Shira Ovide, Bloomberg:
Apple Inc. is revamping its digital bookstore in another attempt to take on Amazon’s dominance. I can’t help thinking: What if?
This is a reference to this article, about Apple remaking the iBooks Store and the iBooks app, simplifying both and making book reading a better experience.
More from Shira:
The missed opportunity was for Apple’s business partners, particularly newspaper and magazine companies, which Apple persuaded to turn themselves inside out to take advantage of the iPad. It turned out that Apple was leading those partners to a dead end.
This is a bit of a curmudgeonly statement, but there is truth at its core. A number of publishers went all in on the iPad, with visions of a simple path from print to digital, with subscriptions intact.
The eighth anniversary of the iPad’s introduction was on Saturday. Allow me to take you on a trip back to that time. Steve Jobs set off on a sales pitch to media companies that he hoped would make the new tablet computer more useful. Jobs was a true believer that the iPad would be an amazing opportunity for books, newspapers and magazines to reimagine their products, capture readers and patch up their ailing business models.
All-in-all, a fascinating read.
My wife is an interesting barometer on this: She’s a serious reader and reads 95% of her books on the iPad. Initially she used both the Kindle app and iBooks but as iBooks improved, she avoided Kindle except for books that were only available on Amazon’s platform. But, as iBooks has sat on its butt and Kindle app has improved, she’s using the Kindle app more and more. For her, at least some of it is media availability on the Apple platform but it’s also the useably of the various reading apps.
I’m not a fan of proprietary file formats, whether on iBooks or Kindle. I mostly use the former to read pdfs on my mobiles.
What’s the difference between a “digital magazine” and a website?
iBooks has some useful features but its still too confusing for the lay user. It took me three days to figure out my my books weren’t syncing between the iPad and my macbook. Turns out it was because of one buried switch that said hide books from the cloud (plus I had to log out and log in again)/
PDFs are kind of a shitty format for ebooks, since they don’t rewrap when you adjust the text size.
iBooks supports ePub, though, including DRM-free ePub.
Oh, absolutely no argument there. The pdfs I’m describing are, more often than not, scans of very old magazines (like “Upper and Lower Case”) or the latest public transit map.
I have a bunch of both ePubs and Mobis—not to mention several interesting iBook freebies—but I’m sad to say that my non-tech/non-news reading is way down from what it used to be.
My Terry Pratchett series got largely packed away, so I decided to collect it in iBooks as I get around to reading them again[0]. I’ve also collected the main books of The Expanse in iBooks.
I’ve got used to it; it’s kind of ideal for a small home. The catch is about 1 in 1,000 page turns iBooks crashes, and when it does it usually remembers your position about 20 pages back.
[0]: Terry Pratchett isn’t really dead until I get all the way through it again and finally read the youth books, including The Shepherd’s Crown. I’m not in a hurry.
I can’t remember if I ever had any Pratchett, but I did see something very good with his name on it produced by British tv. The Expanse is something that just might get me reading again.
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