iOS Today 813 Transcript
Please be advised that this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word-for-word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-free version of the show.
Mikah Sargent [00:00:00]:
Coming up on iOS Today, Rosemary Orchard and I, Micah Sargent, talk about apps you can use for reading on your devices. Stay tuned. Podcasts you love.
Rosemary Orchard [00:00:14]:
From people you trust.
Mikah Sargent [00:00:17]:
This is TWIT. This is iOS Today, episode 813, with Rosemary Orchard and me, Micah Sargent, recorded Tuesday, July 14th, 2023. For Thursday, July 30th, 2026, reading on your iPhone. Hello and welcome to iOS Today. This is the show where we talk all things iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, HomePod. It's not technically HomePodOS these days, but you know, it's the various platforms that Apple has. And well, we are here to help you make the most of your devices and the most of that software that Apple provides. I am one of your hosts of this show.
Mikah Sargent [00:01:03]:
My name is Micah Sargent.
Rosemary Orchard [00:01:06]:
And my name is Rosemary Nicholls. And, you know, I figured this is a great time for everyone to just keep going up the color grade. I don't know if you all, you folks also have color grading on books over there in the US the same as we do over here. I know you had Reading Rainbow. So, you know, we love that.
Mikah Sargent [00:01:22]:
We did have Reading Rainbow. Yes, indeed. We, yeah, but there are lots of different sort of book reading competitions sort of things. But then of course Reading Rainbow making it so So fun to explore and read. And that's what we're trying to do here is talk about ways to read on your devices. Because look, we've— I think, Rosemary, you have shown a few different third-party devices that you can use to read. There are now, it seems to be very popular, lots of people, not me yet, have the small little ebook readers that you can attach to your phone.
Rosemary Orchard [00:02:03]:
Mm-hmm.
Mikah Sargent [00:02:04]:
And people, of course, rocking larger e-readers Kindles and Kobos and all sorts of stuff. But, you know, if you only have one device, don't feel bad if you can't, you know, you're not able to add another device to your portfolio. You, you know, can't pick up a Kindle or one of these other devices. It's okay because your phone is capable of doing a lot of great stuff on its own. And that starts with the Apple Books app.
Rosemary Orchard [00:02:35]:
App.
Mikah Sargent [00:02:35]:
This, of course, is the first-party app from Apple that includes a bookstore. It has a library of the content that you have purchased and also has audiobooks as part of the library. And I'll show you on my phone what this looks like. So here on my phone, I can see on the sort of home screen some different bestsellers that are available for purchase. They— there are also different books that, you know, that when there are sales, but then also this is under the books you'd like to read next section. These are the things that I added that I want to read. Turns out very much a fan of the various user guides from Apple all the way back to iOS 15.5 here. But also I've got some Dresden Files books in here that I believe are the The graphic novels from The Dresden Files.
Mikah Sargent [00:03:38]:
And what's cool as well is that there is a reading goal feature within the app, so you can kind of keep track of, A, how much reading you're doing, but also how much time you spend reading. And apparently I have a 5-minute goal to read, and I don't— I'll be honest, I don't use the Apple Books app for the reading that I do. So It doesn't know that I've already spent probably, oh, probably like 15 minutes of reading so far today before the show got started. And then I also have access to my library. This first book here is not actually a book. It was a little project that I was creating to try out some of the features in the Books app and with Pages that lets you publish your own books. But you'll notice friend of the show Shelley Brisbane, who covers accessibility. I have Shelley Brisbane's iOS Access for All book that is an accessibility guide.
Mikah Sargent [00:04:46]:
I also have the Regular Expressions Cookbook in here from O'Reilly, the Raspberry Pi Cookbook, the Java Cookbook, the Python Cookbook. You can tell I've got different cookbooks, right? Also the Unity. Look, this is this is an ADHD. Because I'd convinced myself I was going to be learning Unity game development.
Rosemary Orchard [00:05:10]:
I feel like you've got a couple of Humble Bundles in there, Micah. It looks like you bought a couple of those for the programming ones. Yeah. Oh, you nailed it.
