the #1 reason why I went for an iPad 1 in 2010 was the promise that it’s the best eBook reader out there: Perfect display size and form-factor to display even non-responsive A4/letter PDF pages but still small and lightweight and the battery lasts all day. But the best part was the iBooks app with a phenomenal UX and feature set: Open Formats (pdf/epub), super fast pdf rendering engine, nice gimmicks like the paper-like page-turn animation, a virtual bookshelf, bookmarks/highlights/books reopen at the last reading position. And of course a built-in bookstore.
Apple may have failed with their plan to repeat the music selling success that they had with itunes/ipods with eBooks. But iBooks was right in many ways right from the beginning.
Every couple of years I’m trying a Windows tablet for eBooks. In 2014 I tried a 8" baytrail tablet with Windows 8.1. Perfect size for an eBook reader. It came with the built-in Reader metro app, but it was just a super basic PDF viewer. One document at a time, no library, no way to store the last reading position. About a year ago I tried again on a Surface Book on Windows 10 1903. The default eBook and PDF reader app had changed to the Microsoft Edge browser — interesting, unexpected but not the worst idea. While it provided some basic reading and navigation features, it still lacked to store the last reading position for PDF eBooks, making it unusable for my usecase (I have a lot of technical manuals as PDFs). I crawled the Windows Store for virtually any UWP eBook and PDF reader, but didn’t find any app that supports both ePub and PDF, has a decent fullscreen user experience and provides essential features like a library and storing the last reading position of every book.
Ten years ago Apple got the UI/UX for eBooks exactly right on the first iPad. Windows got the laptop/tablet hybrid right with Windows 10 and devices like the Surface Book — but it still lacks the eBook usecase.
