iBooks 3.0 now available, adds iCloud purchase support, scrolling theme

Posted:
in General Discussion edited January 2014
Just hours after Apple announced iBooks 3.0 at its special iPad mini event on Tuesday, the company has made the app available for download, bringing a number of new features to the iOS e-reader.

Among the most notable updates to come with version 3.0 is the new scrolling feature that displays content in a modified unpaginated layout, allowing users to navigate by "flicking" up and down through text. The endless scrolling lets readers quickly jump forward and back, and removes the restriction of having to wait for page turn animations.

Also added to the iBooks is the ability to view all previous iBookstore purchases from the bookshelf, a feature much like the purchase history seen in the iOS version of iTunes.

iBooks 3.0
iBooks 3.0 scrolling mode.


From the release notes:
Introducing iBooks 3
  • See all your iBookstore purchases in iCloud?right on your bookshelf with iOS 6
  • Scroll vertically through your books with the flick of a finger using the new Scroll theme
  • Receive free updates to purchased books?including new chapters, corrections, and other improvements
  • Look up definitions for words in German, Spanish, French, Japanese and Simplified Chinese with iOS 6
  • Share quotes or thoughts about your favorite book with friends on Facebook, Twitter, Messages, or Mail
Apple's iBooks 3.0 weighs in at 40.8MB and can be downloaded for free through the iOS App Store.
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Comments

  • Reply 1 of 21
    nobodyynobodyy Posts: 377member
    I'll sure appreciate the scrolling theme.
  • Reply 2 of 21
    Tested it. Other than using it for Technical Books its not something I like for leisure reading.
  • Reply 3 of 21
    solipsismxsolipsismx Posts: 19,566member
    Tested it. Other than using it for Technical Books its not something I like for leisure reading.

    I've been wanting this feature for a long time. The page turning is one of the few software-based skeuomorphs that seems to be universally liked but I hope I can find the utility of being to scroll test and not lose my place as I read.
  • Reply 4 of 21
    mstonemstone Posts: 11,510member


    Gauging from the amount of posts regarding iBooks and iBooks Author this is certainly not a hot topic, If it was supposed to be a focus of the presentations as billed it would have earned  more than the 15 seconds of the session. iBooks ubiquity is unfortunately still a very distant possibility.

  • Reply 5 of 21
    solipsismxsolipsismx Posts: 19,566member
    mstone wrote: »
    Gauging from the amount of posts regarding iBooks and iBooks Author this is certainly not a hot topic, If it was supposed to be a focus of the presentations as billed it would have earned  more than the 15 seconds of the session. iBooks ubiquity is unfortunately still a very distant possibility.

    Yeah, would have been nice to see some more effort to buoy this segment of the market, including a way to read iBooks on a Mac. Can you even demo the iBooks you make on a Mac or do you still have to sync them to an iDevice to see how they turn out?
  • Reply 6 of 21
    john.bjohn.b Posts: 2,742member


    Is vertical scrolling mandatory in the new version?

  • Reply 7 of 21
    dmfettdmfett Posts: 141member


    Ok...so will my books in 2.0 have to be redone when I upload 3.0 and will I have any work to do or are all my books ok done on iBooks Author 2.0...


     


    Also will my books in 2.0 be able to be sold on the iPad mini?


     


    What about the new iPod5 and iPhone5?

  • Reply 8 of 21
    gazoobeegazoobee Posts: 3,754member

    Quote:

    Originally Posted by Nobodyy View Post



    I'll sure appreciate the scrolling theme.


     


    I don't know.  It's so herky jerky on my iPad 3 I turned it right off again.  


     


    Plus, each chapter starts a new "page" so there's a weird graphic discontinuity about it.  Not one of Apple's best things IMO.  

  • Reply 9 of 21
    asciiascii Posts: 5,936member


    No iBooks on the Mac of course. Amazon can do it (they have a Kindle app on the Mac App Store) so it can't be legal reasons, surely Apple could get the same contract as Amazon? And there's no obvious technical reason why not, the Mac APIs have a lot in common with iOS.

  • Reply 10 of 21
    wizard69wizard69 Posts: 13,377member
    dmfett wrote: »
    Ok...so will my books in 2.0 have to be redone when I upload 3.0 and will I have any work to do or are all my books ok done on iBooks Author 2.0...

    Also will my books in 2.0 be able to be sold on the iPad mini?

    What about the new iPod5 and iPhone5?
    Really good questions here. I'm assuming you are an author of books so probably short term you will need a device with iBooks 2 to test on until the community converts to iBooks 3. That is a CYA bit of advice but really the standards Apple is using here are well defined, it would be reasonable to believe that iBooks 3 is backwards compatible with old texts (books).

    It would be sort of like PDF readers where most of the time old files re read fine. As to iPhones, why would there be an issue? Unless you have some odd content the pages should automatically reformat to the larger displays. I'm not an iPhone 5 owner but I've heard zero complaints about iBooks on these devices.
  • Reply 11 of 21
    wizard69wizard69 Posts: 13,377member
    This is actually a big disappointment for me too! Macs need the support of good iBooks integration. In my case I highly doubt I would use the Mac for casual reading but I find the organization of iBooks useful for technical documents I need to keep on hand. The idea of being able to sync such documents across devices without effort is very appealing.

