The standard Apple iPad application for eBook reading, iBooks, is one of the best examples of a solid, well-designed app on the iPad. It is a pleasure to use and has a wide range of functionality. Apple continues to add extra features to the app, as evidenced by today’s update which brought better handling and printing for PDF documents and the ability for users to categorize documents and books. But, reflecting darkly on iBooks, is the success of the Kindle application for iPad and Mac, together with the severe limitations of iTunes.
Regarding the Amazon Kindle app, the similarities with iBooks are remarkable and both apps are equally excellent in terms of reading, display and ease of use. However, Kindle has two massive advantages over the Apple system, the first being the online storage of reading data such as keeping your place when you leave a book and change to a different reader.
iBooks is, of course, unable to do this, probably because, and this nicely leads us on to the second advantage Kindle has over it, iBooks documents and novels are only able to be viewed on Apple mobile devices. We point this out and moan about it every single time an update to iTunes or iBooks is released, but iTunes has no abilities whatsoever for dealing with ePub files and therein lies the biggest obstacle in overcoming Kindle.
While Apple made a great choice in using the open standard ePub, they are unusually slow in giving Mac users they ability to play with these files. You can of course open ePub files in iBooks, but can you import them into Pages. Sadly, no. A strange fact given that you can export your Pages documents in ePub format. The same is true with iTunes.
The reason for this may be that Apple are planning on releasing a standalone iBooks reader for Mac that would be available on the soon-to-be-launched Mac App Store. A great idea if this were the case. With Amazon and Google snapping at their heels, Apple needs to sort it out.
Reading Too Much Into It?
