iBooks: No. This Is Wrong.

This has been bothering me since last night. And if I don’t post this now, I might not remember it for several days.

Click = big

That’s just wrong. That doesn’t belong there.

As some people have been pointing out in their own posts, there are strange loose ends and design inconsistencies that are beginning to sprout in iPhone OS and its Apple-created apps.

That is one of them. The Apple I knew would have never done that.

For those of us who are attuned to some aspects of design, to see things such as that come from Apple is beginning to really creep us out. It’s like a warning sign that some control has been lost … somewhere.

There are other things that are completely wrong with iBooks too, but this one has been bugging me for near 24 hours, so I had to get this out of my system.

More on iBooks when I have my own iPad.

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iPad Links: Thursday, April 8, 2010

I didn’t get much of a chance to get around the Net today. Frankly, after fondling the iPad again yesterday, coming back to this desktop PC is a depressing and discouraging experience.

So, a very short post.

Apple must read this: What the iPad is Missing (No, it’s not a Camera) — this is disturbing. I’d expect this of Microsoft, not Apple.

Finally, a way to improve WinMob! DIYers Hack Windows Mobile Phones to Run Android

iPad:
The hammer and the iPad…
Read Predictably Irrational: Price Anchoring, Or Why a $499 iPad Seems Inexpensive
What the iPad Told Me
The iPad: Obligatory Post on Impressions, Reading, and Wrist Strength
iPad thoughts after a few days
Um, no: Are People Already Missing the Point of the iPad?
iPad Keyboard Dock Hands On
Why the iPad Will Win.
Apple Wants 1/8th of Your iPhone Back—Don’t Give It to Them

iPad Pages App:
File Sharing with an iPad: Ugh!

iPhone OS 4:
YouTube video: iPhone OS 4 multitask

UI/Web Design:
iPad web development tips
2008: iPhone Design Session
HTML 5 Doctor

Publishing:
Publisher Realizes Google Books Isn’t Evil, But Quite Beneficial — and then will cry when his business is all gone.
Spooked By iPad, ePub’s Custodians Promise Overhaul
Backwards Steps by the WSJ and NYT on iPad

Writers/Writing:
Free eBook: Lady – Here’s Your Wreath by James Hadley Chase

BiblioCore: The Second-Biggest eBook News Of 2010

The first big eBook news of 2010 being the iPad, of course.

I’d been awaiting today’s announcement for quite some time, hoping it would come, and now it has.

TuneCore, a service that independent musicians have used for years to sell through the iTunes Store, will now offer a similar service for ePub eBooks to be called BiblioCore.

This is huge. Major huge!

How The iPad Helps Google Steal Books

I could have chosen other titles, but I think that’s apt.

If you want to see my stance on Google and books (if it isn’t obvious from this post title), start with this post at The eBook Test and read all of its backlinks.

Earlier this year, I was using Google Books extensively. It was a real pain. Reading a vertical screen while seated at a desk is work, not any sort of pleasure.

At one point, I got really desperate and was thinking of buying a small machine that would let me lounge and read. But there weren’t any tablets out there that would do this. And given the crap CPU in the original iteration of Archos 9, that was ruled out too.

Luckily, that desperate stretch ended without me wasting money.

Because, as it turns out, right now the iPad is nearly what I wanted all along.

And So 2010 Becomes 1984

Television broadcasting started out in the public interest.

We didn’t have hours and hours of infomercials when I was growing up.

iAd has no such “public interest” at the heart of it.

Previously at The eBook test:

I Don’t Like The Future Apple And Google Are Creating

iTunes Modifies ePub eBook Files

This post is a follow-up to Experiment: Add Missing eBook Covers In iTunes.

The problem here is that since I don’t have an iPad — yet (hurry up, 3G!) — my testing and questioning is not clean and systematic. All this is being done on the fly right now, so I tend not to do the kind of follow-through I ordinarily would.

A Commenter at the above post stated that adding a cover to an ePub eBook file in iTunes does indeed modify the file itself.

Since I took yesterday off, it’s only today that I got around to seeing if this is true.