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.
