Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Managing Books in iTunes

Michael E. Cohen:

With the major overhaul that Apple gave to the look and feel of iTunes in iTunes 11, Apple had a chance to revamp the Get Info interface to handle the different kinds of media that iTunes manages more fluidly and accurately. Instead, Apple left Get Info virtually unchanged, so that you have to guess that authors are really artists, that categories are really genres, and that books don’t have anything corresponding to Beats Per Minute (yes, you can set that field in Get Info for a book, though why you would want to do that – or why iTunes even allows you to do it — beats me).

More sadly, Apple has done little in iBooks to provide readers with the ability to see or to search through their books by any metadata beyond titles, categories, or authors, nor has Apple provided any organizing tools in iBooks other than those I described earlier. For the only ebook-reading software that Apple provides on any of its platforms, the lack of basic organizing tools in iBooks is embarrassing.

Comments RSS · Twitter

Leave a Comment