iBooks 1.1 out for iPhone and iPad

[ATimson]

iPhone version needs some work, IMO - the smallest font size is still too big. (And I think there's too much space between lines, but maybe with a smaller font that wouldn't be such a problem.)

[Kolenka]

I wouldn't want to go much smaller on the iPhone without the hi-res display. The smallest font is already on the border before it just becomes a blurry mess.

[ATimson]

Originally Posted by Kolenka

I wouldn't want to go much smaller on the iPhone without the hi-res display. The smallest font is already on the border before it just becomes a blurry mess.

Maybe Baen's books are just defaulting to too large of a size (they're all I've tested with so far), but I've used smaller in txtr and Stanza without problem.

[Kolenka]

It also depends on the person I find... The anti-aliasing helps, but there's a tolerance level for people before it becomes too hard to read comfortably, and that varies a bit from person to person.

[kjk]

Originally Posted by cmdahler

The biggest problem I see so far is just the bare-bones basic handling of PDFs. iBooks will display the PDF and give you page thumbnails and that's about it. As far as I can tell, there's no way, for example, to access the TOC in the PDF. Goodreader has iBooks beat by a huge margin and still remains my reader of choice for PDFs.

I just noticed something else-the PDF reader in iBooks ignores the "Click Left Margin" settings. That has to be a bug. Back to Stanza for PDFs for me.

[foghat]

Just giving ibooks a go. A few questions:

1. Is there any way to sort the bookshelf view by title or author? I know you can manually drag books around.
2. Is there no way to easily get back to the books(s) you are currently reading? Like the 'latest reads' in Stanza.
3. It looks like series management is non-existent - I kind of knew this, but assumed you would be able to at least reorganize the books within a given author - so sort by Author and rearrange, but no. that sucks. wouldn't be so bad if I could at least easily organize my bookshelf by author and then rearrange by series.

I'm sure ibooks will get there, but seems there is some obvious functionality missing. And why the heck does the clock and battery and such show up in the 'full' page view when reading?

[Trubu]

Originally Posted by foghat

Just giving ibooks a go. A few questions:

1. Is there any way to sort the bookshelf view by title or author? I know you can manually drag books around.

It's pretty non-intuitive, but if you scroll all the way to the top of the bookshelf and keep going, there's a little "hidden" toolbar like the one on the iPad that gives you a few different sort options.

Originally Posted by Smollett

Syncing between iPhone and iPad works for me too for epubs not bought through the iBookstore. I wasn't expecting that so am very pleased.

This is killer, and a feature that I always really missed on the Kindle and Kindle for iPhone. Very, very happy they implemented it.

[foghat]

Originally Posted by Trubu

It's pretty non-intuitive, but if you scroll all the way to the top of the bookshelf and keep going, there's a little "hidden" toolbar like the one on the iPad that gives you a few different sort options.



This is killer, and a feature that I always really missed on the Kindle and Kindle for iPhone. Very, very happy they implemented it.

I see where you can pick the list view and sort that by author or title or category. But I want to be able to sort the Bookshelf view automatically, can't see how to do that.

And I do wish the title of the book didn't display on each page. This may be fine on the ipad when you have so much more real estate, but just take up valuable text space unnecessarily on the iphone version. imo.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Trubu

It's pretty non-intuitive, but if you scroll all the way to the top of the bookshelf and keep going, there's a little "hidden" toolbar like the one on the iPad that gives you a few different sort options.

I don't think that's what the previous poster was asking. You can sort the list view, but not the bookshelf view; that has to be manually arranged by dragging the books around. I think that's actually very nice; the list view lets you sort by title, author, or category, but at any time you can switch back to your own manual arrangement of books.

[Trubu]

Originally Posted by foghat

I see where you can pick the list view and sort that by author or title or category. But I want to be able to sort the Bookshelf view automatically, can't see how to do that.

Oh, gotcha. Yeah, I don't think there's a way to do that, unfortunately.

Would be nice if you could sort the Bookshelf in iTunes, similar to how you can rearrange apps on the homescreens. Or set up a playlist with a custom sort for books.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by foghat

2. Is there no way to easily get back to the books(s) you are currently reading? Like the 'latest reads' in Stanza.
3. It looks like series management is non-existent - I kind of knew this, but assumed you would be able to at least reorganize the books within a given author - so sort by Author and rearrange, but no. that sucks. wouldn't be so bad if I could at least easily organize my bookshelf by author and then rearrange by series.

2. What I do personally is to move whatever books I'm currently reading to the start of the bookshelf; that provides instant access to them.

3. You can arrange books however you want on the bookshelf. When I add books to the shelf, I arrange them by author, and then sort into series within author.

[foghat]

Originally Posted by HarryT

2. What I do personally is to move whatever books I'm currently reading to the start of the bookshelf; that provides instant access to them.

3. You can arrange books however you want on the bookshelf. When I add books to the shelf, I arrange them by author, and then sort into series within author.

regarding 3. that is what will end up doing as well, but would be nice if you could get it to automatically sort by author as a starting point.

[kjk]

Originally Posted by Beanski

Actually, iBooks syncs between my iPad and iPhone for all books!! - I've never bought a book through the Apple bookstore, but I can close a (de-drm'd epub) book I've added through iTunes on the iPad, and open it on the same page on the iPhone (a 3G)

This is really good news - and one up on Amazon!! In fact, it may have convinced me to upgrade to the next iphone - was looking at moving to Android

(Only tried epub though, don't know about anything else)

Very slick. It works for PDFs as well.

[athlonkmf]

A screenshot of the sepia colour and Georgia fonts

[athlonkmf]

Originally Posted by lilman

+1 Goodreader > iBooks for pdfs by a large margin

However, I DO like the coverview-library very much. I hope goodreader will implement that too...



Oh... that national geographic PDF kills ibooks btw. the interactive features are not nice.
Ah well, I only wanted to show the stand anyway. I got the same mag in zinio.