    No maybe that is the problem, such documents do not generate income for Apple. Actually this highlights one little issue with iBooks that I find frustrating, you can download and transfer such PDFs to iBooks in a snap, but it isn't easy to edit file names once you get them there. Unfortunately those files names often get transformed into garbage or where never human readable to begone with. Maybe that has been improved, going to iTunes to fix the glaring issues is no fun at all.
    ascii wrote: »
    No iBooks on the Mac of course. Amazon can do it (they have a Kindle app on the Mac App Store) so it can't be legal reasons, surely Apple could get the same contract as Amazon? And there's no obvious technical reason why not, the Mac APIs have a lot in common with iOS.
  • Reply 12 of 21

    Quote:

    Originally Posted by John.B View Post


    Is vertical scrolling mandatory in the new version?



     


    No. off by default.


     


    On my iPad 1 it is smooth [like all documents wait for the complete document/book to be cached then flip/scroll all you want] ]but for a book is annoying [my personal taste]. For Technical publications it has its advantages.

  • Reply 13 of 21

    Quote:

    Originally Posted by wizard69 View Post



    This is actually a big disappointment for me too! Macs need the support of good iBooks integration. In my case I highly doubt I would use the Mac for casual reading but I find the organization of iBooks useful for technical documents I need to keep on hand. The idea of being able to sync such documents across devices without effort is very appealing.

    No maybe that is the problem, such documents do not generate income for Apple. Actually this highlights one little issue with iBooks that I find frustrating, you can download and transfer such PDFs to iBooks in a snap, but it isn't easy to edit file names once you get them there. Unfortunately those files names often get transformed into garbage or where never human readable to begone with. Maybe that has been improved, going to iTunes to fix the glaring issues is no fun at all.


     


    Especially when iBooks 3 is EPub 3 with Apple specific add-ons. The heresay is that it isn't EPub 3 complete [should not be hard seeing as they co-wrote HTML 5] and with WebKit being the Engine inside OS X for all Publications you'd think an EPub 3.x profile would be natural for Preview.app to just open them up and in this case, for ePub morph into an iBooks Presentation View that gives a choice of Full-screen or scalable to your window view port used by Preview.app.

  • Reply 14 of 21
    irnchrizirnchriz Posts: 1,616member
    gazoobee wrote: »
    I don't know.  It's so herky jerky on my iPad 3 I turned it right off again.  

    Plus, each chapter starts a new "page" so there's a weird graphic discontinuity about it.  Not one of Apple's best things IMO.  

    When you switched to scrolling did you wait until the layout completed formatting/setting up? e.g. did you wait until the vertical dots on the right hand side all turned black and the quick scroll bar appeared?

    Once this completes (takes a few seconds) it is silky smooth for me. Tested on half a dozen books of between 500 and 1500 pages in length.

    I have no idea why Apple just don't build epub support into Preview.
  • Reply 15 of 21


    Re: Scrolling


     


    I've an old (pre-iPad days) App called "FileMagnet" that has had this since day one.


    But, better... the scrolling was controlled by tilting the iPhone slightly... tilt more, it scrolls faster... I liked it a lot and used it for reading everything... but quit using it when iBooks came out because FileMagnet never updated for the bigger screen.


    I'd like to see that as a setting for iBooks ... the tilt-auto-scrolling. (If it's there, I haven't yet found a switch to turn it on!)

  • Reply 16 of 21


    I wonder if iTunes offers a metadata tickbox to change books from left-right to right-left… 

  • Reply 17 of 21

    Quote:

    Originally Posted by Tallest Skil View Post


    I wonder if iTunes offers a metadata tickbox to change books from left-right to right-left… 



    Nope.

  • Reply 18 of 21


    Originally Posted by KingOfSomewhereHot View Post

    Nope.




    How are we supposed to do that, then? Maybe I'd like a couple right-left books…

  • Reply 19 of 21
    I read one book with iBooks on my iPhone, and went right back to the Kindle App.

    iBooks is slow and laggy, iBooks takes too many clicks to change from day to night text, and iBooks won't let me lock orientation in the app - instead it uses the system setting.

    Kindle app is fast, it loads books easily in 1/3 the time it takes iBooks to open. Kindle app turns pages crisply and instantly, iBooks lags. Kindle app lets me lock orientation in the kindle app itself, so reading books can be orientation locked but the rest of my iPhone can rotate. Kindle app lets me change my theme from light to dark in two taps while iBooks takes several more.

    This is one app where Apple has a significantly worse interface than their competition.
  • Reply 20 of 21

    Quote:

    Originally Posted by Tallest Skil View Post




    How are we supposed to do that, then? Maybe I'd like a couple right-left books…



     


    You might check with iBooks AUTHOR ... it could be that a book can be DESIGNED to work that way... I've just never found a meta-data tickbox for that in iTunes... and I've messed around with reformatting stuff to work with iBooks a bit ... but never through iBooks Author.


     


    But given that they sell these things in Japan... I'd like to think a book can be designed to work that way ... 


    Having to scroll to the "end" of a book to start reading it "backwards" just doesn't seem very Apple-ey ... they usually get THAT type of stuff right.

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