Mikah Sargent [00:05:18]:
You clocked it.
Rosemary Orchard [00:05:19]:
I am also in this picture. I am this picture. We are both this picture.
Mikah Sargent [00:05:25]:
I love that. I love that.
Rosemary Orchard [00:05:27]:
Yeah. Honestly, I do love iOS for nonfiction reading specifically. So, you know, I can't blame myself. I agree.
Mikah Sargent [00:05:34]:
Yeah, so let's pull open the iOS Access for All book here so that I can show you what reading looks like on the Apple Books app. It used to be called iBooks, and that's what my brain keeps wanting to call it. But you are presented with text that is really well sort of justified. I think the readability is great. If you tap on the screen anywhere in the bottom right-hand corner, you will see the kind of menu, and there are different options here. So I can look at the contents, the chapters, book notes, Bookmarks that I've added, highlights that I've added. I'm also able to search through the book. I can use the share sheet to share to people.
Mikah Sargent [00:06:15]:
I have a rotation lock option. I also have a different mode that's called a line guide so that you can more closely follow text. I had a friend in high school who would carry around a— now I've forgotten how to turn it off. There we go. Nope, that's not how you turn it off.
Rosemary Orchard [00:06:34]:
Nope.
Mikah Sargent [00:06:34]:
Oh, there it is. Turn off line guide. So down in the bottom, once you've turned on line guide, you can turn it off there. But I had a friend in high school who would carry around a playing card and use a playing card to move along with the text. And I always thought that was a great idea for, you know, her being able to stay where she needed to stay on the screen. I sometimes find my eyes darting around to other places as well. And so that is a nice feature to be able to have that. I do have to give a quick shout out as we're recording this show because I love a pun.
Mikah Sargent [00:07:05]:
And earlier I mentioned that the text was justified on screen. Wadfan in the Discord said, literacy needs no justification. Very funny and also true. Last but not least, themes and settings. So this is one of my favorite places to be. It's just fun. You could change the size of the text, but you can also change the screen brightness. And what's great is that you can set up themes.
Mikah Sargent [00:07:31]:
So original has sort of a, white background with black text. There's a paper option that makes the text a little bit more kind of, well, papery color, I guess. It's sort of a grayish tan. It also increases the size of the text. There's a quiet option that's a little bit darker, a calm option. There's a focus option and a bold option. You can customize each of these. So setting it up exactly how you want, including different fonts that are available.
Mikah Sargent [00:08:03]:
So if you know you like Georgia or— I love Georgia. I love to read with Georgia personally. You can also bolden the text, change line spacing, character. I mean, you have all of the stuff that you need to get things set up exactly as you want them and make the reading experience quite nice. I also like that the Books app has great support for PDFs so that if you want to add PDFs to the library, then you can view those there as well. The bookstore again has— it's a lot like any other digital bookstore that's out there. I'm going to be very careful about my wording there because I don't want to get involved in a lawsuit with Amazon, Apple, and price fixing. But we'll just say that this is like other bookstores that you can purchase books from, digital books.
Mikah Sargent [00:09:00]:
And then of course the audiobooks section.
Rosemary Orchard [00:09:03]:
Yes.
Mikah Sargent [00:09:04]:
I don't know if you knew this, but the Apple Books app does also support audiobooks. That other app that we'll talk about in a minute is not the only one that does audiobooks, so you can purchase them here as well. It looks a lot like the Podcasts app in terms of the functionality that you have whenever you play an audiobook. But yeah, that is a— oh, check this out. 2 minutes and 52 seconds because I was reading. quote unquote, at this moment, iOS Access for All, the iOS 16 edition. So I've almost reached my 5-minute-a-day goal, uh, here in the app. Fun, easy to use, and, um, arguably, uh, all of the basic features that you need whenever it comes to a, uh, a book app.
Mikah Sargent [00:09:53]:
Anything that you would like to say, Rosemary, about the Apple Books app.
