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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.
It only applies to the Apple universe. Lots of us moved on to Android platforms.
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.