One thing that I really really like about the Kindle app and ecosystem is it’s ability to automatically sync your position in a book between devices. I use it extensively moving back and forth between the iPad and the iPhone, depending on where I am and what I’m doing (especially since my wife takes over the iPad when I’m at home).
Currently the same feature is available in iBooks for books that were purchased in the iBooks store. But I have a lot of books in ePub format that come from other sources, like Gutenberg, BAEN Books and my proper scanning and file conversion tests. I’ve been using Stanza for most of those eBooks due to its integration with Calibre, the software I use to manage the library.
Earlier today I loaded an ePub file from my DropBox account into the iPad to verify that the conversion from .LIT had worked properly. Then I was out to lunch and remembered that I hadn’t checked if the table of contents was properly done. After opening the file, iBooks hesitated a second and took me to the last page I’d been reading on the iPad. So I read a little bit further and once I got back to the iPad, it properly synced the page without my doing anything else.
Now I’m not sure of how iBooks determines the identity of a given eBook across iOS devices, but it’s worth knowing that at the very least loading them from DropBox lets iBooks treat it as the same book and auto-sync without any further action.
This moves iBooks up to become my primary reader and relegate Stanza to second class. Which is good because overall I prefer the typography of iBooks over Stanza.
This is a new behaviour that I think started working once Apple released the first iCloud services like the auto-installation of apps on all of the devices. The auto-sync feature never worked for me before with any non purchased books.