Can you view personal books in the ipad app?
No, that is not currently available
are you aware if there are any efforts underway to allow personal books to be available in the iphone/ipad app?
I'm not aware of any work going on - but, in general, we hear about new features when they are made available for beta testing.
There is a request for this at https://feedback.faithlife.com/boards/logos-mobile-app/posts/expose-personal-books-on-mobile-app - you may want to add your vote to that.
