A feature I wish iBooks had

I read books on my iPhone nowadays. There are two main reasons for that

• I love taking notes while reading. It helps build a note system which refreshes my memory quickly all the points that I deemed worth remembering. With physical books, I can’t do the same
• Admittedly, I pay for books once in a while, but mostly I use gen.lib; which is a website that offers free ebooks in various genres. After I download books to my Mac, it usually doesn’t take long for iBooks on my phone to sync and have those books ready in the app

Much as I like the experience of reading on iBooks, I wish it had a feature that’d allow readers to quickly store or buy books referenced by authors. Take a look at the example below

With the current iBooks, I have to highlight the name of the “The Tao of Warren Buffett” book and save it in my notes section. Later on, if I want to buy the book, I’ll have to exit what I am reading, go to the Search function, type in the name from my memory and buy it. There is so much friction and the experience is anything, but ideal. What I’d love to have is that once I press on the name of the book, a pop-up will show on the screen that has the book information from Apple’s bookstore and I can just tap on my phone screen to add it to my to-read list. The list should be able to sort books by added date or alphabet.

In fact, links on iBooks are clickable as you can see below. So, I wonder why there isn’t such a feature for iBooks. If friction is removed, I think readers are more likely to buy more books; which means more revenue for Apple and publishers.