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Apple's Getting Back Into the E-Books Fight Against Amazon (bloomberg.com)
Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg: Apple is ready to take on Amazon.com in the digital book market again, years after regulators forced the iPhone maker to back down from an earlier effort to challenge the e-commerce giant's lead. Apple is working on a redesigned version of its iBooks e-book reading application for iPhones and iPads and has hired an executive from Amazon to help. The new app, due to be released in coming months, will include a simpler interface that better highlights books currently being read and a redesigned digital book store that looks more like the new App Store launched last year, according to people familiar with its development. The revamped app in testing includes a new section called Reading Now and a dedicated tab for audio books, the people said. Apple released an early version of its iOS 11.3 mobile operating system update to developers on Wednesday, providing a hint that the new e-books app is on the way. The app is now simply called "Books," rather than "iBooks," according to the update.
The app is now simply called "Books," rather than "iBooks," according to the update.
Nooooo, is this finally the end of "i"Everything?
I'm still in mourning over the end of iCarly!
Though I work with computers I don't use them to read books. I have an epaper reader for that. What's your experience for reading for long times on LCDs?
I was under the impression that it wasn't very good for your eyes. I even read some people developed eyesight problems because of that
Yo guys, what's the worst reading app around?
Kindle, hands down.
Hire the man in charge of this "kindle" and get him to work on redesigning our knock-off right now.
Trying to get the old price fixing gang back together? Lets see if they can do it without being convicted of a a felony charge this time.
It only applies to the Apple universe. Lots of us moved on to Android platforms.
creimer is an amazing miracle poster!
I had never seen a minus 3 post on slashdot before. Only creimer could manage to do it!
See here:
https://slashdot.org/comments....
...years after regulators forced the iPhone maker to back down from an earlier effort to challenge the e-commerce giant's lead.
Yes, that time Apple and the top five book publishers colluded to enable price fixing, causing ebook prices to skyrocket overnight. What a wonderful effort; thank you Apple for fighting the good fight against Amazon. And then a few years later when the DOJ sued them all for it, such a shame.
I can't wait to see what their new efforts are.
Amazon lets you read kindle books on pretty much any device you can find via their app.
Apple is probably going to try and make iBooks Apple devices only.
For that reason alone I expect them to have next to no success, in this market.
Really. Most people set their monitor and tablet too bright. For comfortable reading, the brightness of the backlight should match the ambient lighting. That is, if your display is showing pure white and you hold a white sheet of paper next to it, the display should only be slightly brighter than the paper. White paper reflects about 65% of the light which hits it, and the white of your screen shouldn't be much brighter than that.
Most people set their screens much brighter than that. This results in eyestrain as your pupils have to adjust in size every time they look at and away from the screen. A good example are those LED billboards you see along the highway. When they're set too bright, it hurts your eyes to look at them at night. But when their brightness is set to match the ambient lighting, you can't tell if it's a LED billboard or a traditional paper billboard. Set the backlight of your LCD or OLED tablet to about match the brightness of a piece of paper, and there's no difference between reading from the tablet, an ePaper reader, or a printed page. (ePaper actually has a lower reflectance than white paper, about 50%, which is why the ones with a dim backlight are more comfortable for reading.
It's absolutely terrible. So they added multimedia to books and built in a PDF reader. Then tie in iTunes, I don't understand why they think this is acceptable software.
I don't understand why they think removing the ability to do things that a computer can do is a solution. The only people this matters to is people that don't do any kind of computing. They've gone to making computing easy and accessible to making it impossible.
I know Apple is in decline lately, and Amazon has the design kind of nailed with the current Kindles, but wouldn't it be nice to see an Apple e-reader?
Kindle works as a Kindle (as in the device) and Kindle (as in the app). The app works on pretty every much platform I have around the house ... our Android phones, the Apple devices we have around (iPod, iPhone, iPad), and our (convertible) Windows laptops. I also believe I can read my book on a plain old browser if I log into my Amazon account. We have a family Amazon account so we can share books that way, and my library works with the Overdrive app, which happily lets me check out ebooks from the library and send them to my "Kindle" to read.
Or I can go get a book through godawful iTunes and then not be able to read it, and I'm locked into the platform, and as far as I can tell, no integration with my local library so I need to pay for the book. Yay, where do I sign up?
The next price fixing scandal. Fucking cunts. In 20 years, we'll find out they fucking make illegal deals like people change underwear.
Another piece of software with an unsearchable name. Search engines finally got good enough that you could hit your target quickly, but then everyone is moving to reusing common terms so now everything is cluttered with everything else.