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Tuesday, January 24, 2012

iBooks Version: 2.0 Review | iPhone and iPad Books App | Macworld

iBooks Version: 2.0 Review | iPhone and iPad Books App | Macworld: With optimized books, the app succeeds too—but in a different way. It’s not at all complicated to read an optimized textbook in the app, and anyone familiar with an iOS device should mostly be able to navigate such a book without trouble. (The one gotcha is remembering the pinch gesture to get back to the Chapter view.) But you do need to examine each element on the page to know what it can do: Is this just a photo, or is it a slideshow, or a model, or an animation, or a video, or something else? Again, it’s not hard to answer such questions—you just look at the interactive element’s description to see what it does. It’s a different way of reading, and it makes the books feel much more like exquisite webpages than texts. That’s not necessarily either good or bad—but it’s undeniably different from traditional reading. Where iBooks does a superb job getting out of your way as you read regular books, it screams “THIS IS AN IMMERSIVE MULTIMEDIA EXPERIENCE” when you read fancy ones.