Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice on Apple’s iBooks.

Jamie Montgomerie of Things Made Out of Other Things has removed Eucalyptus from the app store. Development obviously stopped quite a while ago: Eucalyptus was never updated for the iPad, which meant that not only did it not use the larger screen size effectively but it also never synchronized downloaded books and current locations between iPhone and iPad.

I enjoyed Eucalyptus enough that even without those features I continued using it for Gutenberg books, reserving iBooks for PDFs (mostly manuals) and non-Gutenberg ePubs. Thus reading Gutenberg books on the iPhone only.

While I could technically continue to do this, his comment in the announcement that “I’ll keep the servers going until I can’t.” just tipped me over the edge to switch all of my reading to iBooks. It is nice to be able to use the iPad at home and then seamlessly switch to reading on the iPhone when I have a few extra minutes on the go.

It is easy enough to get books from Project Gutenberg onto an iPad or iPhone. You can go to almost any book on Gutenberg and download the ePub. On your Mac, just drag the downloaded file to iBooks. On the iPad or iPhone, you can choose to “Open in iBooks” after choosing an ePub link.

The one tricky part is that, if you are only syncing “Selected books” in iTunes, iBooks does not assume that if you downloaded a book on a mobile device you want it kept there. The book will sync over to iTunes for synchronizing to other devices, but it won’t be checked. It will, thus, be deleted from the original device. Nor does iBooks yet synchronize non-Apple Store books via iCloud; it will synchronize your current location in those books, however, the book needs to be transferred to each other device through iTunes.