It seems like there’s a revolt among a segment of diehard Apple fans every time a new app comes preloaded in iOS. No one likes bloatware, and Apple is usually good about keeping crap out of its software. The main problem is that iOS apps can’t be deleted and phone storage these days is precious.
Yet it turns out that choosing to include iBooks as a stock app in iOS 8 was the best thing Apple’s ever done for its ebooks service.
Speaking at the Digital Book World Conference today, Director of iBooks Keith Moerer revealed that iBooks has been seeing one million new users per week since the launch of iOS 8 and the iPhone 6 last September. Family Sharing in iOS 8 has also boosted iBooks engagement in recent months.
“Indie publishing is one of our biggest growth areas,” Moerer told the audience. He also said that TV and movie creators have been increasingly using iBooks Author as a means of offering free promotional content. The ebook creation tool was intended primarily for textbook use, but Apple has been unable to capture much traction in that market.
Moerer noted the overall slowdown in ebook sales, pointing out that it’s “something we’ve seen in other digital media businesses.” iTunes Music sales are down too, and Apple is rumored to preload Beats Music on iOS sometime this year.
“More of our book sales are coming from phones,” according to Moerer, which isn’t very surprising given the larger iPhone 6 and 6 Plus displays.
Alex Heath is a journalist who works for Tech Insider. He’s the former co-host of The CultCast. He has been quoted by the likes of the BBC, KRON 4 News, and books like “ICONIC: A Photographic Tribute to Apple Innovation.” He lives in Lexington, Kentucky. If you want to pitch a story, share a tip, or just get in touch, additional contact information is available on his personal site. Follow him on Twitter.
5 responses to “Why iOS 8 turned iBooks into a must-read”
While I love the convenience of reading books and documents on iBooks for iPad, I have been frustrated by its serious bugs that ruined my experience.
If you are not careful when highlighting certain words, sentences, paragraphs, you could inadvertently highlight the entire chapter from the point where you are highlighting to the first word in the chapter. If you delete the accidental highlight, it also delete all of highlighted snippets, forcing us to go back to the chapter’s beginning and start over.
I have seen same complaint in many forums since a several years, yet Apple has done nothing to fix the bug.
Another bug is that the new books and documents added to one platform aren’t automatically added to other platforms, i.e. iPhone, iPad, or Mac computers. I have to use the iTunes to add the books and documents to each platform. That consumed my time. Amazon Kindle does that automatically, allowing me to download whatever books I purchased.
Why can’t Apple fix this glaring deficiency?
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It was “The Swift Programming Language” that got me into iBooks. I do use it to read some ebooks and pdfs as I come across them. When I comes to purchasing ebooks, I still mostly use my Kindle reader program for that, for the flexibility and selection (and, as Oliver mentions, for the easy sharing).
Pro tip: download the high quality voices in Accessibility>Speech>Voices and boom! Instant audiobooks!
I quite like iBooks but always end up buying e-books from Amazon due to their platform neutrality/portability. I’d imagine there are very few people (customer base wise) that are 100% Apple. It would be nice if they released a reader on different platforms, they should at least release the iBooks app for their own older desktop OS’s.