I haven’t had much time to really sit down enjoy the latest iBooks 3 update from last week, so I set aside an hour and a half last night to simply sit in bed, read, and check out the new scrolling mode. Scrolling If you haven’t already tried it, iBooks can now visualize your books […]
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Review: iBooks 3.0 for iPhone and iPad

Oct 30th 2012 by

iBooks scrolling

I haven’t had much time to really sit down enjoy the latest iBooks 3 update from last week, so I set aside an hour and a half last night to simply sit in bed, read, and check out the new scrolling mode.

Scrolling

If you haven’t already tried it, iBooks can now visualize your books as one long scrolling list, instead of presenting you with hundreds of digital representations of pages. This advantages of this new scrolling mode may not be immediately apparent – after all, taking the trouble to flick upwards a certain amount requires more effort than a quick tap to turn a page. But there is one major advantage to scrolling that I noticed during my quick reading spree: you don’t have to move your eyes around nearly as often.

One thing I love about iA Writer on the iPad is that it allows me to always keep my eyes on the same line, along the top third of the screen. The new scrolling in iBooks lets me do this, albeit manually, and that makes a major difference for when I want to read in bed. The iPad 2 is too heavy for me to really hold comfortably, so I always end up propping it up on my chest, or on top of a pillow. But even with that setup, reading anything on the lower half of my iPad’s screen does feel like a stretch, and it simply isn’t very comfortable. So for this niche reading case, scrolling is very, very welcome.

The only downside I’ve noticed so far is that scrolling seems to cause a lot more lag than pagination on both my iPad 2 and iPhone 4S. iBooks has never been the quickest app on either of my devices, but there’s a significant amount of interface lag during the first 5-10 seconds of loading a book on my iPhone.

Sharing

Sharing is a little hit-and-miss. I highlighted a passage of The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay to share with someone last night, and it worked perfectly. However, when I tried to share an excerpt from Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs for this post, I simply wasn’t able to. So the gist of it is that iBooks 3 can now share excerpts from text in nicely formatted e-mails…except when it can’t (probably thanks to DRM).

Misc.

  • the newly added French, German, Spanish, Japanese, and Simplified Chinese dictionaries sound like a great addition, but I don’t have any German books in my ebooks library yet, so I haven’t tested this feature at all
  • iBooks now functions a little more like iTunes Match, allowing you to see all of the titles in your account library, regardless of whether or not they’ve been downloaded to your device; books that aren’t on your device are tagged with little iCloud icons
  • updating books with chapters, corrections, and more content hasn’t happened for any of my books, but I imagine this is really aimed at textbooks (which I’ve simply never had occasion to use on my iPad)

That’s iBooks 3 in a nutshell. It’s a free download with a few UI refinements, one new marquee feature (hi, scrolling theme), and I’m looking forward to spending a lot more time with the app on my iPad mini later this week.

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