How do I read iBooks on my Macbook Air

In addition to your horrribly smug attitude and arrogance, you totally ignore that e-books are sometimes referenced as well as read. If I want to read a book (spend time with it and read many pages), I prefer to use a smaller device. iPhone is good, iPad is good but heavy, iPad mini is perfect. In form factor and weight, Kindle is better than iOS but it onlly does the one task. For those who can afford only one of them, iPad Mini is the obvious choice. Kindlge plus iPhone covers nearly all my needs except for the next point. But when I am writing a document or email and need to check facts or even quote passages, i really do not want to juggle my iOS device or Kindle or Nook while writing my document. I find the full computer a better designed document creator/editor in general and more so if I need to switch between source and destinaion (read book, write document / email). Multiple overlapping windows is still the way to go for me and many others. I don't see that yet reasonable in iOS devices. I believe the statement I just made is going to be obsolete in a short time but not yet. Some of these advances take longer than I wish. So my desktop / laptop will still be around a few more years at least. Also the needs of so many users will vary and the company who can accomodate many of these users will be a winner. Companies who argue why they are right and the user is wrong, usually go bankrupt. I've seen it many many times.

Contrary to your claims you have not solved the world's problem you have only shown the world how arrogant and thoughtless and inflexible you are. Computing devices are FOR people. People shouldn't have to adapt to the devices if good alternatives are provided. Apple obviously agreed with the person asking the question and rejected your thinking.

Apple is suffering from a number of things. Some of their latest changes to Mac OS X are horrible but I'm hopeful they will correct this trend. Someone at Apple looked at the success of iPad and thought everything should be done that way. There are places for hand held devices of various sizes and touch screens. There are places for mice, large screens, overlapped windows, etc. The entire the PC (whether a IBM Compatible PC or Apple PC they are both PC's) is dead trend is overblown but I feel that Apple leaders are pushed too much that way by their success. If someone is following the fiancial numbers, it will get corrected, hopefully, before they destroy the great stuff they have.

Understand, I'm a fan of Apple tablets and phones, Mac Books of various types AND iMacs. I'm even curious about the new desktop Mac Pro they mentioned. If my workspace has a desk or table, I want a large monitor so I can do many things in parallel. I was a very early adopter of the messy desktop. I missed Smalltalk and Xeroc Parc until later. But I did use Windows 1.0. You could have multiple windows BUT all of your windows had to be able to fill the screen. Each window was a rectangle, there were no gaps on the screen. If you needed another window, you needed to split an existing one. It was horrible to use. For that reason, Windows 2.0 was the first version to have any acceptance and Windows 3.11 solved most of the UI details. Then they had to fix the underlying software which was pretty buggy.

Apple has done some great things. I hope they can keep it up and avoid being led by the media hype into a place that is no good.

If you know Pages on Mac OS X, it is pretty good. Pages for iOS does some amazing things, but I cringe at trying toi make a decently formatted document on an iPad or, heaven help us an iPhone. If I only had Pages or Numbers or Keynote for iOS, I would be hard put to do good work. It is even hard to update documents on iOS created on the desktop because of what the iOS versions cannot do. I expect tablets and tablet software to go much further than it has yet, but we are not yet there so let us keep the good stuff we have on the MAC OS X platform and not dumb it down to tablet size.

Gosh, this thread is a year old ... has anyone got any updates about Apple listening to the consumer and being able to to have the iBook read on multiple devices?
I stopped buying from the iBook store a year ago and buy from Kobobooks and Kindle because of the iBook's inflexibility.

I like to share good phrases and paragraphs on Facebook from my purchased kindle books, but I can't do that from my iPod5 or on my iPad for most DRM books... and yes, I do read books on my PC sometimes too.
Has anyone come up with a solution to Apple's inflexibility with iBooks or has Apple made any positive changes yet? 🙂

AdrianLYH wrote:

Has anyone come up with a solution to Apple's inflexibility with iBooks or has Apple made any positive changes yet? 🙂

The solution is the one you have already found -- get your books from one of the other stores (Kindle, Nook, Kobo, Googlebooks, Sony).

Apple's only change so far is:

http://www.apple.com/osx/preview/#ibooks

Tom,

so it looks like iBooks is finally on the Mac 🙂
But not the PC yet ... well, one consideration on whether my next laptop will be a PC or a Mac .. or an excuse to finally get a Mac ! But having it on the PC would be great ..

odd, one cannot read a book on a macbook. hmmm

i'd sure be happy if i could read books and magazines on my macbook air as i can on an ipad, i do not enjoy carrying an iphone, an ipad, and a macbook air on business trips. why carry three devices?

one day it will happen

You will be able to read ibooks on a Mac with OS X Mavericks later this year : http://www.apple.com/osx/preview/#ibooks

Wonderful!! At Last!!!

Now, how do I get and App that will let me do this on my (Aging) macBook running Lion?

I can't run Mavericks (or Mountain Lion) on it.

The iBooks app is only available with Mavericks, without it you may be able to read free ibooks and those from publishers such as O'Reilly who don't include digital rights management on their books via programs such as Calibre.

And the problem with reading free book on the Mac (as opposed to my iPad) is what?

I have quite a few free books on my iPad, including the entire Oz library and a few Mark Twain,

as well as some that I've purchased from the Library.

There isn't one. Most free ibooks tend not to have DRM on them, so you should be able to read them via a program such as Calibre or possible Adobe Digital Editions on a Mac. The problem is with paid-for ibooks as most of them do have DRM on them which tie them to the iBooks app - so they can only be read in iBooks on an iOS device, or the new iBooks app on Mavericks.

Full of yourself aren't you? (Obtuse???). Some of us have a small Macbook air and want to read a book AND do other things that are not available on iPad.

BVISailor wrote:

Some of us have a small Macbook air and want to read a book AND do other things that are not available on iPad.

Of course you are now able to do that, if you can install the free upgrade to 10.9, since Apple includes an iBooks app with this version of OS X, released 10/22/13.

I posted this years ago. And FINALLY Mac has listened. I'm reading my Christmas book on my Macair on IBOOKS. Yayyyyy. About time, Mac, but thank you anyway!

It's all fine for those of you that have new enough Mac's that can run Maverics, but my MacBook can't run it or Mountain Lion. I'm still running Lion. There should be nothing to prevent Apple from releasing an iBooks that will run on Lion or Mountain Lion.