Saturday, February 18, 2017

The State of iBooks in Early 2017

Michael E. Cohen:

iBooks is not quite as unreliable and confusing as it was when I wrote about it last year, but neither has it improved nearly as much as loyal iBooks users deserve. Moreover, what little support documentation Apple provides is sketchy and inaccurate, leaving the impression that even the support and documentation departments within Apple are ignoring iBooks.

[…]

Now and then, the Library window in iBooks on the Mac gets confused, showing books that aren’t there, or duplicating thumbnails for books that are there. A couple of days ago, I found two thumbnails for a short EPUB I had just uploaded. The second thumbnail was a phantom, and actually represented the next book in the window, which I only discovered by right-clicking the duplicate. A simple cosmetic problem you might think, but if I had attempted to delete the phantom copy, I would have trashed an entirely different book!

Previously: I Wish Apple Loved Books.

2 Comments RSS · Twitter

I think it's improved a lot, at least on the client side. Still no AppleScript and I'd like better editing of Epub metadata. But for me the past year the iCloud syncing of books on all my devices has worked flawlessly. Were I to wish for a change though it'd be more attention to publishing tools as there are *many* publishers that simply don't publish in iBooks so I'm stuck using Kindle with its lousy metadata support.

@Clark I don’t know—the Kindle clients have improved, too. I miss the multi-page swiping mode when in iBooks.

Which metadata are you referring to?

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