The best software for publication fans inside Apple Books is

Apple Books is an underappreciated gem because of how great the publications look in it and how Apple has focused on creating a fantastic studying experience. However, it still has some oddities, as well as the issue of a smaller store than its competitors. &# 13, This isn’t like Apple TV + where the service started small but is steadily growing. Alternatively, it has always been that an book can be found on Amazon Kindle, but most likely not Apple Books. &# 13, Finally Apple Books has the reputation for charging more for publications than Amazon does and while that’s not always the case, it also generally is. If there is a difference at all, it can be a matter of only a dollar or two, nevertheless, and Apple Books is easily the better buy than Kindle just for the large display of the ebooks and Apple’s treatment for font. Except there is one more item. Kindle ebooks are locked to Amazon, but they can also be read anywhere— including on tablets, smartphones, and Macs. Apple Publications can only be read on Apple hardware. &# 13, Left: Ebook app on phone. Straight: Apple Books on phone. There is a benefit to choosing a Kindle over a equipment Ebook, which is clearer and has much better typography. If you want to organize your collection and access it in one place, you can read any ebook you own without having to remember where you saved it. &# 13, But if it’s an advantage, it’s also a compromise. Apple Books are much more enjoyable to read on any Apple system than any Kindle technology. &# 13, It’s even better than the Kindle apps on Apple tools, though there the font comes more under Apple’s power so the change is less. &# 13, Amazon concentrated on getting every book available on Kindle and it so devalued font that it was years before equipment Kindles had any release to address it. Apple, on the other hand, focused solely on the specific books ‘ appearance. Critical to the whole Apple Books encounter is that when you’re reading a guide, you are really reading the book — all of the many options from bookmark and addressing are kept out of sight. An unrestrained reading experience, according to &# 13, Left. Middle: a tiny knowledge. Right: complete Apple Books controls That’s key to the whole experience, but it does also mean that you can but very easily lose all the helpful extra features that Apple Books offers. Plus, you could be staring at a book page completely lost for how to get out of it until you understand how it works. &# 13, There’s a whole side to Apple Books that is to do with finding and buying books, and much to say about the detail of that. First of all, you might assume that reading a book you own would be simple, which it is. However, you must be certain that you are. &# 13, Such as one oddity that for some unfathomable reason is shared by both Apple Books and Kindle. If you have a book showing in your library but it doesn’t happen to be downloaded onto the device you’re using, naturally when you tap on the book, the first thing it does is download. You have chosen to read this book so that it should then open, but it doesn’t. &# 13, Only, you have made a wise decision. You have to wait until it’s downloaded and then tap again, in exactly the way you just did. There are a couple of ways to download a book if it doesn’t happen to be on your current device. On all Apple devices, a circular icon indicates that a book is being downloaded and how far along it is. It’s particularly easy to miss on the iPhone, though, so you can be left wondering why nothing appears to have happened when you tapped. &# 13, Downloading is quick — even on a slow internet connection, books are not large — so if you just scratch your head for a moment and then tap the book again, it’s been downloaded. However, since it has already been downloaded, the book opens when you tap it. &# 13, It all leaves you thinking you must have tapped it wrongly in some way. When you are in a book, you are just in the book; you see its text, you see nothing of any controls, and the entire screen is taken over by that book. It is very well done, it is very freeing of distractions, and you just get to read, then tap or swipe to get to the next page. &# 13, Soon enough, though, you’re going to finish the book, or you’ll have no more time to read just now. You can simply emerge from Apple Books knowing that the title will remain on the most recent page whether you re-open the app on this device or any other of your own. &# 13, But to come out of the book and stay in Apple Books, to get other titles for instance, you need to bring up the controls. It’s not as though this is difficult as it seems, but it does take some getting used to. &# 13, For the way to bring up controls on the iPhone or iPad is to tap or click in the center of the page. If you tap for just a beat too long, however, you don’t get controls, you instead highlight a word and get a