only.
On the mac I use the ebook-viewer.app from calibre (which I otherwise don’t like). Install calibre, then set all .epubs to open in ebook-viewer.app in the finder. It’s not great, but I haven’t found anything better and I seldom want to read an epub on a mac anyway, just check for a decent conversion, or look something up.
For metadata, I decided a while back that time spent fussing with metadata is time that could spent reading instead. I use Finder as the filing system with standardized file names and a tolerable directory hierarchy. Find Any File and or HoudahSpot work well to turn up what I want. (Names are ala “Vo - 2 When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain.epub”) Once I choose something I just copy it to the relevant iPad.
For adbobe drm books on iOS, there’s Bluefire Reader. I haven’t used it for a long time but I remember it as being adequate. For pdfs, I use Goodreader.
Thanks, guys. But I don’t think anyone has told me how to get an epub from my iMac onto my iPad. Also, I don’t know how to get an epub into iCloud (if that’s necessary) and iPads don’t have the “Files” folder mentioned above.
I am assuming you are using the latest iPadOS (15.6.1) and macOS (12.6).
Do you have Books set to synchronize via iCloud?
On the Mac: System Preferences > Apple ID > iCloud > iCloud Drive; Check iCloud Drive and click Options; Be sure that Books is set to synchronize.
On the iPad: Settings > Books; Under SYNCING, turn on iCloud Drive.
Now any books you add to Books on the Mac should shortly appear on the iPad (and vice versa).
As I said above, add the ePub to Books on the Mac simply by double-clicking the ePub file.
If you do the above, then you don’t need the Files app to transfer ePubs in Books, but it is useful for many things, especially transferring random files between devices. See Use the Files app on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch - Apple Support
See especially Step 1.
^Check these settings first. Then:
Done.
On the Mac version I believe I’d also check the Account menu to make sure that your Apple ID is logged in. I think that’s what makes epubs (and purchased content) sync via CloudKit.
While it was not within the remit of the article, no mention has been made about the near-complete lack of metadata tag editing functionality – especially on Mac, due to it now being a gimped catalyst app.
This has come up before in these forums, with seemingly the only solution being to run an old version of Mojave’s Books app in a VM (or via other means), in order to have the fields available to edit (as most were removed in later versions of mac Books app).
What on earth Apple are doing with Books app in regards to users actually being able to maintain their own database tag data, is anyone’s guess. They seem to think that users with non-Apple purchased titles don’t need such basic tag-editing functionality or something?!
Complete and utter misunderstanding of what users want and need in terms of controlling their database, in favour of needless changing of GUI functionality that is mostly unimportant.
Thanks very much. Now it works!
@canecittadino Years ago I dumped iBooks/Books because I prefer to sort on Author + Series and had to do so manually since iBooks/Books can’t do that type of sort. The finally straw was when an update to iBooks/Books in iOS completely trashed my library sorting! I found MapleRead by MaplePop that has built-in Author + Series sorting. So now I import my ebook purchases into Calibre to (if needed): deDRM them, configure metadata, and convert to ePub, After that I import them into MapleRead on my iDevices. Thus iBooks/Books has been replaced by Calibre on my iMac in addition to having been replaced by MapleRead on my iDevices. Kindle’s Mobi format sucks; ePub is many, many times better.
@romad .mobi is of course now being depreciated in the most recent Send To Kindle update. So you can just send the .epub file – either via email or via in-app share pane.
The share pane method is very recent, tried just yesterday without problems (previously some Calibre converted ones screwed-up all the apostrophes on upload to kindle or similar?). I have most of my books in both Books and Kindle, so can use either ecosystem to read.
But yes, I agree, while Kindle has always been limited in metadata tag editing, Apple really have screwed the pooch by removing the previously better tag-editing functionality in recent versions, in favour of seemingly playing around with the app’s GUI interface on the catalyst version. Annoying and sad.
@jimthing As I was told by an author, while Amazon now accepts epub files, they convert them to mobi files before putting them in the Kindle Store. I then have to use Calibre to convert them back to epub so I can upload them to my iPad Minis.
@romad I don’t think it is .mobi though, as that’s Kindle’s very old standard (hence its depreciation), but is actually one of their newer current .azw (KF8) formats.
I’m pretty annoyed at the always-on chrome, which I find intrusive. And in the middle of the book I’m currently reading, I’ve somehow triggered a new interface widget that appears top-left, and looks like
︎ [page number]. I haven’t figured out how the clear it yet.
It’s much older than that.
