Hi Dahveed,
my ISP is definitely not the source of all evil. I have no download problems whatsoever. Even though I have only a 3 Mbps connection (living in a rural area), it's very stable. Nothing to complain about.
What do you mean by "how are you reinstalling"? What options are there other than to download Mavericks and launch the installer? In fact, I even went to the point of erasing the whole hard disk content (using another computer and running the Mac in target mode), and then performed a full internet recovery. So, I did this. Also, I launched the installer after download to install Mavericks "over" the existing 10.9.2, which took me back from iBooks 1.0.1 to 1.0 and Safari 7.0.3 to 7.0.1. Yes, it worked in the past. The reason for restoring the Mac in the first place was something else severely failing which works now, but also somehow related to Apples bad software inventory mechanism.
Still, both internet recovery and lauching the installer after normally downloading it leave me with iBooks 1.0 (169) and not 1.0.1 (281) as I have it on my other Macs.
In the meantime, I found a direct download link for the Safari 7.0.3 package and installed it manually. So this issue is solved now. This leaves me with iBooks, which I haven't found a download link for.
As for Apple fixing stuff, since Apple moved the updater to the MAS, it has become highly unreliable and is a complete mess. What was wrong with the old and small dedicated software updater that was built exactly for that purpose and never failed on me? In fact, Mavericks is such a bad release, just as was Lion (Mountain Lion was somewhat better), that I could write books about it by now. I'm trying to get things right for weeks now and I'm really tired of it. The quality of Apple's software has been going down the drain for the last few years. That is a fact! And that is what Apple definitely needs to improve. In fact, I fear the day when the updater will finally fail completely or will refuse to update critical packages like itself(sic!) and not only a single application.
And why doesn't Apple either provide the software packages for each application for separate download? And why are they refusing to let one restore a single application from time machine?
Ok, all this is philosophy and religion and I hate that. Still, the iBooks 1.0 => 1.0.1 issue remains.
Cheers,
Paul