Rosemary Orchard [00:10:00]:
Yeah, definitely worth checking it out for purchasing audiobooks in particular. I was looking for a very old TV series here in the UK called Willow the Wisp. Willow does not have a W at the end. And I found that you can get the top audiobooks for £2.99 as a set in the Apple Books app. So I may or may not have that on my to-purchase list because I've been reading the books to a certain child recently because I have 4 of the original books and they seem pretty interested. So I think, you know what, I think I might throw £2.99 at it just to get some more of those to listen to in the car.
Mikah Sargent [00:10:41]:
I love that. I really love that. That's fantastic. So that is the Apple Books app. Now let's go to my favorite app probably in existence. And it's not because of the app, honestly. I mean, the app is fine, but it's about the content that I consume most often, which for me is audiobooks. I use the Audible app.
Mikah Sargent [00:11:06]:
Audible has long been a sponsor on the network, so just getting that out there. I've used Audible for years. I'm not going to get into the credit system and all that jazz. We'll just talk about the app itself. It is an audiobook manager and purchaser, and it works how you would expect. So here I'll just kind of show Uh, the, the main screen, we've got your, your home. I've got, you know, it tells you how many credits you have. You can use credits to buy books.
Mikah Sargent [00:11:35]:
Uh, it has lots of great suggestions on the main page. One of my favorite features that it— or suggestion options that it has is, uh, finish your series. And so it'll show you like what's next in your series of whatever it is that you're reading. Um, the library, of course, includes all of your, uh, books. Continue listening. You can set up lists. Uh, you can see that For 36 weeks in a row since November 10th, 2025, I've listened at least one day for 36 weeks. I listen every day to audiobooks all the time.
Mikah Sargent [00:12:09]:
In fact, I'm kind of afraid to tap on the— your listening stats, but I'm going to. Uh, let's see what it says. I have listened to 573 hours and 20 minutes of science fiction and fantasy. I have listened to 129 hours and 58 minutes of literature and fiction. I have 587 titles in my library, not to brag. And I cannot believe this, but I— oh no, this is maybe bad. Apparently I'm a top 5 listener, uh, so I'm in the top 5% of all of the people listening. That's kind of scary.
Mikah Sargent [00:12:50]:
Um, anyway, I really like audiobooks. I think that the big thing is that I fall asleep to audiobooks. And so that's where probably a lot of the listening is happening. And I'm having to then go back in the morning and go, okay, where was I? But super cool, super fun to find new audiobooks and find new series this way. And if you out there, I just wanna say, this is kind of as an aside, if you out there are a, um, a person who has any sort of, uh, internal guilt about audiobook listening as opposed to eye reading, uh, let that go because your reading is just as valid as anyone else's. And I think that it's more important to, you know, participate in these experiences, however you go about it, than it is to shame yourself over one means or another. This is more recent because a friend of mine was talking about how they felt like they couldn't do audiobooks because they felt like they were cheating. So if you feel like you're cheating, I don't know if you need to hear this, but you're not.
Mikah Sargent [00:14:11]:
It's fine. Anyway, so that's a look at Apple Books and the Audible app. Of course, You will need to purchase the content within. You can buy Audible books directly as opposed to through credits. And now because of the EU— shout out EU— you are able to make a purchase by tapping on a book in the app and have it pop open in a browser now on its own instead of you having to do it manually and buy the book. So fantastic that it's much easier to purchase Whether you do that via credits or actual exchange of, you know, direct money. Do you want to tell us about what's next on the list here, Rosemary?
Rosemary Orchard [00:14:58]:
Yes, I would love to. And I am going to keep this brief because it's a pretty niche application. If you are somebody who has a Plex media server in your home. So for example, you've bought DVDs and you've ripped them for television shows and movies and films and you've bought CDs of audiobooks and music and you've used this to create your own at-home version of Netflix, then you can use this app called Prologue to connect to your audiobooks. I love this. It's got a CarPlay app, which I'm— if I'm being perfectly honest, CarPlay is the way that I listen to the most audiobooks. Like, I've got quite a long drive coming up over the next couple of weeks. I've got a couple of them, and I'm there going, okay, what audiobooks am I gonna download? It's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, uh, read by Stephen Fry.