definition. Top: uninterrupted reading on a Mac, number 13. Bottom: bringing up all of the Apple Books controls. On the Mac, it’s different, and clicking in the middle of the book screen does nothing. On the Mac, you have to move your cursor up toward the top of the book’s window and click. &# 13, Controls for readingIn its most recent redesign, Apple Books also minimized the controls you see when you even call up the controls. There is information about the page you’re on and how many pages are left in the chapter or book, depending on the publisher’s guidelines. &# 13, Otherwise, there is an X close icon at top right, and an icon of two lines over ellipses at bottom right. Tap on the bottom right icon to access a neat set of the first seven controls. &# 13, Apple groups its Books controls into one neat selectionContents ( and a percentage read marker )
Search Book
Themes &, Settings
Sharing
Device screen lock
Line Guide
Bookmark
Although it is only available on the iPhone, Line Guide is perhaps the least well-known but may also be the most useful. It’s an accessibility option which dims the text of a book except for a single line. When you tap on the screen after reading that line, it dims while the next one is highlighted instead. &# 13, Line Guide is a reading aid on the iPhone version of Apple BooksTo come back out of Line Guide, you tap the Line Guide icon which appears at bottom left. It includes options for controlling the dimming of other lines, plus Turn Off Line Guide. Themes &amp, Settings is the most comprehensive of the other controls, which are available for all devices, covering everything from font and background to page layout. &# 13, The many settings options include restoring the old curling page animationTapping on Themes &amp, Settings takes you to a panel that is headed by font size controls. You can change between the two buttons, which are marked with an A and a small and a large A, depending on the text size you choose. &# 13, Next to those Aa icons is the page turn one, though the way it looks changes depending on your selection. By default, Apple Books now just Slides from one page to the next, but you can change that. &# 13, Perhaps the most popular choice is Curl. This is how Apple Books used to always work, right from when it was first released in 2010 as iBooks. Curl animats the turning of the current page as you swipe to the next page. You can also slowly swipe and control that animation, even turning the page back and forth. &# 13, It’s a particularly well-done piece of Apple design, but you can also get bored of it very quickly. Curl is no longer the default, and Themes &amp, Settings also offers Slide, Fast Fade, and even just Scroll. &# 13, With that last, you no longer get any page turning at all. Instead, you simply keep scrolling down the book’s length and constant flow of text. &# 13, More themesThis Themes &amp, Settings section also contains an option for light or dark mode. This is particularly good for when you’re reading at night and your iPhone or iPad screen seems incredibly bright. You can either switch to light or dark mode on your device or have Apple Books change along with the light/dark setting. Or perhaps most usefully, there is a Match Surroundings option that will adjust light and dark depending on the ambient lighting conditions where you are. &# 13, In addition to this, you can access six of Apple’s main variations at once, including a Calm setting that displays light black text on a sepia background. Plus there is an overall brightness slider. &# 13, Then there is also, though, a Customize option. There are a number of font options available to you, but it may not be every font you use. &# 13, Settings options also include accessibility featuresThese same options are also on the Mac if you tap on the Aa icon toward the top right of the screen. Doing that also offers yet another level of adjustable features, just like on the iPhone and iPad. Having tapped or clicked on Customize, there is a section called Accessibility &amp, Layout Options, which has its own further Customize control. &# 13, Choose that and you can now set your preferred line spacing, character spacing, word spacing, and margins. Additionally, you can choose to have straight or jagged edges on the right, with text being justified right and left. &# 13, The odds are that while it is startling how much control you can have in Apple Books, most people will not alter any of these options. That could be due to the slightly obscure controls, but it could also be because the default settings were carefully chosen. &# 13, Study aidsSpeaking of hidden options, Apple Books has the ability for you to mark passages, but it doesn’t tell you how. &# 13, To do it, you first press and hold on the iPhone or iPad screen, then quickly swipe left or right to select a section of text. A popup menu offers you at least these options once you accomplish that: &# 13, Highlight.
