I was catching up on the Reading List Instapaper story this morning (more on that later) when i realized that there was something Apple didn't announce. There was no mention of iBooks being added to OSX.
To be honest, I expected iBooks to show up in the next major OSX release. Well, OSX Lion was announced yesterday and there was no mention of iBooks. This is not good.
I have to admit that I was surprised that iBooks was announced for only ioS when it was launched. I didn't think Apple would pass on an opportunity to sell content to their customers. Apple were facing just as much of feature shortfall on OSX as on iOS, so you'd think they would have plugged the hole.
Yesterday Apple gave up the chance to at least lock in their core customers, and that is going to continue to hurt iBooks. If any of Apple customers want to read on this very expensive computer they bought, they're going to go with either B&N or Amazon.
That sitting at your computer and buying ebooks is worth a lot of money. The on-device ebookstores are uniformly crap, so the best time to get and keep a customer is when they're at their keyboard. Apple threw that away. BTW, the PC is still the most popular reading device, so this isn't just the fringe that Apple lost.
iBooks might now be accessible from the web, but it's going to stay a second rate ebookstore.
Yes, I noticed that too. But having been disappointed by Apple so many times, I didn’t even expect it. And it’s clear now that their strategy is Do Enough, so they leave more to give people later. FFS, iPhone Volume button as camera shutter after *years* of waiting and people think Christ returned!
They just added it to iTunes, right?
Correct, they added it to the iTunes store. But you can’t actually read the ebooks on OSX.