The New Sleekness

By all accounts, iBooks is a beautiful app; a slick app, but almost too slick for its own good. In developing its iPad-native apps, Apple seems to have followed a relatively unified design paradigm: where apps have physical counterparts, they’ve designed the app to mimic the look of the physical object they’re intended to replace. So the Calendar app looks like a desk blotter calendar for week and month view, and like a date book in daily view; the Contacts app looks like a little address book; and the iBooks app looks like a relatively nice hardcover book, while your library resides on a nice wooden bookshelf (easter egg: if you drag the bookshelf down far enough, you’ll see a little Apple logo carved into the back of the bookshelf).

I can only assume that this is more catering to the “your mom” demographic, providing environments that are comfortable and familiar in order to ease the leap from a physical to digital lifestyle. I understand that, and can respect the idea. But while this approach looks beautiful in Calendar, it falls absolutely flat on its face in Contacts (especially in portrait view), and is somewhere in between on iBooks, where the entire reading interface looks like either a single page in portrait view, or a double-page spread in landscape view, complete with receding edges of subsequent pages, a simulated gutter, and just the hint of a cover lying flat behind the stacked pages. While I’m willing to make an allowance for designing the iBooks app for “your mom”, I generally find ereaders that try to mimic physical books kinda silly. iBooks is not a print book, nor should it look like one. Constraining the reading experience to the limitations of a different packaging form eliminates the ability to be truly innovative with presentation, and the trappings of the aesthetic treatment end up becoming an unwelcome distraction while reading, at least for me.

The home screen is dressed up like a fancy bookcase, as I said, and the options for sorting and customization are slim. In bookshelf mode, sorting only happens manually, through a mechanism similar to how you sort and organize apps on your iPad/iPhone’s home screens (tap the Edit button to move covers around on the shelves, as well as delete books). There is an option for viewing books in list mode, where you can search for a book, as well as sort titles by the order you’ve set in the bookshelf, by author, by title, or by category (this last, provided your books have clean and proper metadata. Which they probably won’t, sadly, because publishers as a whole have yet to realize that they need to take good care of their metadata). Other than the “Sample” and “New” badges, there’s also no indication of the status of a book: is it in-progress? Have I finished it? Have I not started it? This is information I could use on the home screen.

Reading interface

As I mentioned, iBooks displays text as a single, right-hand page in portrait mode, and as a double page spread complete with a gutter in landscape mode. I don’t particularly care for this approach, although I can live with it, I suppose. That being said, once you get beyond the distractions of the “look pa, I’m a real book” interface, the running heads of the iBooks interface are probably my favourite of the three apps I’ve been playing with. When you first come into a book, all of the in-reader elements appear. On top: a link to your library, a link to the book’s TOC and list of bookmarks, an in-app screen brightness slider, a button for choosing a typeface and changing the size of type, and a search function. At the foot of the page, you have a handy slider for scrubbing through chapters, as well as a thoughtful “x pages left in this chapter” message. As someone who constantly has to tell himself “I’ll just get to the end of this chapter and I’ll go to sleep”, this last is very welcome. While reading, you can tap on the middle of the screen, everything disappears and you simply have the title of the book on top, and a page count on bottom. The page count is clever, as well: it tells you that you’re on, say, page 14 of 1472. But if you enlarge the type size, it will also refresh the page count, telling you that you’re now on page 15 of 1602. Handy, useful, and smart.

Much has been made about iBooks’ page-flipping effects, but again, while they’re expertly executed, with a meticulous eye for detail (you can actually see the real text of a page, faded and in reverse, through a curled page), I find this kind of eye candy hokey, distracting, and have little use for it.

On Covers and illustrations

I was in a meeting with Tor Books art director Irene Gallo today, and she took a look at the cover art for some of the books on my iPad. She was blown away by how beautiful the covers looked on the bright, high-quality screen— “This looks better than print!” she exclaimed. It’s a shame that image display in iBooks is so static and limited to the live type area of iBooks; covers and interior illustrations are screaming to be pinched and zoomed, and seen full-bleed on the screen. Hopefully this will happen in future versions of iBooks.