.mobifiles were designed for use with the MobiPocket e-reader software. I think this software and format was originally developed for the Palm platform (I used it on a Palm m515). As a matter of fact,.mobifiles are actually Palm.prcresource files with a filename extension designed to distinguish them from generic Palm documents.Amazon bought MobiPocket (and therefore the
.mobifile format) in 2005, for use on Kindle. They retired the format and its web site in 2016.@Shamino - Sure it’s an old format all right. In this context I merely meant
.mobiis the older format Amazon used.But now
.mobifiles are effectively almost end-of-life’d on the Kindle platform, as you cannot upload this format using the Send To Kindle methods anymore. Which is the typical way many users like to use, in order to get everything kept on their online Kindle library cloud – available under “Docs” atamazon.com/mycd(or in my caseamazon.co.uk/mycd) – rather than the manual plug-device-in-and-drag-files-onto-it method, where files are only stored local to said device rather than cloud.Anyway, I know many third-party sellers including Joe Kissell at Take Control Books are stopping bothering with offering
.mobiin favour of just offering.epub– well at least after Amazon irons out the final conversion to their own format bugs with sending.epubfiles via Send To Kindle, and said service then finally stops allowing.mobiuploads. Likely in the very near future.One thing that nobody has mentioned is that there is no way to download a document into the Books app and then prevent it from getting offloaded. More than once I was on a flight and tried to access an older book that had been purged from my device (remaining only in the cloud). I wish there was a way to turn that automatic management off (the same way I can turn off “Optimize Storage” for Photos).
This is one of my big annoyances with Books (and isn’t new in iOS 16), both no way to tell it to not offload books, and to always download books (I’ve been burned by both). I’d personally be quite happy if there was a way to tell it to download any book that gets added on any of my devices, and to never get rid of a book unless I explicitly tell it to.
I’ve been using Marvin 3 for the past year or so and I also really like it. And I am just as bummed out that it has not been updated in 4+ years. I’ve reached out to the author of the app via social media several times asking if there are any plans to update it or maybe ‘open source’ the code but radio silence. I especially love how Marvin can connect directly to Calibre.
Also, if you store *.epub files in a folder on your iCloud drive, navigate there on your iPhone/iPad and do the same thing - double click on the file on your iPhone/iPad and it opens in Apple Books.
Like @adamrice, I’m disappointed that Books now always displays the Reading Menu and close button, as both overlap and obscure part of the content and get in the way of the reading experience.
What I find even worse, though, is that Apple has applied the same misguided Control Center design approach to the Reading Menu: All items in the menu look almost exactly same, even though they operate differently:
Without any visual cues to indicate how each control behaves, it’s up to the user to memorize the controls’ behavior, or to apply trial and error to find out. It’s as if the fundamental principle of “recognition over recall,” one of the central advantages of graphical user interfaces over comand lines, never existed.
Considering how bland and uninspired those flat, colorless roundrects look, you can’t even make the argument that Apple’s designers prioritized aesthetics over usability. They simply failed to achieve either.
Admittedly, the Dynamic Island in iPhone 14 Pro is true design genius. Nevertheless, I’m not too hopeful that the overall design direction at Apple will noticeably improve anytime soon. Sigh.
Books has lost the ability to share notes you make in an ebook: used to be I could make notes and highlights in an ebook and then share them. This was especially useful when I’d make a draft ebook (using, say, Pages), mark up typos and other issues with notes and highlights, and then export those notes so I could go back to the source file and fix them. Now you can create notes but there is no way to share them: the share menu is completely absent.
In addition, the menu that appeared when making a note or highlight allowing one to chose the color of the highlight mark is missing…not completely, though, it appears every so often (say, one mark out of 20 or so) just to taunt me.
It’s as though Apple’s QA team assigned to Books is either MIA or busy reading their Kindles…
I’ll generalize this to Books in Ventura and iOS 16, saying that , unfortunately, neither has a UI or automation ( AppleScript or Shortcuts) to get a deep link to a particular selection of text. (could in principle be there in Ventura > Books > Share menu ; but on my Intel Mac running Ventura, Books > Share crashes consistently. I doubt it’s there anyway.)
We ( @ CogSci Apps) managed to develop a script to get the URL and title of the currently open book, but it wasn’t easy. I don’t understand Apple’s reluctance to provide links in many of its apps. It would be to their advantage. For instance, I’d like to be able to send a colleague a deep link to a specific page in a book. Much quicker than “Author year title page number”. Or with our software users can get a link to a specific book, but you still need to manually specify the page number, which is nearly meaningless in the context of ebooks.
In 2001 I launched a project to create an elearning startup (which I then merged into Simon Fraser University Faculty of Education for 8 years) that would amongst other things enable users to select text and get a hierarchical link like:
Author (year) > Chapter 3 > Section 2.
We developed software along those lines at SFU (and CogSci Apps). But it would be nice to see Books and Kindle provide an API and UI for this.
i’m on a roll here, folks …
yet another broken feature in ios16.1. i’d the books app set to slightly larger font as my ancient eyesight is failing. almost every time when i return to the book i’m reading (pratchett’s “making money” since you didn’t ask), the fonts have been reset to tiny. also, highlighting text fails.
don’t recall but i believe it more or less worked in ios16. the release notes mentioned some fix to books for 16.1. who knew the fix involved breaking more things?
a force restart fixes it.
I’m seeing the color choice menu, but at the top of my screen, and on my second gen SE iPhone, the menu’s bottom edge is there, but not moveable or usable. Filed a report.
Michael and Lisa touched on it, but the change that is driving me crazy and not clearly mentioned anywhere is how to highlight!
