how can i read ibooks on my mac

I buy most of my books from a smaller UK eBook seller. They used to come in .pdf which was a pain as you could not alter the size of the font if you were reading on an iPad, so I used to change them in Calibre to ePub for iPad reading but read them in .pdf format in either Acrobat Pro 10 or Preview. The conversion from .PDF does not work very well due to the way that the font imaging is packaged inside a wrapper and you tend to get spelling errors (particulalry on double L's and double E's) and some formatting mistakes. In the last few months my seller now offers ePub books as an option, which are DRM free, so can be read on a mac in Adobe Digital Editions and after you drag them into Books in iTunes and synched, on an iPad. It is over 18 months since I last bought a book from the iBook store. If this seller does not offer the book I want (and it is a slightly limited list, with an awful lot of vampirish and teen books, which interest me not at all), I will buy from Amazon. I have noticed their eBook pricing has dropped a fair bit over the last few months.

Wilson

As a long time Apple fan (Apple2 & Mac512K long) , who bought quite a few iBooks before realising I could only read 'em on my iPad rather than on my Retina MBP, I'd have to say I'm pretty pee'd off about this silliness. Like many others , I'm sure, it will be the Kindle or Adobe etc versions for me in future, unless Apple get their act into gear. What an absurd, self harming, sitution! It really can't be that hard for this to be fixed!

I'll add to the chorus of groans here. Just bought a book of Itunes and hit with the 'can't read it here bozo' message. Duped by Apple, money wasted, and bedazzled why I cant read a book off my Apple computer. Do you really think i'll head out and get an IPad? Not on your life. Was a a seriously happy apple convert but rapidly getting unhappy a with all the silly limits and restrictions aimed at increasing sales but really turning people off. Are you listening Apple? Give us the software! Show us you are top of the bunch! Are you listening?

I also had to learn this iBook lesson the hard way tonight and am further disheartened to read the many months of complaints about this issue that have apparently fallen on deaf ears. Could have bought Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way on Amazon for the same price as on iBook and read it with Kindle apps on my iPhone, iPad, AND iMac every day as I intended to do for the next few months. Of course it's really not that inconvenient when I'm working on a related project on my iMac to have my iPhone or iPad nearby to refer to the text, but why should I have to? It may not seem like a deal breaker to Apple, but for me it is. They won't see another eBook penny out of me--who have been faithfully putting pennies in their piggy bank since 1984--until they release an iBook reader for their UNIX platforms.

I found that you can drag ibooks out of their ibooks/itunes folder, right click to get info, change the extension name from ibooks to epub and voila they open like every other epub! They work fine in adobe digital editions. This trick works with other odd extensions too.

I followed your instructions. It was unnecessary to change the extension when I dragged the file to my desktop since it was already epub. However, when dragged into ADE all the pages displayed blank, presumbably because the file is DRM protected, which, as has been noted several times in this conversation, cannot be circumvented by any available readers. Thanks, anyway.

Do please do the rest of us the courtesy of reading the thread before posting. How many times do we have to tell people - Adobe Digital Editions will NOT read DRM protected books purchased from Apple or anyone else but only non-DRM protected books (the minority) or DRM protected books purchased through an Adobe linked scheme, e.g. Foyles.

Wilson

How is it such a mystery as to WHY apple is only allowing iBooks on iPads and iPhones, it's pretty straightforward man...

It's the driving force behind sales of those devices! Simple! It's an added benefit, a reason d'etre! If they open up iBooks to the desktop, there will be less demand for iPads/iPhones.. d'oh! Apple isn't interested in providing a good social experience, their goal is to be very profitable and keep very high margins. That's it, it's just another greedy corporation using elitist marketing strategies, nothing new here. :-/

The problem with your claim is it is a false claim!!! Unless you work for apple and have heard these discussions in person, or you know Tim Cook or some other higher up who has told you this is the reason, then you simply do not know the reason. Your claim is nothing but hot air and you try to insult everyone here's intelligence when you have only insulted yours and shown you make false statements.

Stop insulting people and showing yourself to be dishonest and you will get along better with others!!!! :-)

Agreed. These aren't "claims." They are just allegations or accusations, or just venting.

Amazon's Kindle has (to the best of my knowledge) the lion's share of the ebook market.

It is unlikely (to the best of my knowledge) that there are enough "iBook" readers yet to impact

very much one way or another the sales of the reader devices (primarily i guess the MacBook and

MacBook Pro).

