While it was not within the remit of the article, no mention has been made about the near-complete lack of metadata tag editing functionality – especially on Mac, due to it now being a gimped catalyst app.
This has come up before in these forums, with seemingly the only solution being to run an old version of Mojave’s Books app in a VM (or via other means), in order to have the fields available to edit (as most were removed in later versions of mac Books app).
What on earth Apple are doing with Books app in regards to users actually being able to maintain their own database tag data, is anyone’s guess. They seem to think that users with non-Apple purchased titles don’t need such basic tag-editing functionality or something?!
Complete and utter misunderstanding of what users want and need in terms of controlling their database, in favour of needless changing of GUI functionality that is mostly unimportant.
@canecittadino Years ago I dumped iBooks/Books because I prefer to sort on Author + Series and had to do so manually since iBooks/Books can’t do that type of sort. The finally straw was when an update to iBooks/Books in iOS completely trashed my library sorting! I found MapleRead by MaplePop that has built-in Author + Series sorting. So now I import my ebook purchases into Calibre to (if needed): deDRM them, configure metadata, and convert to ePub, After that I import them into MapleRead on my iDevices. Thus iBooks/Books has been replaced by Calibre on my iMac in addition to having been replaced by MapleRead on my iDevices. Kindle’s Mobi format sucks; ePub is many, many times better.
@romad.mobi is of course now being depreciated in the most recent Send To Kindle update. So you can just send the .epub file – either via email or via in-app share pane.
The share pane method is very recent, tried just yesterday without problems (previously some Calibre converted ones screwed-up all the apostrophes on upload to kindle or similar?). I have most of my books in both Books and Kindle, so can use either ecosystem to read.
But yes, I agree, while Kindle has always been limited in metadata tag editing, Apple really have screwed the pooch by removing the previously better tag-editing functionality in recent versions, in favour of seemingly playing around with the app’s GUI interface on the catalyst version. Annoying and sad.
@jimthing As I was told by an author, while Amazon now accepts epub files, they convert them to mobi files before putting them in the Kindle Store. I then have to use Calibre to convert them back to epub so I can upload them to my iPad Minis.
@romad I don’t think it is .mobi though, as that’s Kindle’s very old standard (hence its depreciation), but is actually one of their newer current .azw (KF8) formats.
" Now, it will be a little easier to get an ePub on a Kindle. Amazon is going to allow you to send ePub files to your Kindle via the Send to Kindle function, and it should then convert the ePub into a KF8 file. Which, while technically an ePub is not really an ePub because it is only supported by Kindles. "
I’m pretty annoyed at the always-on chrome, which I find intrusive. And in the middle of the book I’m currently reading, I’ve somehow triggered a new interface widget that appears top-left, and looks like ︎ [page number]. I haven’t figured out how the clear it yet.
It’s much older than that. .mobi files were designed for use with the MobiPocket e-reader software. I think this software and format was originally developed for the Palm platform (I used it on a Palm m515). As a matter of fact, .mobi files are actually Palm .prc resource files with a filename extension designed to distinguish them from generic Palm documents.
Amazon bought MobiPocket (and therefore the .mobi file format) in 2005, for use on Kindle. They retired the format and its web site in 2016.
@Shamino - Sure it’s an old format all right. In this context I merely meant .mobi is the older format Amazon used.
But now .mobi files are effectively almost end-of-life’d on the Kindle platform, as you cannot upload this format using the Send To Kindle methods anymore. Which is the typical way many users like to use, in order to get everything kept on their online Kindle library cloud – available under “Docs” at amazon.com/mycd (or in my case amazon.co.uk/mycd) – rather than the manual plug-device-in-and-drag-files-onto-it method, where files are only stored local to said device rather than cloud.
Anyway, I know many third-party sellers including Joe Kissell at Take Control Books are stopping bothering with offering .mobi in favour of just offering .epub – well at least after Amazon irons out the final conversion to their own format bugs with sending .epub files via Send To Kindle, and said service then finally stops allowing .mobi uploads. Likely in the very near future.
One thing that nobody has mentioned is that there is no way to download a document into the Books app and then prevent it from getting offloaded. More than once I was on a flight and tried to access an older book that had been purged from my device (remaining only in the cloud). I wish there was a way to turn that automatic management off (the same way I can turn off “Optimize Storage” for Photos).
This is one of my big annoyances with Books (and isn’t new in iOS 16), both no way to tell it to not offload books, and to always download books (I’ve been burned by both). I’d personally be quite happy if there was a way to tell it to download any book that gets added on any of my devices, and to never get rid of a book unless I explicitly tell it to.
I’ve been using Marvin 3 for the past year or so and I also really like it. And I am just as bummed out that it has not been updated in 4+ years. I’ve reached out to the author of the app via social media several times asking if there are any plans to update it or maybe ‘open source’ the code but radio silence. I especially love how Marvin can connect directly to Calibre.
Also, if you store *.epub files in a folder on your iCloud drive, navigate there on your iPhone/iPad and do the same thing - double click on the file on your iPhone/iPad and it opens in Apple Books.
Like @adamrice, I’m disappointed that Books now always displays the Reading Menu and close button, as both overlap and obscure part of the content and get in the way of the reading experience.
