Q: How Can I Read iBooks on my Laptop?

Good morning all, I have a slightly different issue to which I require an answer.

I am an author currently producing a biography and have sent a couple of copies to my proof reader  and he and I are both reading the work to look for spolling irrers, grammar etc and I am highlighting them on my iPad (as is he).  I had no problem getting the draft from my mac into iPad's bookshelf but need to know if there is a way of doing the reverse with the amended/highlighted versions from my iPad.

As a rider to this discussion I have a Kindle and an iPad and whereas previously I would use the Kindle, I have switched to kindle on my iPad as it allows for colour etc.

I have only purchased a very small number of books from iTunes but 70/80 from Kindle and the comments above reinforce my decision to offer the tome on both iTunes and Kindle (even though I clearly prefer the output from the iPad).  Like jbranden I am very loyal to Apple, I just wish that they reciprocated - miffed too that iBook Author is only available for users of Lion (which my ancient and trusty MBP won't handle).

Any responses greatfully accepted

Uncle heFTy

Please Apple!  Please Please Pleeeeeeaaaase. iBooks on MAC!!!!!

use  "BookReader" app ( 7.99 Euro from MacAppStore - and no I am not the maker of this .)  , it is fine in mirroring the iOS experience on OSX, just see how it looks and behaves - it is a clone of the mobile app - If you want to go free, then google for "Calibre" - it is somewhat ugly library and conversion manager but it has a ibook compatible epub reader included and runs on Windows,Linux and Mac.

Sjazbec wrote:

 

use  "BookReader" app

Neither this nor any other app can read paid-for iBooks on OS X, which is what most people want to do (and is why they are asking for iBooks on the Mac, and why this thread exists).

It is important to avoid possibly misleading people about this, because if people get the idea that your advice is valid for paid-for iBooks, they could have to buy their ebooks a second time, from Kindle, Nook, Kobo, or Googlebooks, in order to be able to read them on both their iOS and OS X devices.

blvovsky wrote:

 

How do I un-subscribe from notifications from this thread?

Look at the upper right/top part of your screen.  Under the Actions heading click "Stop email notifications"

pft44 wrote:

 

...he and I are both reading the work to look for spolling irrers, grammar etc and I am highlighting them on my iPad (as is he)...need to know if there is a way of doing the reverse with the amended/highlighted versions from my iPad. ...

You can email those notes to yourself.  That way you have the annotations in machine-readable form, in one place.  Is that what you're looking for?

That's what I would like to do but I cannot find a way to do so - maybe I am just dim.

I am currently in the book on my iPad and there doesn't seem to be a way, can you assist please?

Uncle H

pft44 wrote:

 

That's what I would like to do but I cannot find a way to do so  ...

With the book open on yout iPad, tap the upper left corner so that you get the buttons to navigate back to "Library" and to the TOC. Tap the right one (to the TOC). 

At the head of the TOC are three "tabs" -- you will be looking at the view with the left of the 3 tabs selected/highlighted.  The other two are tabs to your "Bookmarks" (the middle tab) and your "Notes" (the right tab).  Touch the right tab. This shows you (a) the bit of text from the book where you placed the note and (b) what you typed into the Note box. 

While you are looking at that view of your Notes, do you see the small right-arrow icon at the very top right corner of the screen?  Touch that.  This brings up a box to let you either "Email" or "Print" the Notes.

I just did this for some notes I'd made on an ePub that I am reviewing so I'd just done this to get my own notes out. 

However, if it works for you the way it did for me (I had not yet updated to iBooks 2 when I did this last week so things may have changed), the document I got in the email did NOT contain anything from the book page of the Note other than the title of the Chapter the note was in.  IOW, no page number and no snippet from the marked text, like you see on the "Note" page you're looking at on the iPad.  Fortunately, I had only a dozen or so notes and having those was the kind of "checklist-in-one-place: that I needed.  If you have hundreds of notes and if your "note text" is something like "typo" you may not find this as useful as you'd like.  In that case, perhaps you'd need to also screenshot each page that has a "note" icon so that you also have more of the note's context.

