A Boring Tech Review Blog - RTOTD #858

Day 858

 

I upgraded my MacBook to OS X Mavericks yesterday because it was free. And thus far, I love it... with one big caveat:

 

For the first time, iBooks run on the Mac. In previous iterations of OS X,  you could buy iBooks through the iBooks Store that was inside of the iTunes store. You could manage your library. You could add other ePub format books that you... *ahem* Downloaded... and modify the metadata and transfer the books to your iOS devices through the iTunes app. But you couldn't actually read a fucking iBook on your Mac without a 3rd party ePub reader app. If you were in iTunes and double-clicked on a book to open it like you would a movie or song, it did nothing. It might as well have been an iOS app that you could also manage/view your library of iPhone or iPad apps, but that was about it. It was just there. A throwback to the days where you had to connect your phone to your computer in order to manage what music and apps you had on your device.

 

That all changed with Mavericks. iBooks has its own dedicated app now and when you first open it, it asks you if you'd like to migrate your library to there from iTunes. A dedicated app for just reading that actually lets you read the books that you buy for your iPad on your laptop. A dedicated app for managing your eBook library that is designed for books instead of being square-peg-hammered into the round hole of an app originally designed as just a music library manager and media player. A media player and library manager that couldn't actually run/open/play a number of the types of files that it managed.

 

iTunes, while still bloated and unnecessarily processor intensive, is a good media library manager for movies and music and tv shows. It's a player. It plays entertainment that you passively enjoy. The integration of iBooks management, while it makes sense in a "keep your whole media library in 1 app" sense, always seemed too somehow... not... quite... fit. In the same way that iOS app management doesn't seem to fit. Books and movies/music/tv shows are different in 1 very specific way. Books require active engagement with the material in order to enjoy. Movies, music and tv shows are passive. Reading requires thinking. Watching and listening don't. And that's before I even point out the uselessness of a library that simply lets you LOOK at apps that you can't even open.

 

But I'm getting off track here.

 

Artist names. Album names. Series names. Disc numbers. Track numbers. Compilations, durations and all of that stuff is great for metadata for music and movies. But for books? It doesn't work as well. It's that square-peg-round-hole thing again.

 

That's what's nice about iBooks. The problem is, you can't actually edit the metadata in iBooks. Now, I don't know about you guys, but I'm fucking weird about id3 tags and metadata in movies and music and tv shows. I want them to be as accurate as possible. Granted, I don't give a fuck about "composers" or some of the weird fields. But artist, album, track number, release year, etc... I want that shit to be right. And I can't do that in iBooks for some reason. There's no way to edit the stuff. So when it comes to a book genre, I've got some weird genres in there right now. For instance, there's a Vince Flynn book in my library that has a genre of "cookie429" because apparently that's a real genre and I can't change it. I can't drag & drop it into the right genre and it make the changes. I can't 2-finger click on it and get a thing to open and edit it manually. I can't do anything. It's stuck with a genre of "cookie429" until magic happens. And that does NOT make for easy library maintenance of over 1,500 eBooks.

 

The other problem that I see with it is one major thing that made the iTunes integration make sense. If you buy a book from the iBooks store, it's right there with the little iCloud logo every time you open the iBooks app on  your iPad or phone. Just click the iCloud logo and you can magic your book down onto your device. No problem. But if you have a book that you didn't buy from the iBooks store, and you have it in your library and want to throw it onto your iPad, you just clicked it, dragged it over to your devices and dropped it into the iPad option. Except that... oh would you look at that? There's no fucking devices that show up! There's no option on the 2-finger click. There's not even an option anywhere in the damn program that I can find. WTF?

 

So I'm back to managing books to my iPad by having to check and uncheck them through the sync options in iTunes when I click on the device that I want to stick a book onto.

 

Needless to say, this sucks. Granted, it's been out for all of about 20 hours now, and I'm pretty sure that's one of the things that'll get fixed pretty quickly. But still... in the meantime? It sucks.