Rosemary Orchard [00:15:47]:
Followed by the dramatized radio version. Um, but you know, it's just lovely to have these books downloaded, uh, and be able to access them. And so I use Prologue for this. It does let me download things offline. It's got various views, so I can see here, you know, I've got A Perfect Spy by John le Carré that I can listen to. Uh, I can create collections. I can manage all that in Plex, obviously. And then yeah, I can just download things and have them offline.
Rosemary Orchard [00:16:13]:
If I tap on the downloads at the top, I can see which books I've got downloaded, how big they are, and swipe to delete them. So if I think that The Princess and the Pea is a little large at 7.7 megabytes, then I can get rid of them. Now, obviously I've got a large selection of children's audiobooks here because there will be a child and/or a dog with me for most of these trips that I'll be doing. But it's just nice to have these books that I especially— I have bought lots of audiobooks on CD over the years. I used to use them when I was a teacher, and now I still have them, and they're just really nice to have for all sorts of things. So yeah, I will be downloading, uh, you know, even more of these, uh, or downloading the ones that I have purchased and added to Plex is what I should say there. So yeah, that's Prologue.
Mikah Sargent [00:17:03]:
Nice. Uh, we should also mention that Spotify Audible has— yes, has audiobooks as well. Spotify quickly becoming the audio everything app, and so you can find books there. Sometimes there are books there that you can't find in other places. Same thing with Audible, you'll find books there that you can't find in other places. They're like Audible exclusives and Audible originals. And so that is something worth checking out. Now, what if I want to keep track of the reading that I'm doing and also if I want to maybe share that with other people? I'm really introing this app, aren't I? Tell us about Storygraph.
Rosemary Orchard [00:17:54]:
Well, Storygraph is on my list because they recently announced a partnership with Kobo. Uh, so for folks who aren't aware, Kobo is the Canadian company, uh, of very friendly people trying to make, uh, awesome ebook readers. They do make excellent ebook readers. Uh, they have awesome days in the office with like a bunch of drag queens coming in and, and things like that. They're very supportive of a massive community, and they have excellent integration with things like OverDrive and Libby for borrowing books from your local library. And they recently announced an integration with Storygraph, For tracking your reading. Now, tracking your reading is not something that I personally have ever found particularly useful, um, for me. Some people love to count how many books they've read in a year.
Rosemary Orchard [00:18:43]:
Personally, I just know that if I pick up a book, I'm probably going to be reading for a good couple of months. Not that one book, multiple books. I tend to like get sucked into the reading rabbit hole for a period of time, and they'll surface and suddenly replace it with diamond painting or something. Is there ADHD in this Definitely yes, and it's all right here.
Mikah Sargent [00:19:04]:
Um, the ADHD in the room with us.
Rosemary Orchard [00:19:06]:
Yes, uh, but Storygraph is great. Uh, I want to say that it is a female Black-owned business as well. I know that there's something that Kobo partnering with that is that at the moment, um, and maybe Storygraph. Um, but yeah, it, it allows you to go, hey, uh, so recently I have been reading, um, The Ring Fire by Beth The Lie Back and the Ring Fire by Beth Webb. So I can tap that and it's currently on my to-read, or I can add it to my to-read, and then I can say I'm currently reading this. And so you can do this entirely manually. You don't have to hook this up to any app at all so that it's not necessarily automatically tracking data. Particularly useful if you do have, say for example, a Kobo or a Kindle and it is shared with other family members.
Rosemary Orchard [00:19:54]:
As you can see, my Kindle has potentially got a little problem right now. It needs some charging. Um, but, uh, yeah, it is a nice way to be able to track your data, and you can hook it up and automate all those things, or you can just track it independently. And Storygraph is a really pretty nice way to do that. And yeah, the folks behind it seem lovely.
Mikah Sargent [00:20:17]:
All right, uh, and then we should also— of course, Libby is Very, very— I mean, this is an app that I hear people mention almost as much as they mention Audible or one of the other big ones. Libby is the app for accessing your local library. You can get audiobooks, ebooks, magazines from your local library. You borrow these books. Yeah. They then go back, so to speak. You basically lose access to them after you're done. You just need a library card and then the Libby app, and then you tie those 2 together and you are able to see all sorts of books.
