[tomsem]

iBooks coincided with the launch of the iPad and was one of the highlights of the announcement, at least for me. At the time, I had only my lowly Kindle 2 and I certainly wanted an iPad (it would be a few years before I got my first one). So at least one reason it exists is to sell iPads, and it seemed reasonable then to imagine paper books would go the way of CDs and DVDs, and there was serious money to be made after selling an iPad.

The Store never had any pretensions that it would have every book, and that certainly remains the case today. Still if I were self publishing an ebook, it would be #2 priority after Kindle Store.

Apple has also tried to promote ‘.ibooks’ format for multimedia digital books (education?), but it doesn’t seem to have taken off. It might help if they allowed people to sell .ibooks from their own web sites: after all, they have to buy Apple devices to author and read these on. And there would still be incentive to sell in Apple bookstore if you wanted DRM stronger than nothing or watermarking.

What I like about Apple Books is that it is a relatively ‘honest’ ePub reader. You can build an epub file and test it and submit to Apple Bookstore, with confidence it will be the same thing a customer will download (and it has to pass epub check). Side-loaded books have the same features as store bought books. It’s a little different with Kindle, Google or Kobo, where there is sort of a ebook meat grinder in between and there is not as much control over the results.

Also it is one of the few reading apps for iOS that has exemplary accessibility support (VoiceOver and Speak Screen). Kindle app is pretty good too but doesn’t do Speak Screen highlighting and they’ve yet to support it with Continuous Scrolling mode.

And iPadOS features like Split Screen are still not supported well by many reading apps, to say nothing about multiple document option which will be in iOS 13 — I expect Apple Books will support it first.