Developer posts iBooks for Mac video tour

iBooks for OS X Mavericks (iBookstore, Featured)

The fifth beta of the upcoming OS X Mavericks was released today, bringing with it for the first time the iBooks for Mac app.

Showcased during June’s WWDC keynote, iBooks for Mac brings the iOS reading experience to the Mac, down to turning pages with a swipe, zooming in on images with a pinch and scrolling from cover to cover. One developer took to YouTube to share his experience with iBooks for Mac beta, the video is right after the break…

Developer Nick Pomes posted a video tour (via 9to5Mac) to YouTube showcasing the reading experience in iBooks for Mac.

He takes us through downloading a free book from the iBookstore and demos the various tools, like search, highlighting, bookmarks and more.

Have a look below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnnmGDGqAfo

Needles to say, all your books downloaded through the built-in iBookstore (see the image top of post) automatically appear in iBooks for Mac and iOS. Speaking of the iBookstore in iBooks for Mac, you can browse free or paid books by title, author or genre, check out reviews, click to see details or read a free sample.

Other features included in iBooks for Mac: Collections, support for importing your own PDFs via drag and drop and a Purchased section to filter only the reading material obtained from Apple.

Strangely enough, PDFs open in the Preview app.

If Apple is reading this, I sure as hell hope they’ll implement iCloud sync for PDFs because I want to be able to import my own books once and have them automatically pushed to all of my authorized devices.

iBooks for OS X Mavericks (Multiple books)

By the way, iBooks – along with other Apple apps on the App Store that are not part of the stock iOS experience – is yet to be updated with the flattened iOS 7 look and feel. I also love how the Mac edition steers away from the wooden bookshelf design seen in its oft-criticized iOS counterpart.

According to Apple, iBooks for Mac brings feature-parity with its iOS counterpart.

iBooks for OS X Mavericks (Collections)

In addition to page turning by swiping and pinch-zooming, iBooks for Mac takes advantage of your screen real estate by letting you keep as many books open as you like, which is useful for students who need to reference and research multiple textbooks simultaneously.

The Notes pane seen on the below screenshot collects all your notes, highlights and thoughts in the lefthand column.

iBooks for OS X Mavericks (Textbooks 001)

“When you quote an excerpt while writing a paper, iBooks adds a citation for you,” Apple says in a press release. “And when you take notes, highlight passages, or add a bookmark on your Mac, iCloud pushes them to all your devices automatically”.

Of course, iCloud also keeps your progress synced across devices so you’ll be able to start reading a book on your iOS device and continue right where you left off on a Mac, and vice versa. And by enabling automatic downloads, buying a book on your iOS device  will automatically push it to all your Macs via iCloud.

By last count, the iBookstore had over 1.8 million free and paid books, from textbooks and classics to the latest bestsellers.