The debut of OS X Mavericks brought Apple’s e-book reader, iBooks, to the Mac platform. iBooks for OS X allows you to read books, textbooks, graphic novels and more previously only available on iOS devices.

Setting Up iBooks and Syncing it With Your iBooks Library

When you launch iBooks on your Mac for the first time, you’ll be required to login using the same Apple account you have previously used to purchase e-books on your iOS device. After your login is complete, iBooks will check for any previous purchases, and will sync those purchases to your computer.

Now, any new purchases you may make on any devices attached to your Apple ID can be downloaded to your Mac by going to “Store” -> “Check for Available Downloads.” iBooks can also be set to automatically download any new purchases by going to the “Store” tab in iBooks’ Preferences menu, and clicking the box next to: “Download new purchases automatically.”

We take the industry standard Mozilla Firefox browser and rewrite it to be compatible with Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5, then compile it specially optimized for your G3, G4 or G5, add AltiVecTM JPEG, HTML and WebM decoding acceleration for G4 and G5 Macintoshes, and soup up JavaScript performance with our best-in-class just-in-time PowerPC script. Book lovers, teachers, and students rejoice: iBooks has come to the Mac—and it supports iBooks Author books, too. Apple Senior Vice President Craig Federighi previewed the new Mac version of iBooks. My iBook shipped with Mac OS X 10.1 'Puma', which I still have on the restore CDs. It was quite speedy, but Puma doesn't support many of the applications we use every day, so I figured I'd go modern and install Mac OS X 10.4 'Tiger'. I started by checking if the Mac was compatible. It sure was, with a 600 MHz G3, 30 GB hard drive, and 512 MB of RAM.

Exercising Parental Controls

On the “Parental” tab in iBooks Preferences, you can completely disable the iBooks Store, or restrict books with explicit content. This is handy, as most parents don’t want little Bobby or Susie to get a jump start on puberty by accidentally reading “50 Shades of Grey’s Anatomy.”

Turning Pages and Jumping to the Next Chapter

You can turn pages in iBooks either by using the left and right arrow keys on your Mac’s keyboard, by swiping left or right on your Mac’s trackpad, or by hovering your mouse pointer over either edge of the page and clicking the arrow that appears.

Jumping to the next chapter is accomplished by hitting “Command + Shift + Right Arrow”. You can jump to the previous chapter using the “Command + Shift + Left Arrow” combination of keys.

Highlighting Content and Making Notes

While reading a book in iBooks, you can highlight text, or add notes for later reference, To highlight a section of text or add a note, simply drag your cursor across a section of text. After the desired text is highlighted, you’ll see a menu pop-up that will allow you to highlight the text in one of five colors, underline the selected text, add a note to the text, or copy the text.

If you want to make a note, follow the above steps, and then select “Add Note” from the menu. A small window resembling a post-it note will appear, and you can enter any notes you like about the highlighted content. To access the note, just click the small box alongside the highlighted text. The note will pop-up for you to read or edit.

You can view all of the highlighted sections and notes you have made in an ebook, by clicking the right-most button in the upper left-hand corner of the iBooks window, (it will look like a post-it note), or just the the Command + 4 hotkey combo. All of your notes and highlights will appear in a panel on the left side of your display. Click the various sections in that panel to jump to your highlighted or note-filled areas of your book.

If you need to delete a highlighted area, and/or its notes, just click the highlighted area, and then select “Remove Note,” or “Remove Highlight and Note” from the pop-up.

Using iBooks Text-to-Speech Function

Apple’s iBooks can read the text of an ebook to a user with a few simple steps.

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Launch iBooks, and load the book you would like to have read to you. Now, go to the spot in the book where you would like iBooks to begin reading to you.

Now, go to “Edit” -> “Speech” -> “Start Speaking” in the iBooks Menu.

Your Mac will begin reading your ebook to you, continuing until you tell it to stop. Note: While your Mac will happily read the whole book to you, it won’t turn the pages, you’ll need to do that manually.

