With a book open, tapping a different book in a widget, in Spotlight or through Handoff now opens the book you tapped. Your place is kept better. A book opens in your text size from the start, so it reopens exactly where you left it. Turning the phone, changing the text size or leaving a book open and untouched no longer overwrites a newer place from another device. Downloaded audiobooks play without reaching the server, and keep their place. Play always plays after a call or a long pause, and a book that was starting when a call came in starts when the call ends. If your server can't be reached when the app opens, your books stay on the shelf and the server address is kept. Also: signing out first tries to send changes not yet sent, text copied from a book stays on the clipboard, CarPlay's chapter list always includes the chapter playing, a page turned sideways starts clear of the camera housing, and two reading settings that did nothing are gone.

Margins: in a book, tap Aa and use the Margins slider or the Wide, Standard, Narrow and Edge buttons. The page reflows as you go, and each book can keep its own. Settings › Reading & highlights sets the default. Fill the screen with text, under Margins, gives the page the space kept for the controls, and its Top and bottom slider sets the space above and below the text. On an iPhone with Face ID the text also runs closer to the Dynamic Island and the bottom edge. Redesigned widgets: a bigger cover, long titles that fit, and your other books in progress a tap away — one more on the medium widget, up to four on the large one. An illustration fitted to a portrait page no longer stays too tall after turning to landscape.

Your library now stays up while your server redoes a read-along. Before, it failed to load until the job finished, and your place stopped syncing with it. A read-along on your device keeps working during that job too, offline included, and Listen keeps your place. If a book can't be read, the shelf says how many and offers Try again, and every other book stays put. iPhone Duo: closing or opening the phone now keeps your reader and your page where they are, and a link opened while it's closed lands beside your shelf. Ask now knows the right-hand page of a two-page spread.

• iPhone Duo. Closed, the reader's tools stand in a column beside the page, below the camera, and the library keeps three covers across. Opened wide, a book reads as two pages either side of the fold, turning together, and the library shows your shelf and the chosen book side by side. Propped open on a table, a narrated book shows the sentence being read on the upright half and the player on the flat one. • Fixes: Stop on an audiobook no longer stops it again after you switch to another book and back while its place is being saved. Play past the last narrated chapter no longer shows Pause over silence. Scrubbing or skipping back into an earlier chapter now saves your new place.

• Ask about this book is now on from the start on iPhones and iPads with Apple Intelligence. It answers on the device, and where Apple Intelligence is off, the app says how to turn it on or hide the button. • Find in book and Marks are in the reader's top bar. Stop Narration, in the ••• menu, clears the highlighted sentence so the next Play starts on the page you're reading. • The book's title sits under the reader's controls on iPhone. Turn it off in Settings › Reading & highlights. • Each colour in the Highlight menu shows its own colour. • Fixes: in Downloads & Storage, touching and holding a book opens that book's menu, and Remove download removes that book, not the first one. Before you press Play, the audio player shows where the narration would start on your page. A search containing %, _ or \ now finds its words in any order. Also tested with Storyteller 3.0.0-beta.56.

• Fixes and housekeeping. A page-turn setting no longer resets while you read, a download you cancel no longer starts anyway, search treats % and _ as ordinary characters, the widget's progress ring stays between 0 and 100%, and a highlight at the edge of an emoji no longer splits it. Also tested with Storyteller 3.0.0-beta.49.

• Pages now slide as you turn them, and follow your finger as you swipe. Prefer another style? In Settings › Reading & highlights, Page turn offers Slide, Cover — the page lifts away over the next, as in Apple Books — or None, which turns pages instantly. With Reduce Motion on, pages always turn instantly.

• The screen now stays on while a book is open, so a long page no longer goes dark before you've finished it, and a paused read-along stays on screen too. When a sleep timer runs out, your iPhone or iPad can lock again as usual.

BOOKS FROM YOUR FILES • Read a DRM-free EPUB from Files or iCloud Drive, with or without a server. The book is copied into the app and read on this iPhone or iPad only, with read-along narration when the book has it. It's at the foot of the sign-in screen, and in Settings → Advanced. AROUND YOUR LIBRARY • Touch and hold any book for its menu: see its details, read or listen, mark it, rate it, download it, or go to its series or more by its author. • A book's tags lead to a page of every book that shares them. • The series on a book's page shows where each book falls in it. ASK ABOUT YOUR BOOK • Answers draw on the pages you've just read as well as on what the search finds, so questions about where you are get better answers. • A name you haven't met yet is never shown, not even for a moment while an answer is being written. AND • Many fixes to reading positions, read-along, downloads and switching accounts, and support for the latest Storyteller 2 and the Storyteller 3 beta.

