Apple Books Layoffs

Feels like a dumbing down, a switch from books to sports. Books seemed paralyzed after the lawsuit loss. The app has some great features, like the highlight text gesture.

@Neil Which gesture is that? It seems to be just the regular iOS selection gesture to me, and the docs don’t mention anything else. The gesture in the Kindle app feels a lot more natural.

@Michael ... oh they must have removed it, I have an old iPad Mini. It was quiet cool you could swipe your finger along a line of text and it would directly show the highlight colors sub menu. I guess it wasn't very discoverable :)

As a book publisher, who has been publishing on Apple's store for ~13 years, this is just one in a long succession of stupid decisions. from Apple.

Books has been a classic, textbook example of mismanaging a platform and a format.

The bone-headed things I've seen:

- Removing the ability to set and retrieve cookies so authors can't use javascript to set and change global CSS values throughout the book.
- Almost a year where book cover art was rendered too dark to read on he Apple Books preview site (fixable with a single CSS value change at Apple's end).
- Removing the entire book proofing workflow in Monterey by replacing the Mac version of Apple Books with an iPad port which lacks the push to device function that let you see changes on device whenever you aved an authoring file. Now for every single change you make, a sngle CSS tweak, you're expected to zip compress your book, delete the old version from the device, airdrop the entire book, wait, wait again as the device dumbly uploads it to iCloud, then re-open your book on device, navigate to the page you were editing, and view your change.
- Replacing iTunes Producer, the tool we used to submit and update our books on the Apple store with a web portal, which doesn't work reliably, and *has no function to upload or edit screenshots of our books*, which are pretty important for people making illustrated / visual content books.

And here's the kicker, despite being a convicted monopilist with regards to books, Apple is able to do this, and no credible alternatives for independent authors can get purchase, because Apple will demand 30% of the cover price for any in-app sales on non-Apple bookstores, and then after the third-party book store takes its cut, the author / publisher is left with maybe ~30% of the cover price if they're lucky. Last I looked at it, Amazon's deal was publisher gets 30% of the cover price, OR they pay a "download fee" and get 70%. On one of my $5 photo-books, that fee would have been ~$25.

But Apple going all in on TV, while ignoring Books does tell you everything you need to know about the superficiality of Tim's Apple.

Weirdly enough, about a week before this news broke, I moved all my books out of the Books.app.

There were two drivers for me: 1) some EPUB3 files had trouble rendering correctly (images not showing), and 2) Books changing the EPUB Zip archives into packages. The first one was obvious to see and mildly irritating, and the second only became apparent when I tried to get these books out of Books’ storage.

I can understand that that’s how it chooses to store EPUBs, but even dragging them out from the app window into a Finder window to export left them in this state for me. It finally took a custom script that I found on a forum to convert all the EPUBs back into their proper format so I could move them to another ebook management app. (It was behaviour similar to this that caused me to stop using the Music.app a few years ago. Do not mess with my data.)

These two things are possibly unrelated to what’s happening in the Books division at Apple at the moment, but they are indicative of the decline of quality of the software to me.

@Neil Yeah, with Kindle you can just swipe and it will highlight with the default color in a single gesture.

@Someone I have steered clear of Apple Books, primarily because they don’t have any e-ink reader hardware, but also because post-Jobs it has not seemed like their heart is in it.

@Barry: Rendering isues could be for a number of things - Books.app is just a repurposed Webkit instance, with two viewports. It would be interesting to see if the rendering problems occur when the individual pages from the book are loaded in a browser.

As for the packaging issue - EPUB .zipp is not the same as a normal finder.zip. I use eCanCrusher for compressing and decompressing EPUBs - you can also check out Snowflower EPUB Validator on the app store, it's a self-contained Mac app that validates EPUB files. It might give you a lead on the rendering problems etc.

@Michael Tsai: Because I do full colour photo books and graphic novels, e-ink isn't really in my scope, but I will say this, up to iOS12 (the next iOS devices I had came with iOS 17), iBooks / Apple Books was by far the best eBook reader of any sort. So many little things, like the spread view in portrait mode sliding left and right, but always showing you the spine and a bit of the adjacent page, so you knew which side of the spread you were on. Or, the page turning thing being an actual 3D effect you could pull about with your finger, not just a canned animation. Also spine integrity - I do a lot of "black paper" books, and it neverused to splpit the spread at the spine to reveal the white of the viewport behind.

That particularly has changed in the iOS 17 version - my spreads keep getting a while hairline down the centre depending on the zoom level, because I genuinely don't think there's anyone at Apple testing this stuff any more.

You're right about Apple's heart not being in books - they're trying to be a TV studio, and I recall that proverb from the book of Jobs: "We think basically you watch television to turn your brain off, and you work on your computer when you want to turn your brain on."

*sigh*

Sadly I'm married to Apple Books: leaving it now would just be suicide. It's a shame because I'd be happy to pay Apple's ripoff prices if they were indeed DRM-free because the software is shit, particularly the catalyst shoebox experience (though I never liked the Mavericks app much either, I'd mostly prefer to read on iOS and manage Books separately in iTunes or elsewhere as compressed packages). There are persistent VoiceOver bugs making it impossible to continuously read, on both platforms. Tempted (but haven't yet got up the gumption) to write to the Attorney General and demand DRM-free versions of all of my purchases, in order to exercise my right under the Marrakesh treaty ...

@Sebby
Not advocating piracy or anything, but there's a reason I removed DRM from my Nook and Kindle books. I didn't want to deal with problems down the line if the software became horrendous (or unavailable given how many times B&N has removed their computer apps from distribution) or the hardware devices I own die and I get tired of purchasing new models. And yes, I paid for all these books (minus the free ones that are occasionally given away).

I'm sorry you feel trapped in iBooks. Not sure if there's a similar escape hatch available to you.

@Nathan_RETRO Trust me, if I could, I would. Already do it routinely for Audible and there's no question at all that this increases the value of my purchases (although of course nothing can change the criminal choice of encoding quality for dramatisations etc). Unfortunately Apple's DRM was never (consistently and permanently) broken and I don't have a time machine so it seems I can't undo the damage of so much of my accessible library being in iBooks; the best I can do is borrow (literal or figurative, you decide) the equivalent title elsewhere, or temporarily if I'm speculating. It's just tragic that among the many consequences of digitisation, fair access to what you actually fucking bought is still not often possible and we still have to resort to the shady approaches. Copyright maximalism does its worst, as usual.

There was an application called "iBookCopy" a while back, that you could pair with a 10.12 install, that was successfully able to decrypt the iBooks DRM.