Apple Books
Apple Books, formerly iBooks, is an e-book reading and store application by Apple Inc. for its iOS and macOS operating systems and devices. It was announced, under the name iBooks, in conjunction with the iPad on January 27, 2010, and was released for the iPhone and iPod Touch in mid-2010, as part of the iOS 4 update. Initially, iBooks was not pre-loaded onto iOS devices, but users could install it free of charge from the iTunes App Store. With the release of iOS 8, it became an integrated app. On June 10, 2013, at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, Craig Federighi announced that iBooks would also be provided with OS X Mavericks in fall 2013.
It primarily receives EPUB content from the iBooks Store, but users can also add their own EPUB and Portable Document Format files via data synchronization with iTunes. Additionally, the files can be downloaded to iBooks through Safari or Apple Mail. It is also capable of displaying e-books that incorporate multimedia. According to product information as of March 2010, iBooks will be able to "read the contents of any page " using VoiceOver.
On January 19, 2012, at an education-focused special event in New York City, Apple announced the free release of iBooks 2, which can operate in landscape mode and allows for interactive reading. In addition, a new application, iBooks Author, was announced for the Mac App Store, allowing anyone to create interactive textbooks for reading in iBooks; and the iBooks Store was expanded with a textbook category. The iBooks Author Conference, the annual gathering of digital content creators around Apple's iBooks Author, has convened since 2015.
iBooks was renamed "Apple Books" alongside the release of iOS 12 and macOS Mojave in September 2018. It features a new variation of the San Francisco typeface known as "SF Serif."
History
iBooks was announced alongside the iPad at a press conference in January 2010. The store itself, however, was released in America three days before the iPad with the introduction of iTunes 9.1. This was supposedly to prevent too much traffic on Apple's servers, as they have been overloaded with previous releases of the iPhone. On the day of its launch, on March 31, 2010, the iBooks Store collection comprised some 60,000 titles.On April 8, 2010, Apple announced that iBooks would be updated to support the iPhone and iPod Touch with iOS 4. As a result, iBooks was not supported on first-generation iPhones and iPod Touches.
On June 8, 2010 at the WWDC Keynote it was announced that iBooks would be updated that month to read PDF files as well as have the ability to annotate both PDFs and eBooks.
As of July 1, Apple expanded iBooks availability to Canada.
Upon its release for older devices running iOS 4, such as the iPhone 3GS and iPod Touch, iBooks received criticism for its slow performance. However, a July 19 update from Apple offered several improvements.
On September 27, 2011, Apple expanded the premium store to the Republic of Ireland.
On January 19, 2012, Apple announced the release of the iBooks 2 app, allowing users to purchase and download textbooks to the iPad. The new app will support digital textbooks that can display interactive diagrams, audio and video on the iPad. Apple also released a free tool called iBooks Author. The software allows users to create these interactive textbooks themselves.
On October 23, 2012, Apple announced iBooks 3.
On November 13, 2012, Apple was granted the patent “Display screen or portion thereof with animated graphical user interface” for page-turning animation. The page-turning animation was first filed for in December 2011 as ornamental design for a display screen. The patent’s illustration shows three different images of a virtual page being turned. One with a corner of a page being turned slightly, the next image with the page halfway turned, and the third showing the page almost entirely turned over. The patent refers to O'Reilly Media and FlippingBook companies that use page-turning animation in eBooks.
On June 10, 2013, Apple announced iBooks for OS X Mavericks.
Books are now available for purchase in the following countries; Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Guatemala, Honduras, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States, and Venezuela.
On October 24, 2013, Apple patented an application for “Personalizing digital gifts”, which describes a novel method for gifting e-books to friends. The patent describes how a user can select the appealing e-book snippet that will bring up a contextual menu containing an option to gift the media to another party.
On November 15, 2013, Apple pushed version 3.2 of iBooks for iOS with a redesigned interface to match the "flat" style of iOS 7, which dropped support for iOS 6 and earlier versions.
On the annual WWDC in 2014, Apple unveiled that iBooks will be a pre-installed app in the next version of the operating system, iOS 8, along with the Podcasts app.
On September 17, 2014, Apple bundled version 4.0 of iBooks for iOS with iOS 8.0. This includes slight changes with the bookstore button, grouping of books by series in the bookshelf, Auto-night mode theme, as well as small changes to the underlying rendering engine.
On October 20, 2014, Apple bundled version 4.1 of iBooks for iOS with iOS 8.1.
On January 24, 2018, Apple renamed iBooks to Books in the iOS 11.3 beta.