STORYTELLER 3 • Issa Reader now works with the Storyteller 3 beta as well as Storyteller 2. It tells which one your server runs and adjusts to it; Settings → Advanced shows your server's version beside what it offers. • Covers load from a Storyteller 3 server without signing you out. • A status your server's admin has renamed shows under its new name. A book with no status moves to Reading once you start it, as it does on Storyteller 2. • Read-along books aligned by Storyteller 3 play straight through their music, credits and narration-only chapters, and next and previous sentence step past them. READ-ALONG • A skip or a scrub lands on the moment you chose, rather than at the start of the sentence it falls in.

BOOKS IN A SERIES • A book's screen says which book of its series it is, and how many there are, right under the title — so you know it's the third before you start it. • Every series has a screen of its own: its books in reading order, numbered, so a missing one shows. • The library can be sorted by Series: each series in reading order, standalone books after. THE PAGE LOOKS LIKE THE BOOK • Italics, first-line indents, centred lines and justified margins now come through the way the book was typeset. The reading page used to drop them. • Justify text has a new first choice, Follow the book, and it is the default. Always and Never still override it. READ-ALONG • Tapping a sentence could move the highlight back one sentence, and at the start of a chapter turn the page back as well. It lands on the sentence you tapped. ASK ABOUT YOUR BOOK • Where the on-device model can take in more at once, Ask now uses it, so more of what you have read goes into each answer. • An answer can no longer disappear behind its list of sources.

YOUR PLACE, WHEREVER YOU LEFT IT This version is about one thing: a book you read on the phone, listen to in the car, and pick up again later should always open where you actually stopped. • Start a book on the phone and carry on in CarPlay — the car resumes from where you were reading, not from the start of the chapter. • Park, unplug, and open the book. The page takes over from the narrator at the sentence it had reached, and only once the drive has ended. • A place you choose yourself — a scrub, a tap on a chapter — is now respected by the reading page as well as the narrator. Hours of listening are no longer kept nowhere at all. • An audio bookmark older than your reading position no longer wins, so an evening of reading in silence is not undone the next time you press Listen. • The same book opened on a second device starts near the right place rather than at chapter one. THE AUDIOBOOK CONTROLS • Previous restarts the chapter you are in, instead of dropping into the last second of the one before it. • Two quick taps on Next move two chapters. • A sleep timer set while the audiobook is playing survives the book moving to the reading page, and scrubbing across a chapter no longer counts as a chapter ending. • Removing one edition of a book no longer stops another edition that is still playing. ALSO • Reading, downloads and Ask about your book are unchanged.

ASK ABOUT YOUR BOOK New in this version, and off until you turn it on in Settings. Ask a question about the book you are reading and get an answer drawn from the book's own sentences. • Answered on this device by Apple Intelligence. Your question and the book's text never leave the iPhone or iPad — no server, no account, no analytics. • Spoiler-aware. Ask draws only on the pages behind where you are reading, so a question about a character cannot give away what is still ahead. It tries hard rather than promising, and says so. • Every answer shows its sources. Tap an excerpt to read the passage the answer rests on. • Six suggestions to start from — who someone is, how two people are related, what has happened so far — or type your own. • Close the sheet while a question is still working and the answer finishes anyway; a notification brings you back to it. Requires an iPhone or iPad that supports Apple Intelligence, with Apple Intelligence turned on. ALSO NEW • Downloads have a place of their own. The Reading tab shows what is on this device, with sizes per book and per edition, and one screen to clear them from. • Volume is measured in decibels now, with a soft knee in place of the old hard clip, so turning a quiet audiobook up stops distorting it. Levels you had already set carry over. • The screen stays awake while a book is reading itself aloud. • A book's subtitle appears on its book screen, where a jacket would put it. FIXED • Cancel now cancels a download, and restarting one no longer deletes it. • A deleted download stays deleted. • A font added for one book can be removed again. • The read-along highlight no longer swallows the following line. • A library folder that cannot be read no longer looks like an emptied library. • The time above the scrubber survives a book that reports a nonsense duration.