Customization

Font customization is robust on iBooks; you can switch between five fonts (four serif, one sans: Baskerville, Cochin, Palatino, Times New Roman, and Verdana—nothing fancy, but solid, workhorse typefaces which offer a good selection of options for a good reading experience), and you can increase type size substantially, along a ten-step scale from honkin’ huge to legal-text small.

Style customization, however, is unfortunately non-existent. In a move that’s characteristic of Apple (“you’ll look at things how we tell you to look at them, ’cause we know what you need better than you do”), there’s no alternative to the black-text-on-white-background style that iBooks offers, which is a shame, since I would have expected at the very least a reverse, white-text-on-black-background view, which is kind of standard on most good ereaders out there, and helps some people deal with the eye strain associated with reading on a backlit screen.

Dictionary, Bookmarking and Search

Double-tapping on a word brings up the Copy/Dictionary/Bookmark/Search popover menu. iBooks has a great built-in dictionary, although there’s no way to edit that dictionary, in order to add words to it. As a science fiction and fantasy reader (genres with a penchant for strange or made-up words), I come across odd words all the time. It would be nice to add them to the dictionary, if only for later personal reference.

Bookmarking works as expected, again going with a physical (albeit mixed) analogue: mimicking a highlighter (you can change the colours of the highlighter). Apart from the bookmarking/highlighting feature, however, iBooks offers absolutely no other annotation tools.

Search is powerful and fast, as is the case everywhere else on the iPad, and the search results popover display offers handy links to “Search Google” and “Search Wikipedia” (I think I may have to re-read Neal Stephenson’s Barroque Cycle on iBooks, just for the Wikipedia integration).

Store

You can buy books directly from within iBooks by flipping your bookshelf—secret passageway style—over to the iBookstore, the new section of the iTunes store and the focus of all the recent agency model drama in the publishing industry. The initial selection is slim, and the bookstore suffers from the same lack of easy discoverability/browseability that plagues the rest of the iTunes stores—a situation that is not helped by the absolutely craptacular state of book metadata coming from publishers. Have I mentioned that publishers really need to step up their metadata game? No, really. Seriously, publishers. You’re shooting yourselves—and your authors—in the foot by not making sure all your books are properly tagged.

But if you know what you’re looking for, buying is dangerously easy, as in the rest of the iTunes store (oh, so that’s where my paycheck went. Curse you, Steve Jobs). Since iBooks is the only one of the three reader apps that employs in-app buying (both Kindle and Kobo require a trip to Mobile Safari for prosecuting the entire sale and the final step in the transaction, respectively), it enjoys the same ease-of-use and simplicity that, say, the Amazon bookstore enjoys on the Kindle device. Home field advantage, I suppose. This is no small thing, though: ease of purchase will probably keep me using iBooks as a primary ereader app on the iPad, especially if I’m buying a book on the go, on the device. If a book is on iBooks and on Amazon, I’m going to buy it on iBooks (yes, regardless of price discrepancies, which, under the agency model, shouldn’t exist anyway), because as long as I’m on the iPad, it’s the easiest way to do so. I’ve always said that Amazon’s killer app is its ease of purchase; well, on the iPad, Apple is beating Amazon at its own game.

Another very important factor which will make iBooks my main reading app is the fact that iBooks not only uses ePub as its default format, but treats ePub files in much the same way that iTunes treated MP3s before Apple strong-armed the music industry into getting rid of DRM: Any ePub files you download from iBookstore will be infested with DRM, sure, but you can also add DRM-free ePubs from elsewhere to iBooks via iTunes. And if you think that Apple isn’t gearing up to strong arm publishers in the same way they did the record labels, I’ve got a bridge I’d like to sell you. That day can’t come soon enough, in my opinion (I predict no later than the end of 2011/early 2012).

Conclusion

iBooks is a perfectly good ereading app, despite its affectation towards mimicking the physical book. The integration with the iBookstore makes it a killer, especially once the selection on the store becomes more robust. One drawback is that there’s no iBooks app for the iPhone, so I can’t read on my smaller device, as I can on Kindle for iPad and iPhone, let alone sync my place in a book across devices. Maybe this is a temporary situation—I certainly hope so! Tomorrow, I take on the Kindle app for iPad. In the meantime, chime in below.

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