Add Note
Translate
Search
Copy
Share
Speak
You receive those plus Look Up, the dictionary option, if you only have one word to choose. Curiously, if you do just highlight one word, at first nothing happens other than it is highlighted. &# 13, To get the popup menu on a single word, you have to highlight it, then tap again in the middle of the highlight. You appear to be asking politely. &# 13, Of the controls you then get, search is an curious one. Searching the current book for any events similar to those you have highlighted is what it does. &# 13, If that highlight is more than a word, then the odds are that the search will find only the page you’re already on. But you can use it to search for, say, character names, or one or two particular words you think may be repeated in the book. However, the very first option in the popup menu is Highlight. It does just what you think — it marks a passage so that you can easily find it later — but it isn’t quite the same as you may know from Kindle. That’s a good thing, too, &# 13. What Kindle does in every book, by default, is show you where other people have highlighted passages. &# 13, It’s called” Popular Highlights” and there must be people who want to know when a stranger has underlined a passage about dogs, but fortunately Apple doesn’t think so. You can make any amount of highlighting you like, but you are the only person who will ever see it. &# 13, Or rather, you won’t bother other people, and they won’t bother you, unless you positively choose to take a highlight and Share it with them directly. On an iPhone or iPad, tap on Highlight and you will have the option for one of five colors, or an underline. On the Mac, drag over a passage to select it, then right-click to get a pop-up menu offering the colors, underlining, translation, searching, copying, Sharing, speech, or Add Note. &# 13, Pick a color, and that selected passage will forever be in that — until you select it again, and from the popup menu choose Remove Highlight. Highlighting uses the text to be hidden behind your choice of color. The text remains black, but the background for that passage is changed to your chosen color. If you leave any sections highlighted, you will be able to see them clearly as you go through the book once more. However, you can also see all of your highlights in one place, and then jump from there to the specific page. &# 13, Tap a control to bookmark a page and you also get a new Bookmarks section. The book controls change once anything is highlighted or bookmarked. Where there was Search Book before, there is now an extra control called Bookmarks &amp, Highlights. Additionally, that new control has a number next to it that represents the number of highlights or bookmarks you’ve made. &# 13, Tap on the control and it defaults to showing you any bookmarks you’ve made. But you can tap at the top to switch to highlights. Then it lists the highlight, what page it’s on, and when you added the highlight. Tap on the line and you go straight to the highlighted text in context. For instance, this applies to anything you read in Apple Books, aside from PDFs. Apple Books is a reasonable PDF reader, and especially so on the iPhone or iPad where it’s perhaps even the best free viewer. &# 13, Apple Books on iPhone is an adequate PDF reader, plus you can sort them into CollectionsBut there are differences that apply to PDFs compared to every other type of document or book you can read in Apple Books. For instance, you can’t change the font size on the iPhone and iPad. &# 13, On the Mac, you can’t exactly do that either, but you can zoom in or out — except you’re not doing it in Apple Books. When you open a PDF, the Mac sends it to the Preview app, which used to let you read PDFs. &# 13, So on the Mac, Apple Books is just a holder, a transport mechanism, for syncing PDFs across your devices. &# 13, If you read a lot of PDFs, Apple Books feels like it gets clogged up with them and since PDFs typically don’t have covers, your library is filled with a lot of hard-to-distinguish documents. There aren’t many ways to organize PDFs, despite Apple’s efforts to separate them from all other books in their own section. &# 13, What you can do is create Collections. Select a few or thirty PDFs, right-click on the Mac, and select Add to Collection. &# 13, On iPhone or iPad, tap the ellipses icon at top right and choose Select. Then tap on any PDFs you want, and at the bottom of the screen tap the Add to button that appears. When you tap on that, you are presented with a rather pointless list that includes sections for Books, Audiobooks, and Want to Read, all of which are unavailable because they are greyed out. What is available is a New Collection button at the bottom. It’s a fairly basic way to group together related titles, but it’s also