Mikah Sargent [00:21:09]:
You can also download these titles for offline reading, which is nice. It lets you, you know, use CarPlay to listen to audiobooks. So So if you are looking to, you know, read and explore and learn and grow and you don't have the ability or desire or wish to purchase a bunch of books, then you've got to check out Libby. There's, there's so much there. And I think also something that my friend Dan Moran mentioned with Libby is that something that's kind of nice about it is it does give you a little bit of an exercise in patience because there's a sort of built-in scarcity for some of the popular titles. The idea is that, you know, the library only has so many copies of a book. And so if someone else has it borrowed, then you're not able to read it. And so you can kind of put it on your list and wait for it to be available.
Mikah Sargent [00:22:16]:
And And in that way, it is a little practice in patience and delayed gratification, which of course can result in an even better experience in the end if you, you know, can kind of let that build up. So I think that Libby is something that everybody with a library card should absolutely be downloading and using. I think that does it. That does it for, yes, our apps this week. These are some of the apps that you can use for reading on your various devices. Of course, if there's an app that you're using that we didn't mention on the show today that you're going, now hold on, this is my favorite app, why didn't you? We'd love to hear about it. You can email us, iosToday@twit.tv is how you get in touch. I also want to mention that last week we talked about the public betas being available To you, if you are thinking about hopping on the beta train, you should check out my show Hands on Apple, where each year I cover how to join the public beta if that's something that you wish to do, and cover some of the process involved with providing feedback to the developers and learning how to give good feedback to the developers.
Mikah Sargent [00:23:40]:
So if you want to help. If you want to help sort of shape the way that the next versions of Apple's platforms are, uh, are actually released into the world, that is part of the fun of being in the public beta. Uh, it's, it's an opportunity to share your thoughts, but it's also an opportunity to break things so that then Apple can learn that those things are broken and fix them. And then that way, when the people in your life wait until the fall to get their app, you can think within yourself, you know what? I'm part of the reason that when you installed that app on your phone, it didn't immediately— or that version of iOS on your phone, it didn't immediately crash the second you opened an app, which is kind of a cool feeling. All right. I also wanna remind you out there, if you have shortcuts requests, don't forget, we love to answer your shortcuts corner or your shortcuts requests on the show. You can email us, iosToday@twit.tv. It's best if you put like shortcuts in the subject or shortcuts corner in the subject or hey Rosemary in the subject.
Mikah Sargent [00:24:50]:
Something like that would be great so that we can make sure that we see your feedback request. And of course, Rosemary invited folks to, when the next version of iOS is here, use the sort of automatic shortcut creator and that gives us the ability to kind of compare the amazing bespoke shortcuts that Rosemary creates with those created by the robot in your phone. So consider that as well. Before we say goodbye, we of course have our App Caps segment. These are the apps and gadgets we're using now, have been using for some time, that we want to share with all of you. Rosemary, is it just me this week? That's totally okay.
Rosemary Orchard [00:25:38]:
It is just you, Micah. I have so many things on my desk, but unfortunately the things that I'm most excited to talk about are in a testing program where I'm not allowed to talk about them yet. So don't worry, folks.
Mikah Sargent [00:25:48]:
That's fair.
Rosemary Orchard [00:25:48]:
I've got plenty of app caps coming for you. I'm just not allowed to talk about them right now.
Mikah Sargent [00:25:53]:
I've got one of those too that I can't talk about, and I'm going, I can't wait. But I will talk about, I mentioned this, I think it's been a couple of episodes ago now, an app that— or not an app, but an object, a product that I purchased called Makroscope that was a keychain microscope. And I said that once I got it, I would tell you all about it. And so I am. First and foremost, it comes in a little metal tin, like an— like an Android— an Altoid tin. For those of you who have had Altoids, which I love, it's already cool. But even better, it comes with a bunch. I thought it was just going to be a little microscope because I'd forgotten about what all was included.
