Apple Books – why it's the superior PDF reader for me (or is it?)

[Silly John Fatty]

To some of those who replied to my previous thread that was closed and claimed Books wasn't a software to be used professionally: I'd just like to answer that yes, it is, and if you think it's not, I'd be very interesting in hearing what is (and seriously interested).

It's certainly not Adobe Reader. Just compare highlighting and marking things on the two. Books takes much less steps and is more flexible. Adobe is clumsy and you can see it's a feature that is there but that probably nobody uses, and if somebody does - my condolences.

So using Books is more rational and more efficient.

And still, Books s**ks and made me lose my data (my highlighting and marks) on a very big amount of pages. And to those who said a cloud service such as iCloud is not a backup: Well, these items are synced through my iCloud only and I believe it's not possible for me to back them up because they're in the Cloud in the first place and only there as far as I know, so you'd assume it's Apple's job to back them up. If you want to have these documents synced, they'll be independent of any copies on your drive - correct me if I'm wrong.

What happened was a syncing issue between multiple devices. I think I might start to look out for a better cloud service than iCloud. It has made me lose data too many times, I can't take it seriously anymore.

 

[gilby101]

Do you want this thread to be everyone naming and arguing their favourite PDF reader?

There is no single answer. Using Books is fine if that suits what you are reading and what you want to do when reading. I quite like using Books for books.

I like Skim (free) for long documents because of its flexible layouts.

But mostly I use Preview, even for long documents.

I don't think there is any need to pay for a reader.

 

[GerritV]

I used Books as a pdf reader for a while, but the Book Store was annoying since I had no need for it.
Also, Books doesn't have an Export command.
So I'm with @gilby101 and would advice Preview for pdf handling.

As for iCloud, I'm with you.
I still remember iDisk, dotmac, MobileMe. All of them were massive fails, never really worked.
In fact, Apple knew it and, in the end, turned MobileMe from a yearly $99,99 to a $0,00 "service".
Somehow, to me, it feels as if iCloud was built upon that crappy technology and therefor indeed cannot be trusted.

A while ago, I switched my calendar, task manager and note taking to analog.
Not having to deal with iCloud was one of the benefits of that switch.

 

[Silly John Fatty]

Do you want this thread to be everyone naming and arguing their favourite PDF reader?

There is no single answer. Using Books is fine if that suits what you are reading and what you want to do when reading. I quite like using Books for books.

I like Skim (free) for long documents because of its flexible layouts.

But mostly I use Preview, even for long documents.

I don't think there is any need to pay for a reader.

You'd think there's an industry standard for that, and there in fact is, it's probably Adobe Reader, but it's terrible for highlighting things and adding marks.

I used Books as a pdf reader for a while, but the Book Store was annoying since I had no need for it.
Also, Books doesn't have an Export command.
So I'm with @gilby101 and would advice Preview for pdf handling.

As for iCloud, I'm with you.
I still remember iDisk, dotmac, MobileMe. All of them were massive fails, never really worked.
In fact, Apple knew it and, in the end, turned MobileMe from a yearly $99,99 to a $0,00 "service".
Somehow, to me, it feels as if iCloud was built upon that crappy technology and therefor indeed cannot be trusted.

A while ago, I switched my calendar, task manager and note taking to analog.
Not having to deal with iCloud was one of the benefits of that switch.

Preview is good and sufficient on the Mac (in fact Books will open PDFs in Preview) but it's not "really" available on iPhone or iPad. You sort of can preview files, but it's not a standalone app and you therefore can't have multiple documents open – but that's what I often need.

You therefore also can not sync files and what marks you add to them.

It's kind of crazy you can not do that. It makes these devices toys for rich kids in my eyes.

 

[HDFan]

To enable your own backups you would need to have regular files that you edit. Others may suggest editors that are better than Adobes'. Once edited you can then put a copy into Books.

 

[Silly John Fatty]

To enable your own backups you would need to have regular files that you edit. Others may suggest editors that are better than Adobes'. Once edited you can then put a copy into Books.

Too complicated sadly, because I edit them all the time. And I need them to sync between different devices.