Dear Bookshop.org ebook department:

2025-11-11

I am a person who reads. I have recently bought an iPad mini for just that purpose, and so have been really delving into using your ebook app. There are several parts about the experience that I would like to change.

The Hi-Lighting

I love to highlight. I read best in physical media when I have a pencil in my hand, and the power to take notes and underline things when reading in the built-in ebook app ibooks is what got me back into reading after college. The hi-lighting experience in your app is terrible. It is inconsistent, and imprecise, and when I use the silly magic wand apple calls a pencil to try and add precision, your app both hi-lites and turns the page meaning that I often will get what I want hi-lit and release the pencil from the page, and the page will slide back, cancelling the page turn and the contextual selection menu with it. The text will ==stay selected==, as if a second interaction will reveal again the contextual menu, but no. The option to interact with the text in any way other than what the system default ascribes has been lost. So I have to cancel and try again. I’m sitting in a coffee shop carefully and deliberately rubbing a plastic tech-marker on a piece of glass just to make a smarmy aside to myself in the future. It’s embarrassing. Compare the experience of hi-liting in the library app Libby; I select the text, and it hi-lites it. I can select it again to change the color, and press and hold to copy and paste out. Nothing happens but what I expect. Libby cannot be customized to match my bear writing environment, but when I download the book again, there are my notes, as if i really wrote them in the margins of a real library book1. Your hi-lites, in contrast, are often off by a character or three on books I have kept downloaded on my device the whole time. I believe they are not tied to the text itself but inserted to some floating marker, as my highlights often get fucked when I switch from portrait to landscape2 and then back. Which is just like. Ebooks are a dynamically-reflowing list of text having a relative marker based off some approximation of a page number or something sucks. I would edit this copy of the book, insert a couple of =’s like in markdown3, but maybe you can’t just edit the text. IBooks and the library figured it out though, you can too.

Turning The Page

When a footnote is too close to the side of a page, the app takes this as an indication to turn the page. I have never met an app so thirsty to turn the page. This makes sense, as a common paradigm for ebooks is that when you tap the side of the page, or anywhere on the screen over the median, the page turns. I love footnotes4 and having support for both kinds of footnote in text5 is great, but if I click a link and it takes me to page 462 and then I don’t pixel-. perfect nail the little number — I am not trying to go back one page! I am trying - to click the referent that got me here so I can go on reading the paragraph the footnote was in!

The Offline Menu

This iPad has no cellular connection, why would it need one, I have an iPhone and a grand-fathered unlimited data plan. But often, I am sitting in my car waiting, and want to read a book. So I load up your app6 to read a book. If I do not have data, I am met by a mysterious field of grey squares. The first time this happened it was quite a surprise! Then I realised the issue: the book covers weren’t stored locally, probably to save space. This makes sense, so I went to the settings to change the display paradigm to “text only” or something. There was no option to do this anywhere. My only options for looking at my library are a field of externally hosted jpegs. My library can be sorted at my whim by author or title, but nowhere was there a way to surface this information in the interface. I can tell I’m, for example, 69%7 of the way through the new Doctorow, and when I click on it the book’s there. But it seems like you did not expect people to have ebook libraries of any size.

Slop

I bought a copy of the little prince and, and this is on me, the cover is obviously AI slop8. I don’t want my dollar back, I want to never have to look at this abomination of a cover ever again. however. Although I have supposedly deleted it from my library, ~there it sits, mocking me~. This book is an illegal addition of a public domain work, it even says so in the copy9, and I would like it removed from your servers but mostly I would like it removed from my sight. As an aside iBooks has a large number of public domain works available for free, but your app charges between a dollar and like five per each. Some of these are obviously, for example, penguin editions with special introductions or something, but the logic there doesn’t track for me.

Conclusion

I like reading ebooks, I love to read and I move a lot, ebooks are perfect. Being able to buy them from the bookstore down the way or the bookstore in my old hometown is an incredible improvement over giving a percentage to iBooks or god forbid, kindle. I have a ton of books in iBooks that I’ve bought over the years, and the switching cost of buying them all on say, kobo, is far too great, so apple’s stupid walled garden continues to bleed me10. I like things being Open. I like ~supporting local business~ etc. If I have to download an app to send a commensurate share of the profit to a bookstore as if I had bought this digital copy of Index, A History of the11 there – good. Fine. Doesn’t matter how janky the app is, I’ll do it.

But for gods sake fix the hi-lighting.

—Jacob

P.S. I completely forgot the thing that incited this! For an app obsessed with turning the page, no matter what you want to do, you can’t use the arrow keys! What the fuck! I press right arrow, the next page should come up, but no! The hell!

  1. something I would never do. ↩︎

  2. accidentally. Your app is awful in landscape. When I turn a reading app sideways, I expect a two-page layout not to read each a paragraph in CinemaScope. ↩︎

  3. the markdown bear uses, but not apparently the markdown micro.blog uses. ↩︎

  4. I love footnotes ↩︎

  5. the kind that are a little pop-up and the kind that are an interlink ↩︎

  6. Lately to continue reading C. Doctorow’s Enshittification or Dr. J. Sadoski’s The Mechanic and the Luddite, both highly recommended . ↩︎

  7. nice ↩︎

  8.  ↩︎

  9. looking into this more after publication it appears to be a fully illegal copy, but has the introductory text of a project Gutenberg book. The little prince is not currently out of copyright here in the United States. ↩︎

  10. Along with the strange difficulty and apparent illegality of cracking the DRM on an iBook or kindle protected file, even though near as I can tell iBooks is just a skin for the kindle store. ↩︎

  11. 2022, D. Duncan. W.W. Norton and co., England. ↩︎

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