by iBooks 3 is the latest edition of Apple’s reading app for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. Like all of its biggest competitors—Amazon’s Kindle app chief among them—iBooks is free. In choosing your preferred e-reading app, you’re basically choosing which ecosystem you’ll use for purchasing the ebooks themselves.
Kindle isn’t iBooks’ only competitor, but it’s worth mentioning one stark difference between the Kindle platform and the iBooks platform: Both can sync your place when you read ebooks between different devices. With iBooks, the only currently compatible devices are iOS devices. With Kindle, there are Kindle desktop apps for the Mac and Windows PCs, and of course the hardware Kindle devices as well. If you’re already plugged into the Kindle ecosystem, I’ll say at the outset that as good as iBooks 3 is—and it is very good—there’s really not enough to motivate you to switch allegiances from Kindle to iBooks.
That said, cliché though it may sound, iBooks 3 is the best edition of the app to date. Significant and minor improvements alike make the app more satisfying a reading environment than ever before.
Surprisingly, one significant iBooks improvement is lifted from the Kindle app: The bookshelf in iBooks now lists all the books you own, even titles you haven’t downloaded to your device. That makes it quick and painless to download books you own on demand (provided your iOS device is online, of course). Books in the cloud are marked with a special icon on their covers.
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