iBooks

I've never been a fan of Apple's iBooks and the iBookstore, but some authors have taken to it to sell books in the .ibook format, easily done with iBooks Author app. I've always been reluctant to buy books there but have if it's the only available ePub format.

One reason for my dislike was that iBooks was only available on the iDevice and not Mac's. That changed with OS-X Mavericks (10.9.x), and while the app is decent, it leaves a lot to be desired and I've learned now, even more to be desired.

Apparently it only likes to recognize books, ibook or PDF format, you buy or download from the iBookstore, and while you can import other PDF's it won't open them, using Acrobat on the Mac, and it will upload them to any iDevice but not open them.

Yeah, you upload the book and iBooks on the iPad won't see it so you can open and read it. To that end I removed all the PDF's from iBooks on the iPad, no matter where I bought them, and uploaded them into Acrobat on the iPad where I have over two dozen other books.

So, until Apple loosens their restrictions on iBooks on the iPad to be more useful, my recommendation is simple, that two word phrase that goes, ".... 'em". Yeah, really. I like Apple and the Mac Pro and iDevices, but less so their operating systems anymore, and even less their policy decisions.

I hope this is just a bug in iBooks on iDevices and Apple will fix it to upload and open generic PDF's since iBooks does open PDF's from the Apple bookstore, but I'm not holding my breath anymore with the Apple developers as they seem more interested in adding enchancement than fixing applications.

My point is simple, avoid if you can which is hard anymore as ebook sellers embed their DRM into ePbub books. I feel more so about NOOK books because of the lousy converstion and display, and I don't buy Amazon ebooks.