Stay on Top of Enterprise Technology Trends
Get updates impacting your industry from our GigaOm Research Community
Starting this fall, Apple’s iBooks are no longer limited to reading on iPhones and iPads. The iBookstore is getting its own dedicated Mac app with the launch of the new OSX Mavericks operating system, Apple (s AAPL) announced at its WWDC conference in San Francisco Monday.
Users will be able to purchase and read books directly from the Mac app. (There are now 1.8 million titles in the iBookstore, Apple said, up from 1.5 million in October 2012.) The app could be particularly useful for students, who could have a textbook open on their computer while they take notes.
Amazon (s AMZN) has Kindle reading apps for PC and Mac, though you can’t purchase ebooks through the apps. Nook (s BKS) has a Windows (s MSFT) 8 app that allows purchasing and reading, but doesn’t have a Mac app.
This is great news, particularly for me as an author. But Apple needs to tell us what versions of OS X iBooks will run on. If it’s only for Mavericks, that’s not good news for school kids, who often have older Macs that can’t run the latest OS X.
That will be very welcome, even if, let’s be honest, I prefer read it on my ipad than on my computer…
http://www.scrabblefinderapp.com/
At last!
Apple should have done this from the start.
_______________
That’s brilliant. I’ve got reference books on iBooks, and it’s a pain I can’t refer to them directly on my Mac. Amazon’s had a Kindle Mac app for years…
That’s so great, will wait for any progress on that. Thanks!