useful with PDFs and it’s applicable to all books, too, wherever you get them from. &# 13, What you can’t readThere is a peculiar thing with Apple Books on the Mac. You can drag practically any type of document onto its icon in your Dock, and it appears to accept it. On Mac, Dock icons appear to indicate that this dragged document is something an app can open, but they darken. Then when you let go, with Apple Books the document appears to go into the icon, and the app launches. If you drag a book to the Mac’s Dock, it will darken as you drag it, but good luck ever finding it unless the document is in ePub format. Presumably it’s in there somewhere, but you won’t find it in your library and it won’t automatically open the way a dragged book does. &# 13, On the iPhone and iPad, the equivalent to dragging is to open the document and Share it. For instance, Share does not include the option for sending to Books in Pages. &# 13, So this peculiarity is limited to the Mac. What you can read: &# 13;Apple Books uses the epub format, allowing the Books app to read any document in that format. You just have to drag it to the Books icon on the Mac, or Share it from something like the Files app on iPhone and iPad. &# 13, Unless you go around creating epub documents yourself, though, or you are somehow working with an archive of them created somewhere, the overwhelming majority of books you read will be ones from the Apple Bookstore. 13, Usually buying them would mean doing it, but there are many excellent free books in the form of public domain classics. The way you get any one of those is the same as buying a title, but the free books are also an illustration of a problem with the Bookstore. Apple was unable to provide any more pixel-perfect recompositions for books. There are curated lists of staff favorites, there are top tens in different genres, there are promotional collections such as Coming Soon. &# 13, The Apple Bookstore is replete with recommendations, but its search feature is lackingThere is so much recommendation that it’s hard to just go in to see everything that’s available. For instance, tapping on Bookstore at the bottom of the screen on an iPhone or iPad or clicking on it in the sidebar on a Mac is the quickest way to find all the free books. &# 13, From there, you need to scroll past” Limited Time Offers” and other promotions, until you reach” Top Free” — if” Top Free” is even there. There is always a” Top Paid” section, but occasionally it is, and occasionally it isn’t. &# 13, When there is a” Top Free” section, you can click on that to get the full top ten list, and it will include a button to show you all free books. &# 13, Unfortunately, when there isn’t a” Top Free” section, you’re screwed. There are no other options besides the free books. &# 13, What you have to do is search for specific titles, and that’s true whether you’re hoping to find a free one, or you’re just after a particular author. To do that search, you tap the Search icon at the bottom right of the iPhone or iPad screen or in the sidebar on a Mac. &# 13, This is more noticeable on the Mac, but when you do a search, you’re not actually searching the Bookstore. Instead, you are searching your whole library plus the bookstore. That’s good because it guarantees that search results always reveal what is in your library before anything that Apple might try to sell you. &# 13, And on the iPhone or iPad, this isn’t a big deal because while you are leaving the Bookstore to start the search, it’s just a matter of tapping on the Search icon in the bottom row. The search function switches from the Bookstore to the search, which is fine. &# 13, But on the Mac, search is in the sidebar. So you’ve gone into the Bookstore and your focus is on all it’s trying to sell you, and to search you have mentally step back out to find that search button. Then, in any device, using Apple Books, is not brilliant. Start typing an author’s name and Apple Books will autocomplete it, which is good, but then show you an unordered list of all possible titles by that person. &# 13, Uncomfortably, the search in Apple Books is inconsistent. &# 13, For example, if you search for “JK Rowling” then you get the Harry Potter books, as you’d expect, plus her novel,” The Casual Vacancy”. But if you instead search for “J. K. Rowling”, with periods, you get all of that plus the excellent” Cormoran Strike” novels she famously writes under the pseudonym of Robert Galbraith. Whatever you search for, and however you spell it, you can usually expect a lengthy and initially unfiltered list of results. You do have some limited options for sorting that into something more manageable. On the iPhone, there are a row of options you can tap to show All, Books, and Audiobooks. For some reason it varies — a search on iOS Apple Books