Q: How Can I Read iBooks on my Laptop?
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Aug 6, 2012 2:54 AMby Tom Gewecke,lujanit wrote:
The only way
You actually omitted an important and likely one:
3. Publishers decide DRM is not worth the trouble
It is the publisher of the book and not Apple which decides whether a book is protected or not. In fact various publishers (including O'Reilly and Take Control) do not DRM their stuff in the iBookstore, and such books can be read on non-iOS devices.
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Aug 6, 2012 5:17 AMby lujanit,In my twisted mind I thought my 1. would have covered that. Yet I take your point that the publisher may make the final decision. It begs the Q though why can we read ebooks from other sources e.g., Amazon even though we may have to use their reader. A reader is a lot easier to come by than purchasing an ios device.
I have always maintained that Apple want us to purchase an ios device (read back a few pages) and that is the primary reason.
Good reply though
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Aug 7, 2012 4:29 PMby slmUSA,@ yougotabkiding Yes, you got it 100% ! That's the problem. You can DOWNLOAD and BUY the iBooks on your Apple computer, but you can't READ them without an iPad, iPhone, iPod. *****. And, yes, I won't be buying any iBooks either. I have a MacBook, why would I buy another device just to read iBooks? No thanks, Apple!
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Aug 13, 2012 8:36 AMby elevenblade,I buy a lot of ebooks, but I mostly buy them from Amazon and read them either on my iPad or my MacBook Air using the Kindle app. I actually like iBooks a lot better than the Kindle app but I buy them from Amazon because I can't read iBooks on the MacBook Air. I travel a lot and need to travel light, and it seems stupid to carry both my iPad and laptop. Just wanted to make sure the "powers that be" hear that they're missing out on lost revenue.
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Aug 15, 2012 8:19 PMby applegoogler,great threads. took the advice of one of them and went to Google Books. downloaded the art of war. read it on my HP laptop and also read it on my iPad after dowloading the suggested app. i was aprehensive that i would not be able to hightlight and post notes like i can with ibooks. but i can! ok, so the only thing i can't do is see my new book sitting on the ibook bookshelf. who cares! thanks for the advice and conversation.......
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Aug 24, 2012 6:49 AMby Possumn,So now the schools are starting to offer iBooks as a textbook medium, which is considerably less than the cost of a lost book. I would love to buy the iBooks but I don't want to buy my kids an iPad when they already have a laptop. Apple really needs to make this easier for consumers.
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Sep 2, 2012 11:17 PMby jaiganesh,Sign in to www.icloud.com using your Apple ID and you can access Mail, Contacts, Calendar, Find My iPhone, and Documents in the Cloud from any Mac or PC.
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Sep 3, 2012 3:14 AMby Tom Gewecke,jaiganesh wrote:
Sign in to www.icloud.com
Your posting has no relevance to the question of reading iBooks on a laptop. Was it perhaps intended for some other discussion?
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Sep 14, 2012 6:40 AMby jshardlo,I bought just a couple of books from Apple and then realized the user experience is way better on Kindle. I don't even have an actual kindle but I have the Kindle app on iPhone, Mac and my work PC/laptop. So now I can read books wherever I am and the latest page gets synced nicely when I pick up the next device.
So all my e-book revenue now goes to Amazon not Apple.
Wake up Apple!
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Oct 27, 2012 9:00 AMby NineTigers,Apples philosophy seems to still be in keeping with the late Steve Jobs philosophy. He believed that he knew what was best for everyone else and he therefore didn't need to listen to other people's concerns and wishes. To some extent I agree this worked, but while I respected him tremendously and the people at apple, an honest open eyed approach reveals many many flaws to this approach. The people at Apple still fail to recognize this reality even after so many glaring mistakes by there former leader.
I still remember in the early eighties when a court had to force him to acknowledge the existence of his own child, atari made him work the night shift because he smelled so bad from refusing to shower, and he died because he refused to accept someone else's advice on how to treat his health problem. I mention that respectfully and realize it is a touchy subject, but the fact is that if that doesn't serve as a wake up call to apple then nothing ever will.
As a big investor in Apple products I fear this kind of thinking will destroy the company in the future. Recent new products are causing me to be hopeful that the new management is more open eyed and flexible, but many things still cause me concern.
Obviously ibooks ommission from the app store is one concern. Other things are simple things like the fact that even on my fifteen inch retina pro the default fonts can't be changed in notes and they are all tiny. I can change the font manually every time or I can go into terminal through a complex process, but these are poor solutions. In notifications I have only one set option for the snooze time and it is short. Notifications also show four or five words and so often my reminder is longer so I have to open the calender and read it. In pages I want to use a simple colored back ground to write on, bit there is no setting for this. I can easily do this in word so I use it instead. Apple is almost bazarre when it comes to a love of small fonts and icons which I can hardly see. In itunes movie store I can hardly read the text and the icons are tiny. I rarely buy a movie there as a result even though the playing aspect of it works so much better.
Now the base model ipad mini ghas no gps or even option for gps.
I could go on and on. I do respect apple and love their products. It's just that so many things they do are bazarre. I wonder sometime if they worry about doing to well because then the government might approach them the way they did microsoft and try to rip the company apart. This is an explanation I could understand better than the notion they just still think the way steve Jobs did which seems most likely.
