iBooks app in latest OS X Mavericks developer preview!

[Jessica Lares]

Finally!

Downloading now. Will let you know how I like it.

[Jessica Lares]

Oh man, oh man, oh man. iBooks for Mac is GREAT! For one thing, you can open multiple books at once!

IT HAS TEXT-TO-SPEECH!!!!

And it lets you search the web/wikipedia when you highlight and hold. The menu could be streamlined as there's a MORE button, but whatever. You can also share stuff to e-mail, Messages, etc.

LOVE the Collections feature too. It is just perfectly done. You can show notes in the margin, and show study cards too.

Import your own ePubs too.

Choices of fonts are:

Athelas
Charter
Georgia
Iowan
Palatino
Seravek
Times New Roman

And then you get White, Sepia, and Night color schemes.

With how pluggable OS X generally is, it might be very easy to add fonts and new schemes.

It's awesome though. Very well done. I think I might actually start using Calibre from now on so I can rip my DRM off my Amazon stuff and never have to use THEIR app ever again. It's THAT good.

Here's a screenshot of a page in a book. There are no margin options, but it fills up pretty good. Tells you how many pages are left in a chapter too.

http://cl.ly/image/3e3O0H2S1h47

Good deal. The only thing I worry about as far as personal docs (deDRMed Amazon books, etc.) is whether they will fully sync between the Mac OS X and iOS devices. As we know, Amazon takes away some syncing capability from "personal docs" so I wonder if Apple will do the same. Hopefully not. Another bad thing for the iPhone iBooks app is the lack of very small margins. This is true of the Kindle app on iPhones too. Margins are not a problem on large screened devices like iPads and computers, but they need to be tiny on small devices like iPhones. For some reason neither Amazon or Apple seem to get this.

[Jessica Lares]

Originally Posted by jswinden

Good deal. The only thing I worry about as far as personal docs (deDRMed Amazon books, etc.) is whether they will fully sync between the Mac OS X and iOS devices. As we know, Amazon takes away some syncing capability from "personal docs" so I wonder if Apple will do the same. Hopefully not. Another bad thing for the iPhone iBooks app is the lack of very small margins. This is true of the Kindle app on iPhones too. Margins are not a problem on large screened devices like iPads and computers, but they need to be tiny on small devices like iPhones. For some reason neither Amazon or Apple seem to get this.

When Mavericks comes out, syncing EPUBs and PDFs are most definitely happening. The current form of iOS iBooks wouldn't allow that though, so it will come when iOS 7 launches.

At least in a perfect world, we would be able to use our 5GB of free space for that. You can make notes in those files though... (I'm not sure if those features work on the Kindle app as I've never tried)

As for margins... Well, iOS 7 is coming soon. It could happen.

P.S. Heh, font page worthy? I don't know... The CloudApp guys are probably going to go after me again for all that data I keep using.

[kyteflyer]

Looking good. almost tempted to get back into the program and install it. I stopped after beta2, just got too annoyed. Wish I had two Macs I could play with.

[Jessica Lares]

Originally Posted by kyteflyer

Looking good. almost tempted to get back into the program and install it. I stopped after beta2, just got too annoyed. Wish I had two Macs I could play with.

Partition your hard drive. That's what I did. I'm using Mavericks exclusively though. I haven't logged into Mountain Lion since Beta 1 except to shrink it down a few weeks back. The stability in Safari is way too good.

And yeah, really enjoying iBooks. PDFs are opening up in Preview though. And it's pretty buggy when you try adding them in bulk. But then it's a beta.

Oh yeah, you can still sort manually by the way.

[kyteflyer]

Originally Posted by Jessica Lares

Partition your hard drive. That's what I did. I'm using Mavericks exclusively though. I haven't logged into Mountain Lion since Beta 1 except to shrink it down a few weeks back. The stability in Safari is way too good.

And yeah, really enjoying iBooks. PDFs are opening up in Preview though. And it's pretty buggy when you try adding them in bulk. But then it's a beta.

Oh yeah, you can still sort manually by the way.

I had Mavericks at b1 and 2 as my main OS, then installed it on an external drive. I don't have the time or inclination to swap between OSes... thats where I fell down. reformatted the drive and now just use it for storage as originally intended. So, I'm hoping that its going to be stable enough to use full-time, this time round.

[Jessica Lares]

Right. Well, it's been pretty good for me!

Converted a majority of my Amazon stuff to EPUB in Calibre this morning. I'm very surprised at how smooth it went as it was my first time using it. Took like 5 minutes.

So now I just have to organize all 160 of these books. That shouldn't be too hard since I can select multiple books all at once.

[kyteflyer]

KACK! I think if I had registered just how far back I would have to go with installs, I might have not bothered. However, on the way now, and will maybe have it all completed by tomorrow night.

[kyteflyer]

Hmm... Jessica, how are you managing with the fact that Calibre can no longer see iBooks books? I'm going to be using my online stores to access for iBooks but in the meantime, one is unable to use Calibre in the "old" way... by moving books in and out of iTunes, for the new iBooks app. GRiker is not installing the beta of Mavericks so there will be no solution for that right away. Got a workaround?

[Jessica Lares]

Originally Posted by kyteflyer

Hmm... Jessica, how are you managing with the fact that Calibre can no longer see iBooks books? I'm going to be using my online stores to access for iBooks but in the meantime, one is unable to use Calibre in the "old" way... by moving books in and out of iTunes, for the new iBooks app. GRiker is not installing the beta of Mavericks so there will be no solution for that right away. Got a workaround?

It's probably because they're in a different location.

/Users/YOURUSERNAME/Library/Containers/com.apple.BKAgentService/Data/Documents/iBooks/Books/

[johnnyb]

Will this enable sync of any epubs between iPad and Mac, including highlights, annotations and so forth?
God I hope Kindle will play along...

[kyteflyer]

Originally Posted by Jessica Lares

It's probably because they're in a different location.

/Users/YOURUSERNAME/Library/Containers/com.apple.BKAgentService/Data/Documents/iBooks/Books/

Yes, I knew they were in a different location, just didnt know which one. I'm actually contemplating reverting to ML. I'm not that impressed with the books thing and thats pretty much all I wanted mavericks for, and its screwed Messages too, on my computer so really... nah. I'll see what happens when they get to release but right now, not that impressed, and TBH I HATE whats happened to Calendar. Thats the one skeuomorphic thing I liked.

[Jessica Lares]

I actually liked all the skeuomorphic too. Did it screw Messages? Hmm. I know that you have to re-add your e-mail addresses everytime you activate it.

But alright. It's not for everyone, I understand.

[kyteflyer]

Originally Posted by Jessica Lares

I actually liked all the skeuomorphic too. Did it screw Messages? Hmm. I know that you have to re-add your e-mail addresses everytime you activate it.

But alright. It's not for everyone, I understand.

I can't even log in to Messages. anyway I sent in a BR and have now restored ML from my cloned drive. No loss. Think I'll give Mavericks a miss, entirely. I'm giving iOS7 a miss, so really... I'll just be doing what I do now