What I find even worse, though, is that Apple has applied the same misguided Control Center design approach to the Reading Menu: All items in the menu look almost exactly same, even though they operate differently:
Of the smaller roundrects at the bottom, the center and right are on/off toggles.
All other roundrects summon additional selector controls.
The Contents “button” additionally operates as a slider, …
… unless you select scrolling mode, in which case the horizontal Contents control now works as a button only.
Without any visual cues to indicate how each control behaves, it’s up to the user to memorize the controls’ behavior, or to apply trial and error to find out. It’s as if the fundamental principle of “recognition over recall,” one of the central advantages of graphical user interfaces over comand lines, never existed.
Considering how bland and uninspired those flat, colorless roundrects look, you can’t even make the argument that Apple’s designers prioritized aesthetics over usability. They simply failed to achieve either.
Admittedly, the Dynamic Island in iPhone 14 Pro is true design genius. Nevertheless, I’m not too hopeful that the overall design direction at Apple will noticeably improve anytime soon. Sigh.
Books has lost the ability to share notes you make in an ebook: used to be I could make notes and highlights in an ebook and then share them. This was especially useful when I’d make a draft ebook (using, say, Pages), mark up typos and other issues with notes and highlights, and then export those notes so I could go back to the source file and fix them. Now you can create notes but there is no way to share them: the share menu is completely absent.
In addition, the menu that appeared when making a note or highlight allowing one to chose the color of the highlight mark is missing…not completely, though, it appears every so often (say, one mark out of 20 or so) just to taunt me.
It’s as though Apple’s QA team assigned to Books is either MIA or busy reading their Kindles…
I’ll generalize this to Books in Ventura and iOS 16, saying that , unfortunately, neither has a UI or automation ( AppleScript or Shortcuts) to get a deep link to a particular selection of text. (could in principle be there in Ventura > Books > Share menu ; but on my Intel Mac running Ventura, Books > Share crashes consistently. I doubt it’s there anyway.)
We ( @ CogSci Apps) managed to develop a script to get the URL and title of the currently open book, but it wasn’t easy. I don’t understand Apple’s reluctance to provide links in many of its apps. It would be to their advantage. For instance, I’d like to be able to send a colleague a deep link to a specific page in a book. Much quicker than “Author year title page number”. Or with our software users can get a link to a specific book, but you still need to manually specify the page number, which is nearly meaningless in the context of ebooks.
In 2001 I launched a project to create an elearning startup (which I then merged into Simon Fraser University Faculty of Education for 8 years) that would amongst other things enable users to select text and get a hierarchical link like:
Author (year) > Chapter 3 > Section 2.
We developed software along those lines at SFU (and CogSci Apps). But it would be nice to see Books and Kindle provide an API and UI for this.
yet another broken feature in ios16.1. i’d the books app set to slightly larger font as my ancient eyesight is failing. almost every time when i return to the book i’m reading (pratchett’s “making money” since you didn’t ask), the fonts have been reset to tiny. also, highlighting text fails.
don’t recall but i believe it more or less worked in ios16. the release notes mentioned some fix to books for 16.1. who knew the fix involved breaking more things?
I’m seeing the color choice menu, but at the top of my screen, and on my second gen SE iPhone, the menu’s bottom edge is there, but not moveable or usable. Filed a report.
Michael and Lisa touched on it, but the change that is driving me crazy and not clearly mentioned anywhere is how to highlight!
Highlighting text has changed significantly…and for the worse under iOS/iPadOS 16.1. Instead of long pressing and dragging to highlight or bring up the other functions (note, look up, translate, etc), now you have to double-tap…but make sure to hold on the second tap…then lift your finger. That brings up the little blue selectors, which you move (more actions) until the text you want is between the text selectors (just like Messages, etc). Then you lift your finger (again) and the function menu appears, from which you can pick “highlight” (or Note, etc). To change the color, you first have to highlight, then go back and tap the highlighted area, and the color menu comes up.
Of course, if you just do a double tap (which is the normal habit) instead of tap and tap/hold, you get a bookmark.
Also, as Josh mentioned in the article, to know where you are in a chapter you have to tap the menu button and the info appears at the top. Sigh.
Concur with others that Books has lost much of its appeal…sorting a mess, metadata a mess (although you can incorporate/update via Calibre before moving into Books), etc. Marvin 3 is decent, but as noted above, not updated for 4+ years.
The fairly straightforward task of reading and interacting with eBooks has not been made easy or intuitive at all in the last few years. I find Calibre useful for eBook management, conversion, metadata, etc. on the Mac, but find it hard to read books on my MBP. I have actually gone back to physical books for my grad school program and that’s a crying shame.
This sounds eerily similar to what we went through with iTunes over the years. Something we loved and used a lot was MS Officed with bloat and “reimagined” so many times that by now we can barely use it anymore let alone make sense of all the changes.
So we find ourselves praying for a small startup out of a garage to come by and show us a simple and intuitive alternative that works well, we fall in love with instantly, and goes on to put big Apple to shame. Including an ad where they forecast that one day they will take over the world with better products essentially almost putting the fat and lethargic behemoth out of business.
︎ [page number]. I haven’t figured out how the clear it yet.