could also give you a Series button, while the iPad may add Genres. &# 13, The Mac has the same list of options as the iPad, but it’s under a dropdown list called Filter by. 13, At this point, there is no way to sort by publication date. You can’t, at this stage, just find out the latest title by an author you like. Even if you haven’t chosen to filter by series, &# 13, Search will group series together on the iPad and Mac. When it’s done that, or you have chosen Series on the iPhone, you can tap on a series to get a Bookstore page devoted to it. &# 13, That page includes an ellipses icon toward the top right, on all devices. in that you can arrange by release date. &# 13, It’s an unsatisfactory system because as well as sorting by release date, you can also sort by what are just called Ascending or Descending. Nothing can be said about how things are being sorted in these directions, but you’d assume that this is the reading order of the books, which is typically the same as the release date. &# 13, Except Apple Books will also show different editions, and arrange those in different places depending on how you sort. &# 13, To find the real latest book, you’re probably better off Googling it, checking the author’s page, or looking it up in Amazon. However, Apple Books typically pops” Book 1,”” Book 2,” and so on above the title. &# 13, That just doesn’t fully help when you’ve scrolled to Book 10 and don’t know whether that’s the latest one, or that Book 11 has been sorted somewhere further down the list. 13 ) Once you find a book in the Bookstore, simply click or tap on it to receive a pop-up card about it. What’s on the card depends to an extent on the book’s publisher, but typically you get at least: &# 13, Series number, if there is one
Title
Author
Star rating ( and number of ratings )
Price to purchase
” Want to Read” and” Sample” buttons
A Share icon
promotion for the audiobook version
Publisher’s description
Once you locate a book in the store, you can purchase it, receive a sample, or simply scroll through a lot of detail. Occasionally, the book card will also include a Publisher’s Weekly review, and surprisingly frequently, an Apple Books staff review as well. There’s usually a section for user reviews as well. &# 13, After all of those there is always a lot of detail about page count ( in the printed version ), plus language, year of publication, and so on. 13- If you already know you want the book, you can just choose to pay the book’s price instead. &# 13, When you’re not so sure, though, you have the option to click on Want to Read, or Sample. On the Mac, you can get both, whereas on the iPhone, you can only buy and sample from the card and add to want to read under an ellipse icon. &# 13, Want to Read and Sample are practically the same option. They both download the start of a book for you try out, but Want to Read also adds it to a collection of the same name. If you frequently browse through your library’s All section, such as a collection you’ve named or one such as Finished, you can see the sample. It isn’t just saved into that Want to Read collection, so the result is that your library still gets clogged up with samples. &# 13, But give Apple some credit because it at least comprehends how sample books operate. A sample is the first chapter or two — the amount you get in the sample is decided by the publisher — and if you like it, you can then buy the whole thing. &# 13, You can buy the whole book at any point, but you are especially prompted to when you reach the end of the sample. &# 13;You buy it, and Apple replaces the sample with the entire book in your library. It also remembers where you read up to in the sample, so you can now just tap on the book and carry on reading from where you are. &# 13; Amazon Kindle occasionally does this. But for reasons passing understanding, often it won’t and instead your Kindle library has both the full book and the sample. &# 13, Apple Books is built by readersThe fact that Amazon Kindle sometimes does this thing with keeping the sample around and sometimes not, is clearly a bug. However, it also serves as an indication that perhaps the developers are not readers and haven’t even noticed the issue. &# 13, Apple Books developers could well be non-readers too, but it always feels as if they are deeply into books. It seems like they are well-versed in how this should operate because they are readers as well. &# 13, And then there is just the overall fact that any Apple Book will look better to the eye, will present a better reading experience, than Kindle or so far any other e-reader. &# 13, Just as some people can’t bear iPhone screens without ProMotion and others simply cannot see it, this is all subjective. Apple Books is the one to beat if you care about typography or you enjoy better reading.