Apple has announced today that their seminal iBooks ecosystem will be coming soon for the MAC. Their is a new operating system update that will occur in the fall, dubbed OS X 10.9 Mavericks. When this new firmware update happens, iBooks will be available to download within the app store.
Apple is heavily invested in their own ecosystem for electronic books. There is currently over 1.8 million titles available, but they aren’t really compatible with any other reading app. If you are heavily invested in iOS via the iPad or iPhone, this is a welcome addition.
When the new version of MAC OS drops this fall, owners can take advantage of the slew of advanced features that iBooks offers. You can take notes, make highlights and look words up in the dictionary. You can also take advantage of their new scrolling feature, that allows you to swipe down, much akin to a website, in terms of how the books are presented and interacted with.
iBooks might have come sooner to the MAC, but most of the development team was pulled out to work on the next iteration of iOS. This new version is poised to offer a new design and Apple is opening up their keyboard SDK, so you can expect a ton of new functionality coming very soon.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