Highlighting text has changed significantly…and for the worse under iOS/iPadOS 16.1. Instead of long pressing and dragging to highlight or bring up the other functions (note, look up, translate, etc), now you have to double-tap…but make sure to hold on the second tap…then lift your finger. That brings up the little blue selectors, which you move (more actions) until the text you want is between the text selectors (just like Messages, etc). Then you lift your finger (again) and the function menu appears, from which you can pick “highlight” (or Note, etc). To change the color, you first have to highlight, then go back and tap the highlighted area, and the color menu comes up.
Of course, if you just do a double tap (which is the normal habit) instead of tap and tap/hold, you get a bookmark.
Also, as Josh mentioned in the article, to know where you are in a chapter you have to tap the menu button and the info appears at the top. Sigh.
Concur with others that Books has lost much of its appeal…sorting a mess, metadata a mess (although you can incorporate/update via Calibre before moving into Books), etc. Marvin 3 is decent, but as noted above, not updated for 4+ years.
The fairly straightforward task of reading and interacting with eBooks has not been made easy or intuitive at all in the last few years. I find Calibre useful for eBook management, conversion, metadata, etc. on the Mac, but find it hard to read books on my MBP. I have actually gone back to physical books for my grad school program and that’s a crying shame.
This sounds eerily similar to what we went through with iTunes over the years. Something we loved and used a lot was MS Officed with bloat and “reimagined” so many times that by now we can barely use it anymore let alone make sense of all the changes.
So we find ourselves praying for a small startup out of a garage to come by and show us a simple and intuitive alternative that works well, we fall in love with instantly, and goes on to put big Apple to shame. Including an ad where they forecast that one day they will take over the world with better products essentially almost putting the fat and lethargic behemoth out of business.
I don’t use Books all that much - I’m a Kindle person - but I just tried highlighting with Books on iOS 16 on an epub of a book a friend had published and if I long press, hold, and drag, I can then highlight. It doesn’t even need to be a long hold - long press and start dragging and it turns the text blue and brings up the ability to highlight, etc.
I just verified with a Take Control book I own on my iPad - same thing. Both devices on 16.1.
Yes, I am having trouble with both highlighting, deleting highlights and ‘add note’. I used to be able to add a note via selecting a single word and it would make a note containing only that word. Now it makes a note that includes a whole sentence. Why this irks me specifically (and maybe it’s a bug) is that I am learning two foreign languages and as I read books in those languages, I like to highlight single words I don’t know and add the english translation, so, e.g. I’d get a note like: “Angebot” and I could then write “offer, proposal, supply”. So useful for making up vocab flash cards. But now I have a whole sentence.
I haven’t yet tried exporting notes and highlights, but if I can’t do that, that will really suck. That works so great in Kindle.
Dang it Apple!!!
updated to ios16.1.1 and lo, books is even worse! when i open the app to resume reading, it often isn’t on the page i last read. it also still screws up the font size.
then i made the mistake of switching to scroll mode and the damned thing completely lost the plot. took way too long to find my spot in the book.
unbelievable how badly this app has been broken by whatever improvements the feature creeps were pushing into it.
the overall code quality of ios16 has been the worst update i’ve ever applied to any phone. congratulations, tim cook and team.
Not lost entirely; you can export individual highlights by swiping to the left and tapping the Share icon. But there’s no way, within iOS 16, to share all highlights at once.
The double tap to add a bookmark is no longer working for me? Anyone else?
Bill, from one Bill to another, It seems that every time there is a iOS ‘upgrade’, the Books app becomes more opaque. It appears that the app programmers are justifying their existence by making change for change-sake. The time spent by users on researching how to use the ‘new’ version of the app is becoming aggravating to the ninth degree. I’d pay for the ability to retro grade to the prior version or even the one before that. I also have in excess of 600 books in my ‘library’ from scores of authors. In each version of BOOKS, library management becomes more difficult. Even finding COLLECTIONS becomes more difficult.
It might be beneficial to have a consumer/reader(s) on call to the app team for insights and testing. I question whether anyone on the app team is an avid reader or has ever used a physical library. Making changes just to be making changes is a frivolous exercise. I spent a long career related to systems analysis, design and modification. I’m a big fan of innovation and enhancement. But I was also driven by the pragmatism of the project and the ability of the user to understand and implement the changes. How about giving the users time enough to finally figure out the newest version before forcing another cycle of modification and research to gain understanding.
Here’s an idea. How about downloading a BOOK “iOSx User’s Manual” as an integral part of any operating system upgrade.
Hoping these comments will reach someone who will ‘get them into the works.’
Very nicely put, Bill~thank you for the response. << I question whether anyone on the app team is an avid reader or has ever used a physical library. Making changes just to be making changes is a frivolous exercise. >> YES!!
Not only is the look, feel and reading of a book more tedious and less enjoyable the Library is even more so. I just don’t get how the organization let this happen. You would have thought one of the execs/leaders would feel the same way.
Anyway your input and call for help is appreciated, Bill.