Build a Better Books
Recent changes to the Books app in iOS 16 have made a mediocre app a lot worse.
Apple Books, formally iBooks, is a decades-old Application that has seen minimal improvement in the decade since its launch. But with the release of iOS 16, I'd argue that many of the aesthetic and design decisions introduced have made the app & reading experience substantially worse (and yes, killing the page flip animation is one of those reasons).
In this post, I bemoan some of my gripes with the changes, offering solutions and listing a few features that could enhance the Apple Books experience.
Why Books is Bad
Bring Back the Page Flip (Fixed)
RIP Books Page Turn Animation (2010-2022)
This is unequivocally the most egregious and unnecessary killjoy change made in Apple Books. Since 2010, iBooks/Apple Books has featured a beautiful user-controllable animation for page-turning, mimicking the page-turning of a physical book. And since 2012, Apple has even owned the patent for this animation. But in iOS 16, Apple removed this flourish, opting for a tinder-like swipe left/swipe right card animation instead.
While Apple has made a point of killing off all skeuomorphic elements of its past, this one felt particularly cruel & unnecessary. First, the new swipe-left-to-turn page tile interaction is just as skeuomorphic as the design it replaces in that it retains the exact behaviour of a physical book, and second, it makes reading less joyful. Flipping a page in Apple Books, even playing with the animation, was always a tiny extra joy while reading an eBook, and that matters to many people for whom these careful details and delights enhance the reading experience.
Solution: Bring back the page turn. There's no reason Apple couldn't have three options: Infinite Scroll, Tile, and Page-Flip inside their application.
Update: As of the February 28th 16.4 beta, Apple has restored the Page Flip animation, implementing the exact solution I had proposed in having three different options (Slide, Curl, None). Bravo Cupertino!
Retool Collections
Some collections are collections (LOTR, Harry Potter, Massey Lecture Series), and some Aren’t (Meik Wikings books, Adam Silveras’ series)
Conceptually, I like the idea of books in a series grouped in Apple Books. For example, all the Harry Potter books I own are grouped in their mini folder in the main library. I don't mind that. But my frustration is Apple, by default, mandates that I see all related books and that books in Collections must be displayed with these mini folders. I purchased a book that happened to be from a CBC Massey Lectures series, and as a result, a folder was populated with other 50+ books in that series that I don't care to read. Other times, books that have sequels or prequels (for example, They Both Die in the End) aren't grouped.
Solution: Provide the option to toggle whether or not a book from a collection is displayed as such.
Stop Changing Covers
I am altering the cover, pray I don’t alter it any further. And as you can see from the image before this one, the covers have changed once again in the time I have been working on this post.
Just like it states, stop changing covers on me! I purchased the Lord of the Rings Trilogy years ago, with a set of digital covers that I quite liked. Those covers have been regularly updated every few years, most recently with giant faux stickers advertising Amazon's The Rings of Power Prime series. Now my copy of The Lord of the Rings is mismatched from my copy of The Hobbit and the other Tolkien works I own. This sounds neurotic, but you're already five paragraphs into an article about Apple Books, so are you that surprised?
Solution: Give users the ability to retain a copy of the cover they purchased with their book and treat covers like alternate app icons, allowing readers the ability to change them.
Fix the Navigation Menu
That tortured little controller at the bottom right of the Books app is the bane of my reading experience.
Books in iOS 16 consolidated all the menus and controls behind a new button at the bottom left or right of an eBook. It's horrendous.
For starters, it's nearly impossible to select. Not only is it ridiculously small, but my hit rate for successfully pressing it has to be 50% on the iPhone and even lower on my iPad mini. This improved since 16.2, but evoking and selecting this menu still requires a high degree of precision; otherwise, you dismiss the button or end up turning the page.
Second, it hides valuable menu items. Previously you could jog through books by sliding your finger along the bottom, as is still the case on macOS. Now, you have to press the screen, let the button fade in, press the button (good luck) and slide your finger along a considerably miniaturized pseudo button. And this functions differently on iPhone & iPad. On the iPhone, it's built into the 'Contents' button, while on iPad, it's a separate slider perpendicular to the other menu items (the Contents button exists on iPad doesn’t have this behaviour). It's less precise, more inconvenient, and not intuitive (it looks like a button, but functions like a slider). This controller might be less of an issue for more linear novels, but it's a nightmare for navigating more complex reads, reference books, or when you want to look back at something.
Third, hiding Search, Notes, & Bookmarks behind this controller is another strike against this cursed button. It's another layer of frustration resulting from needlessly preferring to prioritize simplicity at the expense of utility. Accessing a Note or Highlight in Books now requires:
Tapping the display to bring up the button.
Pressing the button.
Selecting "Bookmarks & Highlights"
Toggling over to view your Highlights.
Four steps to access Highlights when a single dedicated button previously provided instant access to the page.
Solution: Return navigation items & buttons that assist the reader to prominence. They can still be hidden/dismissed by a tap on the page, but there's no need to hide essential data behind multiple layers of taps.
Fix the Hypersensitive Bookmarking (Fixed-ish)
Previously in Books on iOS 16.0-16.1, about 75% of the bookmarks I made were accidental. Anytime my hand even got remotely close to the display, a bookmark would be created. And it got bad enough that I would create a half dozen bookmarks for every 10 minutes of reading.
Now since 16.2, that option appears to have been disabled, with a double press not evoking anything. Instead, creating a bookmark is now a three-step process (tap the display, tap the bottom button, and finally, tap the bookmarks icon). It's still bad, just a different kind of bad.
Solution: Return bookmarking to its existing behaviour, with a single dedicated button accessed at the top right of the screen.
What Books is Missing
This section captures a few changes Apple could add to Books to enhance the App.
Introduce AI Narration/Audiobook Syncing
I'm intrigued by the announcement of AI narration for to Apple Books. Based on the few books they previewed, the voices present the content clearly, correctly, and with a lot of character. As this technology improves, I would like to see it added to Books as a supplement to the reading experience (a book/audiobook hybrid). This could offer the ability for someone to read a book, plug it into their vehicle, listen to it as an AI audiobook while they drive, and pick up reading again at their destination.
SharePlay
Given the number of Children's books available in the Apple Books Store, incorporating SharePlay into Books might be a fantastic feature for family members to read aloud with children while apart.
Bookclubs & Reading Challenges
I would love to see Apple integrate reading challenges into the Books App. This could be combined by partnering with reading challenges, offering book suggestions that fit specific prompts, and recommending podcast book club tie-ins. Ways of tracking, competing and seeing a friend’s progress, and sharing your own metrics add extra interactivity to the experience.
Customization and reader Accessibility
The one addition I have wanted for over a decade in Books is a finer ability to manage book line and character spacing. These features, added in Books for iOS 16, help improve my reading speed and overall experience. However, books continue to omit two reading features: the ability to narrow margins and technologies like Bionic Reading or the Dyslexie typeface to assist those with reading challenges.
In Sum
Books has been a very 'meh' app for most of its life. It wasn't horrible, nor was it the bleeding edge of innovation. However, with iOS 16, Books received changes that significantly degraded the usability and appeal of the application. It's less joyful, more cumbersome, and less intuitive.
This is all software, so I hope that Apple revisits their philosophy behind these changes and remakes books to be more loved and lovely application. The animations of the Dynamic Island highlight that Apple is not allergic to whimsy, and I hope that results in a Books app that returns to delighting its readers.