This may be the forum for venting of anger of Macbook (Pro) ibook readers---a regretfuly

yet still small community.

I also wish there were more ibooks available vs. Kindle but given what I know of the publishing

industry, this is going to be tough. Amazon has almost a monopoly, which is also awful

for publishers and authors.

Thanks for the aggreement, bojan doesn't need to come here and insult everyone!!!

I want to add that I am following this thread since it bothers me also. I almost feel Apple needs to pull ibooks if it isn't going to have a similar version on the computer. They have bragged about cross compatibility with intro of mountain Lion, and this is a hollow claim when not even ibooks has this. Maybe they are listening and adding this to the next os x. Of course, people have complained a good while and they haven't listened so far.

I was responding to Bojan insisting he knows the reason and others who don't see it are stupid. This is insulting and he doesn't know what he's talking about. I and others have speculated the reason, but we know it's speculation, and he doesn't understand the difference. Apple could have a different reason, and that's all there is to it. We don't know the reason, end of story!!!!

There is another possibility or perhaps factor in why certain iBooks cannot be read on a Mac versus an iOS device and that would be touch screen dependency. An iOS dependent iBook contains code if I'm not mistaken that allows certain facilities like gestures and other touch screen requiring factors that are or can be quite difficult to emulate on a non-touch device, even with a track pad (I love mine attached to my Macbook Pro, by the way). It might be possible to use but it wouldn't be as precise and could possibly be rather frustrating for the reader/user.

I know of one iBook (only) publication from the folks at Games Workshop that requires gestures for certain facilities to work. A mouse click and drag _might_ work for those. But I don't know how that could be emulated, really. And with multiple touch elements on one "page", how you could tell _where_ you had touched the page using a pad, I also don't know.

It may be that some books just need iBooks to function at all and that without a touch screen iBooks loses some of its usefulness.

I'm not saying that I don't want iBooks on my Macbook Pro, too. But I can understand that there might be certin technical aspects with some books that just don't translate well.

It may be that the touch screen is a barrier that Apple simply doesn't know how to bypass gracefully. After all, Steve Jobs' purported vision was that all things would be done across the board and done well or not done at all. It makes no sense for iBooks to not take advantage of the capabilities of a touch screen and the lack of a touch screen on a Mac or Macbook is simply a barrier to bringing that functionality to those devices.

I, for one, don't know how to get around that barrier other than giving the Mac and Macbooks touch screens. And that may be in Apple's future. All devices, iMacs, Mac Pro, Macbooks and even Mac Mini's as touch screen capable devices. Imagine a future in which all PCs and Macs having touch screens. I think I'd like that. And perhaps in that future iBooks will make it's way to the rest of Apple's hardware.

I can even imagine this same discussion continuing but people unhappy that their Mac without a touch screen can't open some iBooks because they require a touch screen. Maybe a track pad can be made to work. I do like the gestures Apple has brought to the Mac desktop using the track pad, so far.

This is only my ideas about what the problem might be and a possible "solution" that Apple is weighing for the future. Apple certainly isn't going to tell us. Not until they have a shippable product, I suspect.

BALewis wrote:

It may be that some books just need iBooks to function at all and that without a touch screen iBooks loses some of its usefulness.

I think that is true. But I suspect 99% of what people want to read on their Mac is in standard epub format, for which touch screen is not really an issue.

I'm a big Apple fan. Unfortunately, the ease with which one can now switch from one service provider to the next will severely undermine Apple's iBooks in the future as it just did for me. Case in point, having uploaded a number of .pdf into my iBooks to read on my iPad or iPhone for work, I now also need to have access to them easily (on one platform preferably) on my mac. Without access to iBooks on my Mac, I have no choice but to download Kindle for mac and upload my .pdf to that provider instead. It's unfortunately that simple since reading a book on my Kindle app vs. iBooks on my iPad or iPhone makes very little difference...

Alex_LF wrote:

Without access to iBooks on my Mac, I have no choice but to download Kindle for mac and upload my .pdf to that provider instead.

No choice? That doesn't make sense. PDF format can be read by multiple apps on any platform, there is certainly no need to do it in iBooks, which is not even that good at it. There are many, many pdf readers for iOS and in OS X people normally use Preview or Adobe Reader, not Kindle.app.

This does not detract in any way from the argument that Apple should provide an iBooks app for OS X so DRM'd books from the iBookstore can be read on that platform. .epub ebooks without DRM, just like PDF, have never been a problem on OS X or any other platform.