Just upgraded my 3GZ to iOS4 and am greatly enjoying the ability to use folders and to multi-task Pandora. Can’t wait for Last.fm, which has far fewer repeats. Supposed to be available at the end of the week.
As part of the upgrade I noticed that iBooks is now available. I downloaded it, but will never buy a book from Apple. It’s OK for public domain stuff, but I can’t imagine why anyone would buy books from Apple and then restrict themselves forever to reading on Apple equipment. At least with Kobo, Amazon, etc. I can read on several different hardware platforms. As much as I love my Apple stuff, I may want to change hardware some day, especially with phones, Android looks more and more interesting, and to lock myself in forever doesn’t make much sense to me.
iBooks is in ePub format. I’m sure there will shortly be ways to extract your books much like you can extract your music. The files are all stored on iTunes as well as the reading device.
Not all ebooks at the iBooks store are DRMed. Apple offers publishers the choice of whether to apply DRM to books on the store.
Right. Henry Melton puts his stuff on the Apple iBooks store without DRM.
iBooks now accepts any non-DRM PDFs you might have.
That so rocks.
just here to second what all three people before me said.
I agree with the author..what if I choose to change devices in the future? Short-sighted, at best. I have used EReader/Fictionwise for years, and now B&N EBooks a lot, but at least their software is usable across several devices…much better deal, and frankly musch better software than iBooks.
juliusa: eReader/Fictionwise is usable across several devices *for now*, as long as you don’t want your iPad to use its full resolution. I’m not hopeful about the future of the non-B&N version of eReader.
At this point I think it’s clear that any purchases you want to be able to use into the future need to be in open non-DRMed formats (like ePub). Maybe we’ll get lucky and Apple will convince the publishers (other than Baen, who seem to have grasped the clue early) to stop their futile and frustrating efforts; after all, they managed to get the music industry to come around!
This article is misleading a bit.
iBooks is an ebook application with an integrated book store, but nobody is obligated to buy the books from Apple. iBooks will load any standard ePub/PDF books that is not DRM protected, not just public domain books. ePub/PDF books with no DRM != public domain.
As of right now, majority of the big stores like BN, Amazon and Apple are all restricted to their platform, that’s something they can’t do anything about as long as publishers continue to mandate DRM for their work.
Buying a different hardware in the future does not mean that it’ll automatically get Amazon/BN software either, so you can’t say that buying books from Amazon is future-proof either. Amazon can easily one day remove support for several devices.
For now, the only future proof platform will be Google Editions, as it allows any device with a browser to access books bought from Google. Offline caching of ebooks will solve the problem with offline reading. Furthermore, Google Editions will leverage the power of google search, bookmarking, social reading.