Is there any way to make PopClip work in Apple Books?

PopClip
1

As PopClip is incompatible with Apple Books, I wonder if there is any way to make PopClip work in it?

2

I’d be interested if anyone knows how. But, as I understand it, books come with DRM, and Apple doesn’t want other apps to be able to read the text of the books. PopClip’s usual techniques don’t work.

Whilst iBooks does have a “Copy” command it comes with quotes around it and has and attribution like this:

“A palms-to-floor Elephant Walk, or moving your way closer to it, helps me ensure that your hamstrings will have a nice balance of flexibility when we start addressing their strength.”

Excerpt From
Knee Ability Zero - The Picture Book
Ben Patrick
https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewBook?id=0
This material may be protected by copyright.
1 Like
3

It is broken by design/demands from publishers. It’s terrible for people who want to work with excerpts from non-fiction books. It’s terrible for people who want to export a few highlights. It’s terrible for people who want to look up/translate/save short passages with third-party software.

Also terrible: there is no real EPUB reader alternative on the AppStore.

4

This is an old thread, but I’d like to add one of my wishes. Nick says that “PopClip’s usual techniques don’t work,” but using PopClip’s shortcuts (e.g., ctrl+cmd+C) brings up the PopClip menu. I’m not sure, but I suspect it has nothing to do with Apple restricting access to external apps due to DRM. So, isn’t there a chance that PopClip could be improved? I really hope it works with Apple Books.

5

It still isn’t compatible. When you use PopClip keyboard shortcut it will pop up, but you’ll find the acted-on text gets quotaton marks added and the excerpt credit added.

6

So saving the Apple Books “copy” text in TextEdit and re-select targetted text with PopClip again ?
(Yes, I know two actions)

7

Yep, you can do that of course!

8

If it is possible to copy text using PopClip, you likely can build a PopClip extension that matches the content between the quotation marks and returns just that.

1 Like
9

I wanted to use the dictionary lookup function rather than the copy function. Now it works good. Thank you.

10

For some reason, popclip worked fine for a moment, and I thought it had been improved with an update, but now it doesn’t work properly with Apple Books like before. I’m a little disappointed.

11

I can see why that would be disappointing! I didn’t change anything related to Apple Books.

1 Like