To stop the narration, go to “Edit” -> “Speech” -> “Stop Speaking” in the iBooks Menu.

You can also highlight text and then select “Start Speaking” from the “More” menu. Your Mac will then speak the highlighted text.

Conclusion

The iBooks app in OS X Mavericks gives users another great way to read or listen to their ebooks. Very handy if you don’t own an iOS device, or if you don’t have yours handy at the moment.

Mac iBook with Mac OS X

I recently bought an Apple iBook. As Mac's now run Unix as theirunderlying OS, it makes sense for me to have this. I bought the 14'version with an 800 Mhz cpu, 30 GB hard drive and a Combo drive(reads DVD's, reads/writes CD's). It was $1,599.00 and arriveddirect from Apple's web site just four days after I ordered it.

I'm still awash in confusion, but I do have a few firstimpressions.

Really Good looking

Ibook Mac Os X

This is a good looking machine. White case, white keyboard,thin, lightweight (about 5 lbs) and a sharp display. The batterylife is supposedly five or six hours. I have a Win2K laptop also,but I only use that while traveling, and have a Linux box at myoffice that is my main workstation.. I think this laptop could bemy machine for both office and away once I get it all set up andworking correctly.

But so confusing..

And that's my first (and probably only) gripe. I'm fumblingaround with basic setup tasks. It's nothing really awful, and I'mlearning quickly, but this is not something you can just turn onand use. Well, maybe YOU can, but I confuse easily.

The first thing was something I knew but had forgotten. When youstart an application, its menu appears at the top of the screen.Windows and X apps keep their menus in their own windows, but Applehas always done it this way. This is not a problem, of course, justsomething you have to get used to. Actually, I rather like it. Ifyou choose 'Hide Others' from the applications title menu, allother appplication windows go away, but you can bring them back ondemand. This, in combination with the Windows style Dock (workslike Windows title bar), is a very nice way to manage yourdesktop.

I'm having a little trouble getting used to the touchpad mousealso. Again, nothing wrong - it's just different. On my otherlaptop the touchpad can also do clicks by tapping on it. On theiBook, there's a separate click pad just under the touchpad; not atall hard to use, it just isn't what I'm used to. However, if you goto System Preferences->Mouse, you can change the trackpad sothat you CAN click by tapping.

Another thing that I find disconcerting is the lack ofconfirmation buttons in many dialogs. You know, you call somethingup to change preferences and you click 'Apply' or 'OK' to confirmyour changes. That sort of thing seems to be missing in a lot ofplaces - you just make your changes and close the window. So farthat hasn't been a problem (I haven't screwed up anything Icouldn't fix), but I can see where it could be.

For example, one of the first changes I made was to Terminal. Itdefaults to tcsh, which I don't particularly like, so I called upits preferences and changed it. As you can see, there's nothingthere like 'OK' or 'Cancel' - in fact there is no way to cancel.That's not so bad here, but in more complex dialogs where you maybecome confused, it's good to be able to just start over. Ifthere's any way to do that here, I missed it.

Mail

I think I like the built-in Mac OS X Mail client. I'm notentirely sure yet, and I have downloaded Mozilla which I'm used to using onLinux. The mail does have this nice spam control built in, whichseems to be working well (it's still in training mode), but it onlydoes mail - no Newsgroup capability. Because of that lack, I needMozilla anyway. I'll play with it for a while and see if I stilllike it.

A lot of work to do

I have a bit of work to do before I can use this as my dailymachine. I have a number of scripts on Linux that I use regularlyfor managing my website, my life, and other things. Fortunately,they are all Perl and Bash so I will have no real problemstransporting them here, but it's just taking the time to do it.

Mac OS X is very seductive though - I'm going to have to stealthe time to do this.

Ibook G4 Mac Os X 10.5 Download

If you are considering an iBook, you'll probably want more than256MB of ram. I find that very uncomfortable to work with (too muchpaging and swapping) and have already ordered a 512MB stick whichwill bring it to its maximum of 640MB.

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