Mikah Sargent [00:26:45]:
This, by the way, is the microscope, and it's just a little sort of rubberized material that has a lens popped into it. And what you do is you put, you know, whatever you're trying to view onto underneath the lens. And I'm going to show you in a minute what that looks like. But I got to, I got to show you what all is in here because I was deeply, deeply impressed at all of the stuff that comes in the package. So first and foremost, you get a couple of pipettes so that you can produce, prepare and produce your own slides. It comes with cute little tweezers. It comes with 2 little Q-tips so that you can kind of clean up your slides after you've prepared them. My favorite part, it comes with those little If you've ever taken like a chemistry class, these little pointy-ended vials, which I'm sure have a name.
Mikah Sargent [00:27:47]:
My chemistry professor would be very upset with me for calling them pointy-ended vials. In fact, he might even call it vial. It comes with an extra lens as well, so that if the lens that you have gets scratched, you can replace it, and a cute little blue chain. That you can use to hook the microscope to your keychain. But my favorite part is that along with slides that are empty so that you can prepare them yourself, it comes with pre-prepared slides, including an ant. It also has frog blood, and it has the epidermis of an onion. So I'm going to show you how this works. What I will do is first and foremost, I will take the lens, and this is for the front-facing camera on the phone.
Mikah Sargent [00:28:48]:
And so you take the lens and you put it onto the front of the device. One sec. Glasses adjust focus effortlessly. Yeah, that's what I thought. Okay, so you take the lens and you put it— oh, I should, I should turn on my phone here. All right, so I have the camera turned on. I've got the front-facing camera going, and I'm going to take the lens and I'm going to put it over the top of the front-facing camera. And let me make sure that that's lined up perfectly.
Mikah Sargent [00:29:26]:
And then I can take the ant and put that over the top, and you can start to see— oh, look! Whoops, let me bring it back in focus. There, there is the head of the ant. I recommend doing this underneath a source of light if you can help it. It will make it easier for you to see the Different things that you do. And of course, pressing down, because it's like a silicone material, pressing down is how you can kind of adjust focus. So there you can kind of see that ant head. But I really liked the frog blood because you can see the individual red blood cells from this frog. And honestly, I am not doing this thing perfect justice because again, it works so much better when you've got a light source up above.
Mikah Sargent [00:30:25]:
But the point is that this does work as a little microscope right there on your phone that is— it was like $20, I think was the cost. And that was the whole point. This, this guy that made this, he said, I wanted to give people the opportunity to use a microscope. There we go. You can kind of see those little red blood cells, which is really neat. I wanted to give people the ability to use a microscope on their phone without it costing so much money, because if you look up phone microscopes, they are pretty pricey. And so this, just a little piece of silicone or rubber or something with a, you know, specialized lens built into it. Very clever, very clever stuff.
Mikah Sargent [00:31:14]:
So that is the MacroScope, available on Amazon from time to time. You can also look up MacroScope. Sometimes the website will offer it, but last time I was on the website, it was only available in bulk purchasing, so that's why I waited for Amazon. You can use the notify me feature that is in iOS 27 to be able to, you know, keep an eye on when it's available again. But that is the pick that I have this week, folks. That is going to bring us to the end of this episode of iOS Today. I want to remind you all again, iosday@twit.tv is how you get in touch. And of course, Rosemary Orchard, if people would like to follow you online and check out all the great work you're doing, where should they go to do so?
Rosemary Orchard [00:32:02]:
The best place to go is rosemaryorchard.com, which has got links to apps, books, uh, podcasts, and so on that I am or have been involved in. And of course there's links to my socials there as well, with the exception of the ClubTwit Discord, because you will find me there hanging out in the live show while we record, and also the iOS Today forum after the show. Micah, where can folks find you?
Mikah Sargent [00:32:23]:
If you're looking to find me online, I'm @micahsargent on many a social media network, or you can head to chiwawa.coffee. That's C-H-I-H-U-A-H-U-A.coffee, where I've got links to the places I'm most active online. Thank you so much for being here this week for another episode of iOS Today. We'll catch you again very soon.
Rosemary Orchard [00:32:40]:
Bye-bye.
