Our Verdict
Whenever I ’m demand to reexamine an atomic number 99 - reading app , my first reaction hovers around snarky entertainment . “ Come on , ” I say to myself . “ If it shows school text and you could learn books , it ’s a fine e - proofreader . ” That I conduct this inner monologue each sentence I ’m charged with such a revue is intelligibly a personal failing — specially because I ’m awry . The idealistic e - reading app should become as inconspicuous as a paper book can , but not shy away from offering the advantage that only digital books can .
Last calendar week , Apple unveil iBooks 2 . If you by and large use the app on an iPod mite or an iPhone , iBooks 2 offer nigh no improvements over its harbinger . The bulk of the improvements Apple made to the app are bound to the iPad .
To test out the optimized ebooks , I download several from the iBookstore build into the iBooks app . The first affair you ’ll mention about optimized ebooks is that their file cabinet sizing are much , muchlarger than traditional ebooks . Tolstoy ’s 1300 pageWar and Peace(a regular ebook ) download to iBooks in about five second gear on my iPad ; it ’s 2.3 MB . E.O. Wilson’sLife on Earth , an optimized school text of which just 51 pages are useable , weighs in at 965.3 mebibyte . It direct a bunch longer to download .
This, That, and the Author: Textbooks, or any other fancy book made with iBooks Author, can contain interactive elements. But they’re also a bit limited—you can’t adjust fonts or font sizes in this view, for example.
If you do the mathematics , that putsWar and Peaceat about 1.8kilobytesper Sir Frederick Handley Page , toLife On Earth ’s 19megabytesper page . It ’s not surprising that textbook crammed with 3D models , motion picture , and other synergistic elements would be huge , but it ’s something to keep in head , particularly if you use a 16 GB iPad or a slow Internet connection .
That ’s Hot : An interactive map from Life On Earth showing global temperature over time .
The good news about optimized textbooks likeLife On Earthis that they really are beautiful . The experience of read the books is cruft - devoid ; the original iBooks theme that blow sieve genuine estate showing a skeumorphic bookbinding as you read is nowhere to be found in fancy reading mode . Gone too are the overwrought varlet turning brio , as varlet simply slide into view as you filch — it ’s very similar to the Kindle app ’s page - turn experience . ( A old update to the iBooks app offered an choice to handicap the practical book look when reading a even ebook ; look for Full Screen under idea in the Font carte du jour . )
That’s Hot: An interactive map from Life On Earth showing global temperatures over time.
Though obviously this depends on how the author organise your fancy textbook , all the launch textbooks currently usable crack impeccable , incredible intent . rap to play a movie , or using your digit to explore a 3D model or interactive graphical record , is very coolheaded .
alas , though , because of how carefully lay - out these optimise ebooks must be , the ebooks themselves are n’t as flexile as regular ebooks . You ca n’t , for example , adjust the baptismal font or font - size when you ’re read an optimized leger , since that would mess up the data format . ( It would also intend that if an instructor ask you to turn to page 27 , your pageboy 27 might be different from your classmate’s — no commodity for the intended schoolroom hearing . )
Why The Long facial expression : When you read optimized ebooks in portraiture view , iBooks allows you to resize the text edition as trust .
Why The Long Face: When you read optimized ebooks in portrait view, iBooks allows you to resize the text as desired.
The sole exception to this font manipulation limitation appears when you splay your iPad from landscape painting to portrait . When you do that , you bid leave-taking to the fancy book ’s notional layout , and or else get a sight more akin to one that Instapaper or Safari Reader might provide . All the interactive elements get pulled out to the left margin , with the text flowing across the sleep of the screen . Instead of turn Thomas Nelson Page , you simply keep pinch vertically — again , just like in Instapaper .
In this view , you may freely adjust the typeface and font size . In most of the textbooks I sampled , the font size used in the fancier landscape view was readable , but smaller than my old piece eyes might prefer for lengthy reading ; that I can adapt the font size in portrayal style is a welcome shade . And since the portrayal view does n’t apply a Thomas Nelson Page - turning mechanism , it can keep pageboy numbers consistent . Page 17 might be two foot long if you measure it out , but all the text that should be associate with that page routine is .
When you ’re reading optimized ebooks , you get access to iBooks ’s new highlight features . All you need to do is tap and drag over text to foreground it . Tap the highlighted text to shift its highlighting color ( or shift to underlining ) , or to sum up a note . When you ’re show a unconstipated book , this same motion only select the text , at which point you may opt whether to foreground it or not .
Target Practice: You might have no problem tapping the tiny Note icon in the margin. Or you might wind up unintentionally turning the page when you try to tap it.
To select text in optimized books , you may either double - pat , or tap and hold without moving your digit while holding until the selection interface seem . Only by selecting text — as opposed to spotlight it — can you bring up the selection to see a word ’s inline definition .
Target Practice : You might have no job tapping the tiny Note picture in the tolerance . Or you might wind up accidentally turning the Sir Frederick Handley Page when you seek to tap it .
When you tot a annotation to foreground text edition , a tiny note ikon is added to the page ’s margin . Delicate - finger folk should have no job tapping the tiny icon , but fatter - finger folk like me might circumstantially reverse the ebook ’s Thomas Nelson Page ( in landscape persuasion ) if they inadvertently tap elsewhere in the margin . Switching to portrait panorama eliminate that job , since you do n’t tapdance to flex pages in that mode , on the optimized ebook side . If you ’re attempting to review notes in a landscape mode or while interpret a regular book and you find the tiny tap target too little to off with any accuracy , you may instead tap once on the highlighted text the promissory note is linked to , and then on the easy - to - reach Notes icon that appears .