Hi, actually it was quite helpful once I read it again. The reason being that I was frustrated because I was trying to email extracts that I had highlighted and not made notes.  I will try the latter and see if that works

Uncle H

I don't buy DRM books, so ok, didn't knew this. for the free books and the ones I imported  from ibookstore this app is working on OSX perfectly.

I submitted my suggestion as a QuickTime enhancement. I figure QT already exist on every computer that iTunes installed and with its tie to iTunes it seems logical. I also suggested a possible licensing agreement with Zinio since they have the DRM and digital reader components in place.

This seems like a gapping whole in Apple's offerings.

I had an 'Express Lane' conversation with Apple today to try and find a solution to my original problem - the simple fact is that the experts there struggled to find a way (whether by design or default) to copy a DRM free ebook with highlights from iPad back onto a Mac (of any format).  Keriah's suggestion only works with 'notes' appended to an ebook on the bookshelf, it won't work with highlighted sections. So, to apply my own edits I had to have the source document (Word) and the epub on the Ipad open together and laboriously and slavishly copy the highlighting across manually.

I am not certain, nor were they, that 'iBook Author' will resolve the issue either - and their best suggestion was to look for a third-party program that might be capable of extracting files from an iPad - anyone got any other suggestions apart from 'Calibre' and 'VitalSource Bookshelf' - neither of which can offer a solution?

Uncle H

pft44 wrote:

 

...Keriah's suggestion only works with 'notes' appended to an ebook on the bookshelf, it won't work with highlighted sections. So, to apply my own edits I had to have the source document (Word) and the epub on the Ipad open together and laboriously and slavishly copy the highlighting across manually. ...

Can you describe a bit of the workflow you are using? 

Regardless of how you make mark-ups on the iPad (either simple highlighting or notes - or a combo), you aren't actually doing "edits" on the iPad, right?  If you were (somehow - magically) able to get the marked-up iPad document back onto your computer (i.e., your composing/producing system) then you would still need to make the changes in the ePub's source files and regenerate the ePub file, yes?  (Am I on track so far?) 

When I work from markups in the iBook on my iPad, I have the iPad open to the book (moving from mark to mark) and I have my Word source open on my computer.  I am not "laboriously and slavishly copy[ing] the highlighting across manually" but I do have to do typing to actually make the changes to the book's source.  I use change-tracking "on" in Word so that is, I suppose, the equivalent of transferring the "highlighting" (i.e., an audit trail).  No, it's not easy but who said the life of an editor is easy!?

If I'm following what you are looking for (and correct me if I'm missing something here), you don't want to (or cannot) work on your computer, making those source edits, with the iPad open to the book.  It sounds like you are looking for something you can refer to that's on paper or in a file on your computer -- no iPad involvement.  Okay, so let's go with that.

One thought (not elegant but it seems to fit that spec.) is to screenshot the annotations and either print those pages or move the set of image files onto your computer. 

Using that method, if all you want to see is just the highlighting, you would have something like this:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/9876091/iPadscreenshot-1.PNG

Or if you want to see the highlighting and annotation, you could have this:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/9876091/iPadscreenshot-2.PNG

How's that?

Maybe 'slavish' is too strong an adjective, so let me describe what I am doing. I have almost completeda c.300 pp biography and converted it to epub using Calibre, and uploaded it to mt iTunes library so I could see how it looked on the iPad. As i went through it, obvious changes came out and I highlighted each of them. Now what I have done, in the absence of being able to reverse the upload process, is to have the iPad and Word opedn side by side and transfer the edits and highlighting manually.  Took a few hours, hence my desire to extract the file c/w highlights.

Thanks for your being there I discovered quire a lot about the process and will move on.

Uncle H

pft44 wrote:

 

... in the absence of being able to reverse the upload process, is to have the iPad and Word opedn side by side and transfer the edits and highlighting manually.  Took a few hours, hence my desire to extract the file c/w highlights. ...

Got that.  But even if the marked up book could have come back off the iPad, those markups would never have been part of your book.  They would be something "sitting on top of" some rendered view of your book.  So, still work to be done.

IAC, it sounds like you figured it out.  Good luck!!