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Old 11-19-2011, 03:17 AM   #345
toddos
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Posts: 695
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Join Date: May 2010
Device: Kobo Aura, Nokia Lumia 920 (Freda)
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kattermole View Post
After the sad, tragic loss of Stanza, I experimented with iBooks. It doesn't have anything like the bells and whistles of Stanza, but it is an awful lot prettier. Being forced to explore, I found a few things on iBooks that I didn't know about. For instance, like Stanza, it has Groups, though it doesn't have an automatic "currently reading".

Did Stanza always have the editing facilities it has now? Did I miss them all this time? And the ability to let you add your favorite eBook sources?

Anyhow, just thought I would mention that I am now torn between iBooks and Stanza.

It is a worry that maybe, when the inevitable system updates come, Stanza will yet again become unusable.

I guess nothing is perfect.

Kat
iBooks has plenty of its own problems
  • No "night" or white-on-black mode (sorry, invert colors via the accessibility settings is not a valid option). This one right here is a deal-breaker. The rest are just icing.
  • Gigantic margins. Like ridiculously huge. That's not so terrible on an iPad, but on a phone or ipod it's terrible. This is a direct result of the useless chrome iBooks uses to look more like a paper book. If the stack of page edges actually reflected your position in the book I might overlook it, but they don't are just there for show. Form follows function, not the other way around. Apple got this wrong. The rest of the software industry toyed with the "make the interface look like a real object" concept back in the 90s but stopped because they realized that's dumb. Apple shouldn't have tried to bring it back.
  • Limited font selection.
  • Limited customization (spacing between paragraphs, indentation, line spacing, etc)
  • The iBooks store is pretty bad, and though they chose to use industry-standard EPub they've wrapped it in their own DRM. And their EPub implementation has plenty of issues and not standard behaviors, often breaking on perfectly valid books.
  • No OPDS support. Calibre's content server is so much more convenient than having to push stuff to iTunes to sync.

Lastly, and this is a big one, don't forget that iBooks is the whole reason we have the whole Agency Pricing cartel scheme. If not for that, we'd be able to buy new ebooks for $10 or less, other sellers could compete on price, run sales without publisher approval, etc. Even if iBooks was the most perfect ereader in the world, I'd never use it simply because of that. It's set the industry back at least 5 years, if not more, and it will be a long, hard uphill struggle just to get back to the state the industry was in 2009.

Support other readers that are actively working to push the industry forward, not hold it back like Apple's doing.

Last edited by toddos; 11-19-2011 at 03:19 AM.
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