My iBooks mea culpa

In January 2012 I wrote about why iBooks will never come to Mac OS and I was happily proven wrong a year and a half later. At last week's WWDC in San Francisco, Apple announced that iBooks would indeed arrive with Mavericks (a.k.a. OS X 10.9), the next generation of OS X due this fall. 

My theory in early 2012 was that Apple was intentionally restricting iBooks to iOS in order to squeeze every last cent out of consumers. Students going to college buy a lot of MacBook Airs and my thinking at the time was that Apple could drive iPad sales because students wanting iBooks (and textbooks created with the then-new iBooks Author) would snap up iPads as a secondary machine. You know, for studying. 

While it was true for almost two years, Apple came to its senses and decided to stop handing the eBook business to Amazon's Kindle Store on a silver platter. Apple realized that in order for people to invest in an eBook ecosystem they need to be able to consume their purchased content on all of their devices (iOS and OS X). Students writing papers for college need to be able to reference their textbooks on their iPads and their Macs. 

I still prefer my MacBook Air to my iPad (although the ratio has crept up a little since I wrote that post in 2012) and my workflow hasn't changed much in the 18 months since my original piece:

I'm biased because I write for a living and love Apple notebooks so much that I started a little website about them back in 1995 -- before Google or the term "blog" even existed. I know that there are a whole generation of keyboard cutters coming up in the ranks, but I'm not one of them. My iPad will never fully replace my MacBook Air with it's glorious keyboard, USB ports and external mouse. At least not in the foreseeable future.

While my prediction about Apple never producing iBooks for OS X was flat wrong, Apple agreed with the point of my article. In order for iBooks to be successful (and to better compete with Amazon's Kindle Store) iBooks has to be available on its mobile and its desktop platform. And I'm thrilled that Apple has seen the light. 

Now, what do I do with all the Kindle books that I've purchased?