As well as in macOS 10.13.4 beta iBooks to Books on March 5, 2018. It was renamed back to iBooks in a next intermittent 10.13.4 macOS beta, showing some uncertainty about the marketing decision.
Formats
The supported e-book formats by iBooks are EPUB and PDF. As of version 2.0, iBooks also supports a proprietary iBook format, generated with the iBooks Author tool. This format is based upon the EPUB format, but depends on custom widget code in the iBooks app to function.Features
As of version 3, iBooks renders text written in 18 different languages. Users of the application are able to change the font and text size displayed. Available English fonts are Baskerville, Cochin, Georgia, Palatino, Times New Roman, Verdana, Athelas, Charter, Iowan Old Style and Seravek. Version 5 removed Cochin and Baskerville.Users can adjust screen brightness from within the application.
Words can be selected and searched throughout the book. Definitions of words can also be found upon clicking on the word and selecting 'define' which will give the reader a brief description of what the word means and if there isn't a definition available, the reader can opt to either search on Wikipedia or the web for a definition, an option available even if there is a definition for the word. Readers can also highlight passages and when this is done, the part of the
Ebook which deals with the chapters and notes will automatically save the words or sentences which were highlighted, as well as revealing any notes made after highlighting a certain passage, another feature.
Originally, there were three viewing background themes to choose from, except when reading PDF documents. The themes were:
- Normal: black text on a white background
- Sepia: sepia text on an off-white background
- Night: light grey text on a black background
With the introduction of iOS 9 in 2015, a fourth background theme was added: Gray: light grey text on a dark gray background.
iBooks also stacks books that belong to a series when the user is on the "All Books" screen. When selected, the books included in the series are shown in the order in which they were released, including books in the series that the user has not purchased. The prices of the unpurchased books are displayed on the upper right corner of the book "ear-marked" in green. Tapping the unpurchased book takes the user directly to the iBook store allowing for quick purchase.
There are three page layouts: Book, Full Screen, and Scroll. In Book or Full Screen layout, pages are turned by tapping or dragging the page, animated to imitate the appearance of a paper book. In Scroll, there is no page turning, and the book appears as continuous text, read vertically like a web browser.
Until May 2011 the iBooks app included a free copy of Winnie-the-Pooh, the 1926 book by A. A. Milne, in order to get the user's library started.
Apple Books Store
The Apple Books Store is an ePub content sales and delivery system that delivers eBooks to any iOS device such as the iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch. It does not currently support either the downloading or reading of iBooks directly on Windows or Linux distributions, but it does support the downloading and reading of iBooks on OS X Mavericks and later.Prior to the unveiling of the iPad, publishers Penguin Books, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan Publishers, and Hachette Book Group USA committed to producing content for the iBooks Store. Additional publishers were invited to participate on the day of the product announcement, January 27, 2010. The iBooks Store also provides access to the 30,000+ free books available from Project Gutenberg, and it provides content channeled through Draft2Digital or Smashwords, allowing independent authors and publishers to self-publish.
The day before the iPad event, Terry McGraw, the CEO of McGraw-Hill, appeared to divulge information to Erin Burnett on CNBC about the upcoming iPad release. This was quickly picked up and disseminated by rumor sites and eventually mainstream media outlets as revelation of features of the iPad. McGraw Hill was not included in the iPad presentation at the Apple media event and there was speculation that the exclusion was in response to this release of information. However, McGraw-Hill has stated that the information disclosed by McGraw was not privileged, and that the company had not intended to participate in the event.
In 2011, an Apple spokesperson announced that "We are now requiring that if an app offers customers the ability to purchase books outside of the app, that the same option is also available to customers from within the app with in-app purchase." Due to the 30% revenue share that Apple receives from the in-app purchase mechanism, the financial viability of competing bookstore apps run by other book retailers is uncertain, even though in many countries, the iBooks Store still does not provide consumers access to any e-books except for free works, such as ones that are in the public domain. Apple's competitor Amazon.com updated its iOS Kindle app in July 2013 to bypass the 30% revenue share by requiring the user to purchase content using the Kindle Store's website instead of using the Kindle app; users can still get free e-books or samples while using the app.
Controversy
Some critics have stated that the iBooks interface is a near-exact replica of Classics by Andrew Kaz and Phill Ryu, released over a year prior and even featured in Apple's own TV commercials. Apple has made no acknowledgment of this.Documents created by iBooks Author in the.ibooks format may be sold for a fee only if they are accepted and exclusively distributed by Apple. These restrictions do not apply to documents created in other formats like exported as PDF or text files. As Apple officially mentions the EPUB format, documents renamed to *.epub may not be affected. But this is left unclear and such documents are not fully compatible with the EPUB standard.