iBooks for Mac – Are there any Decent Apps for that ??

Reading free iBook on the Mac – Is there an app for that?

Last week I was spending quite a bit of time with making an e-book, I wrote it using Scrivener for Mac and I suppose I have to say that it would be nice to see Scrivener for iPad. It doesn’t seem to be the case at the moment that there is an iBooks application for the Mac. If you want to read an iBook on the Mac then you have to use something like Stanza or another possibility, if you want to read a Kindle e-book would be to use Adobe Digital editions, although I’m not even sure that there is a version for the Mac. Another possibility for reading your e-books on your Mac will be a application called Book Reader. Book reader costs €7.99 and looks quite an interesting possibility for reading your free iBooks for Mac.

BookReader - iBooks for Mac

iBooks for Mac – BookReader

BookReader has recently been rebranded and restyled and has been given 10.7 Lion support. It supports e Pub books that are without DRM and it will also read doc, RTF, HTML formats and a couple of others. I would have thought that for it to be a e-book reader that was worth buying for the Mac, then it would also read the Kindle format. I imagine that the problem there is the fact that the Kindle format usually has DRM included. At least with the BookReader application you do get a very nice iBooks like page curl animation. I am not tempted to buy this application from the Mac App Store because there is very little information about the app within the App Store. So maybe it is time for us to have a look at other possibilities, such as Stanza for Mac. There is a Stanza iPad application and for the life of me I can’t understand why you would want to use Stanza iPad app, when there is a perfectly good iBooks application from Apple.

Kindle for Mac

None of the books were downloaded to the application to start with and to be able to start reading one of the books, it was necessary to do a double click on the one I wanted to read. Then it was just a short wait for the book to download to my Mac. On my iMac the application takes up about one third of the screen when first started up and the reading experience is pretty good. The Kindle application for the mac is a Lion compatible application and it has the ability to go full-screen. When the application is set at full-screen then the text is a little bit too wide for a good reading experience, but it was possible to change it from one single column of text to 3 columns of text. With three columns it is again pretty good for reading. As you would expect from a professional company like Amazon the software is of good quality and well worth having.

Tofu for reading iBooks on Mac

If you are vegetarian then you may find Tofu as name of a software for reading text on your Mac, to be a strange sort of name. I just downloaded the software Tofu from the MacUpdate website, which is always a good place to look for new software to use on your Mac. My first experiments in using this application were not very encouraging. I tried to open ePub files unsuccessfully, so it is pretty useless as software for reading iBooks. If it can’t open the standard for iBooks, then it is just a complete waste of space. The application does open text files and puts the text into columns, which as we said before makes it easier for reading. Neither does the application open up Kindle files, but that’s not going to be a problem because we already have the official Kindle app from Amazon. Overall looking at the application Tofu, I have to say that I can’t see the point of it and I will be deleting it from my Mac. Mind you Tofu is really a text reader, as in grab some text from a web page and see it in a format that is easy to read.

Tofu or Stanza iPadVerdict on e-book software for the Mac

Kindle for the Mac works very well, Stanza does a poor job of reading iBooks for Mac and Tofu is useless. There are iBooks for Mac that you can download and if you are able to make a choice of the type of e-book that you download, then I highly recommend that you download a PDF. Much easier for you to get good software to read your iBooks download material when it is a PDF document. There are also free iBooks for iPad and on the iPad you have the marvellous iBooks software, which I have found to display ePub books very well indeed.