MacOS Books - Why it is Unusable in Monterey

I've been trying to use Books in MacOS 12, Monterey, for half an hour now, and even though it is not completely unusable, it has such a lot of shortcomings and bugs that using it is a challenge.

• The window cannot be shrunk enough. There is a minimum size where the paragraph lines are still too long to be read with ease. You can make the individual lines shorter by increasing the size of the window, which gives you two columns, which you never asked for, and which distracts the reading.
• There is no way to change the space between the lines, making it still more difficult to read.
• The lookup function needs several steps: 
• Double click on the word.
• Scan past the different colour labels: Yellow, Green, Blue, Pink, Purple and the past Underline and Add Note, before you reach Look Up Selection.
• Click on Look Up Selection.
• Nothing happens. On my machine, it works about once out of three attempts. 
• Synching is haphazard. I sort my books according to how "recent" they are. The books are jumbled up in a system I have not understood with books I added a long time ago and never touched close to the books I just added. The order by "Recent" on my iPad shows completely different books.
• Searching the Book Store, there are no options to sort the books by useful criteria, like price, rating, language or best seller.

Some of those problems were probably there in past versions of Books/iBooks as well, and I cannot tell which ones are new to Monterey. However, I can tell that just displaying text in an agreeable way seems to be beyond Apple's engineers.

Disable Javascript

If you wonder what Javascript is, it is what makes the pages in your web browser bounce around uncontrollably, loads and plays heavy films and images you never asked for and makes your browsing experience generally frustrating.

Javascript has some utility, but most websites use it more to annoy their users than to actually help them. A few websites require Javascript. 

This blog, for example, sometimes works and sometimes doesn't work at all, if one disables Javascript. Unfortunately, it is not up to me, how this works. It is google's designers who determine whether the content is visible without Javascript. (I might have an option to change it, but then I risk breaking the blog for everyone, with or without the script.)

If you want a soothing browsing experience, you may want to switch off javascript completely. However, as there are such a lot of sites that require javascript, you should make sure you also have a javascript option. You can for example have one browser configured with javascript enabled and another one where it is disabled. If you encounter a site you actually need (but do you really need it, if you really think about it?) you can open it in the browser where javascript is enabled.

Here is how to disable javascript currently (May 2021) in some browsers. It may change in the future.

Firefox for MacOS or Windows:

1. Click in the address bar (where you usually type URLs).
2. Type "about:config" (without quotes) and enter.
3. In the search field, type "javascript.enabled" (without quotes).
4. Double-click on the value "true." It will turn to "false" and javascript is disabled for all new windows.

Chrome for MacOS or Windows:

1. Go to Settings > Privacy and Security > Site Settings > Content > Javascript.
2. Switch off "Allowed."
3. Optionally add individual sites with exceptions to Block or Allow.

Safari for MacOS:

1. Go to Settings > Security.
2. Disable javascript.

Safari for iPhone or iPad:

1. Go to the device's global Settings app.
2. Click on Safari > Advanced.
3. Disable Javascript.

Once you have done this, browsing the web will be a much more peaceful and serene experience. Plenty of sites will not work (like this blog, perhaps), but there are plenty of other sites that you can use instead.

You have taken back control.