Developer(s) | Apple Inc. |
---|---|
Initial release | April 2, 2010 |
Stable release |
|
Development status | Active |
Written in | Objective-C |
Operating system | iOS 4.3 or later Mac OS X 10.6.3 or later |
Size | 31 MB |
Available in | English, Arabic, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese |
Type | Digital distribution |
License | Proprietary |
Website | www.apple.com/ibooks/ |
iBooks is an e-book application by Apple Inc. for its iOS and macOS operating systems and devices. It was announced in conjunction with the iPad on January 27, 2010, and was released for the iPhone and iPod Touch in mid-2010, as part of the iOS 4 update. Initially, iBooks was not pre-loaded onto iOS devices, but users could install it free of charge from the iTunes App Store. With the release of iOS 8, it became an integrated app. On June 10, 2013, at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, Craig Federighi announced that iBooks would also be provided with OS X Mavericks in fall 2013.
It primarily receives EPUB content from the iBooks Store, but users can also add their own EPUB and PDF files via data synchronization with iTunes. Additionally, the files can be downloaded to iBooks through Safari or Apple Mail. It is also capable of displaying e-books that incorporate multimedia. According to product information as of March 2010, iBooks will be able to "read the contents of any page [to the user]" using VoiceOver.
On January 19, 2012 at an education-focused special event in New York City, Apple announced the free release of iBooks 2, which can operate in landscape mode and allows for interactive reading. In addition, a new application, iBooks Author, was announced for the Mac App Store, allowing anyone to create interactive textbooks for reading in iBooks; and the iBooks Store was expanded with a textbook category. The iBooks Author Conference, the annual gathering of digital content creators around Apple's iBooks Author, has convened since 2015. A 2017 conference has been announced for later this year, with keynote from NASA and sponsored by Southwest Airlines.