Take Note: Notecards offer a clever way to review and study notes and highlights. Disappointingly, though, they’re limited to optimized books; regular ebooks need not apply.
iBooks already offered a covert that consolidate all of your note and highlights for a given Bible . While that blind now look slightly different look upon whether you ’re reading a veritable or optimized book , it stay enormously helpful either way . fresh in iBooks 2 — but limited to optimized books — is a Notecard eyeshot .
Take Note : Notecards offer a apt means to review and read notes and highlights . Disappointingly , though , they ’re limited to optimise book ; regular ebooks need not apply .
The new eyeshot aggroup your highlights and notes into virtual notecards , with your high spot on one side and your notes on the other . you could shuffle the notecards to test yourself , and even restrict the cards to highlights of a specific color . And you’re able to optionally include glossary damage from the book in the notecards — words on one side , definitions on the other . It ’s a ignominy you ca n’t use notecards to study bank note train in regular books , and I ca n’t imagine the limitation is a technological one ; it ’s simply a feature Apple has only prefer to make useable for optimized ebooks .
Notecards do suffer from one frustrating oversight : You ca n’t jump from a notecard straight off to the highlighted text in context within the ebook . you may do so from the more traditional notes view , and it ’s a great means to dive in when you ’re critique your note . Apple at least include the pageboy number as a reference on the notecards , and since iBooks 2 introduces the power to use the search field to jump to a specific varlet , all is not lose . But a direct linkup from circuit board to associated rule book Thomas Nelson Page would eliminate a couple steps .
In an optimized ebook , a two- or three - finger pinch takes you from your current page back to the Chapter overview screen . That sieve provides inter-group communication to subsections within the chapter , along with thumbnail - found page seafaring . ( you may crimp with more fingers if you disenable multitasking gesture in the configurations app . ) In a regular playscript , you instead tapdance to get up the bill of fare , and then tap the seafaring icon , and then tap for the Table of Contents .
Besides their far smaller file cabinet sizing , even books in iBooks offer a significant advantage compare to their fancy book brethren , perhaps the best reading - centric feature of speech iBooks whirl — a small text edition indicant submit how many pages remain in the current chapter . One key advantage paper books hold over ebooks is the ease with which you may flip ahead to see a good fillet point ; the “ pages left in this chapter ” index number offers an excellent digital choice — and it ’s nowhere to be found when read optimized ebooks .
Additionally , iBooks has never once crashed on me while I was using regular book , since I first started using the app . In less than a week of reading the occasional schoolbook , I meet two crashes that allow for me staring at nothing but Apple ’s stock linen paper backcloth . I call for to force - quit the iBooks app and relaunch it to get back to reading . I have yet to reboot a newspaper book .
Those optimized book are so big that it sometimes necessitate even the iPad 2 some metre to process them . When I tap Library to return to my bookshelf from a fancy textbook , iBooks take a long moment to assemble its thoughts before it take me where I require to go . Returning to the library fromWar and Peace , on the other hand , is essentially instantaneous .
Beyond the fistful of crashes , the missing “ pages remain ” text , and the Brobdingnagian file sizes , the other knock against optimized books is their everlasting loser to work on the iPhone — it ca n’t be done . I ’m not saying it would be easy , but Apple should be able-bodied to provide some means — in all likelihood inspired by the portrait prospect experience on the iPad — of fitting these books on the iPhone ’s small-scale concealment . It ’s a vast ebook advantage to be able to read another couple of varlet while you ’re waiting in line or somewhere else without your iPad . for certain , interactive element might not be quite as easy to experience on the iPhone , but “ not quite as well-fixed ” is far in effect than “ not available at all . ”
I said at the outset that my druthers in e - reading apps is that they just get out of the way and let you read , while still packing in the vantage that their digital nature can give . With regular record book , iBooks succeeds .
With optimize books , the app succeeds too — but in a unlike way . It ’s not at all complicated to read an optimized textbook in the app , and anyone conversant with an iOS gadget should mostly be able to navigate such a book without trouble . ( The one gotcha is remembering the tweak gesture to get back to the Chapter view . ) But you do need to examine each element on the page to eff what it can do : Is this just a photo , or is it a slideshow , or a model , or an invigoration , or a TV , or something else ? Again , it ’s not surd to answer such doubt — you just attend at the interactive constituent ’s description to see what it does . It ’s a different mode of reading , and it makes the books feel much more like keen webpages than texts . That ’s not necessarily either in force or bad — but it ’s undeniably different from traditional reading . Where iBooks does a superb job getting out of your way as you read regular books , itscreams“THIS IS AN IMMERSIVE MULTIMEDIA EXPERIENCE ” when you take fancy unity .
If iBooks were two apps , I ’d give the one for reading regular books a in high spirits rating , and the optimise experience a still favorable - though - slightly dependant recommendation . And I ’d finger conflicted about it , because when it works on the iPad , the optimise indication experience really is impressive . But the limitations — the occasional crashes , massive file sizes , missing “ Page remain ” feature , and want of iPhone documentation — mar an otherwise not bad experience .
[ Lex Friedmanis a staff writer for Macworld . ]
