I’m still not convinced by iBooks. Apple have tried – and, I’m led to believe – succeeded in producing an e-reading solution that well mimics the experience of reading an actual (paper) book. But, for Apple, who have always tried to kick arse in all they do, that’s not enough. The iPod wasn’t merely ‘as good as’ the competition: it blew every other portable music player out of the water. The iPhone trounced the competition, too. (And, for that matter, so too did the original Macintosh). If Apple really want to annihilate Amazon or Barnes & Noble, they have to produce the best reading solution, period.
One issue I have with iBooks is that the app doesn’t (appear) to track an individual’s reading history. Why not? Readers want to know this stuff: how long they spend reading daily, whether they’re reading more or less than they used to, which books they read most quickly, and so on. From Apple’s perspective, tracking how often users read specific titles, and for how long, could be used in the aggregate to accurately recommend new books to users in the iBookstore. I’m not going to attempt to explain how I think Apple should handle this, because Navel Labs already have the perfect solution with their iPhone app ReadMore.
Using ReadMore (screenshots from my ‘Stack’ above), you’re asked to compile a ‘Reading Stack’ of the books you’re currently reading. When you sit down to read a book on your stack, you tap the title of the book in ReadMore which starts a timer. When you’ve finished your reading sessions, you wake your iPhone, stop the timer, tap in the number of the page you’re up to, and you’re done. ReadMore uses this data to track your reading history, offering a prediction as to how long it will take you to read each specific book on your stack. Not only is it handy, but it pushes you to read more quickly, and more often.
It seems a fairly sure bet that these features are coming. After all, iTunes Genius already tracks music play counts and sends that data to Apple’s servers in order to suggest recommended tracks to purchase at the iTunes Music Store. And the App Store gained Genius with OS 3.0. So it’s a no-brainer that an update to iBooks later this year will include these tracking features, marketed as (duh) ‘iBooks Genius’.
But perhaps Apple could go further. How about moving away from conceptualising the iBookstore as a straightforward shopfront (which carries negative connotations of anonymity and passive consumerism), and promoting it more as a kind of reader’s community, along the lines of Goodreads? We shouldn’t forget that reading is social, as well as solitary: we like to know what our friends are reading, and, overwhelmingly, we make decisions about what to read based on their recommendations. So why not allow users to browse their friends’ ‘iBookshelves’? Or why not push the idea of a ‘Book Club’, in which one title is promoted a week (or, perhaps, one title per genre), and readers are then able to use the iBookstore to discuss that book with other users? In order to lock users into iBooks, the iBookstore has to feel like a community, not just some generic site you go to download ePub files. I don’t think that Apple can just replicate the iTunes Music Store formula and hope for an automatic success here: books aren’t songs. In order to compete with Amazon (or, indeed, your local independent bookstore) the iBookstore must offer the most enjoyable, compelling, and social book-buying experience available.
Finally, there’s the question of what iBooks means for independent authors. Surely the real success of the platform will lie in the ‘long tail’ – allowing writers to publish professionally, without needing to prostrate themselves before the big publishing houses. If Apple are serious about iBooks, they’ll provide independent writers with the tools to publish their work on the iBooks platform. Those authors will then become platform ambassadors, because it will become in their best interests to promote iBooks to potential readers.
(As a sidenote, I think it’s interesting, and says something about Apple’s commitment to the project, that apple.com/ibooks returns a ‘Page Not Found’ error instead of redirecting to apple.com/ipad/features/ibooks.html. Not to mention the fact that typing ‘ibooks.com’ into your browser takes you to a ‘Coming Soon!’ page from NetworkSolutions, whereas typing, say, ‘appstore.com’ takes you directly to the relevant page on apple.com. Quit clowning around, Apple – this book business is serious).