iBooks in iOS 11 and High Sierra
Message in a bottle to Apple: My Ibooks have ceased to download- they freeze and then cancel themselves. I have tried everything: googled forums, emailed the pretended help lines- no answer. Is there no hope? What is a fat mortal to do?
iBooks has had PDF rendering issues going back to iOS 8. It’s a fucking joke and reflects poorly on iOS that it’s even preinstalled still.
I wonder if iBooks would even exist if the iPad was new today and we understood tablets didn’t need to compete with e-readers. Seems Apple didn’t need to add anything to this market, nor did they have passion for it.
I pretty much only use iBooks to read Apple’s free developer documentation. So it’s hilarious that it’s constantly preventing me from doing this by telling me that my account is already authorized for five Macs. I have not even owned five Macs since iBooks was released, and I’ve used Deauthorize All on my iTunes account multiple times in the interim to get around bugs like this.
I’ve been happy with both my Kindle Oasis and the Kindle iOS apps, but the Kindle Mac app leaves a lot to be desired. For example, it doesn’t let you view more than one book at a time. And, as Dave DeLong notes, it doesn’t support cloud collections.
Previously: iBooks Author Conference Highlights Ecosystem Worries.
Update (2018-01-01): Jim Correia:
I just bought this book. Literally 2 minutes before I clicked “Read”.
Update (2018-12-04): Eli Schiff:
Fucking iBooks just removed all my bookmarks and saved notes. I am so pissed right now.
4 Comments RSS · Twitter
As someone who (for various reasons) doesn't buy anything from Amazon, I'm happy that Apple provided an alternative that I can use to get ebooks.
Ricky,
If I remember correctly, at the time there were at least three other major book sellers, Sony, Barnes and Noble, and Kobo, plus all the other outlets selling directly, in the USA anyway. Merely my opinion, this was not a real problem Apple was addressing, just more vertical lock in.
I passed on iBooks from the start.
As someone who makes his own books (not all of which are for resale), I would hate to see Apple give up on iBooks.
Not everything that I read comes from a commercial bookseller.
Marshall,
Since iBooks is so buggy, any reason not to simply use a different book reader? For your not for resale books I mean.
On Android, I use a few different eBook reading apps. If you stick to standard file formats (ePub, PDF, CBZ, etc.), they work pretty well. From my time on iOS, seems like there were more than a few book reading apps on the platform, no? I get a lot of stuff from Project Gutenberg, Archive.org, Humble Bundle, RPGNow, etc. I just load them in the reader of my choice (or use my calibre server for LAN access to the library).
