While Apple’s iBooks finally made the jump to the desktop this fall thanks to a new app in the latest update to the Mac OS, one key capability hadn’t come with it: the ability for users to give books directly as gifts. Now, just in time for the holidays, Apple has made it possible for users to send the gift of a favorite book.
The ability to give books was something that Amazon’s Kindle has had for several years now, and Apple has allowed users to give other types of content, like apps, music and video, but for some reason, it’s taken this long for them to allow users to send books directly.
For users interested in getting their literary gift-giving on, it’s fairly simple to do from iTunes: go to a book’s page in the iTunes Store, then open the drop-down menu next to “Buy Book,” and iTunes will offer you the chance to give the book as a gift. On iOS, open up the iBooks app, navigate to a particular book, tap on the icon in the window’s upper right-hand corner, and choose “Gift” from the resulting menu.
In both cases, it’s possible to get Apple to deliver the book via email at a particular date and time, so you can do your holiday shopping now, and get the book delivered when you want your giftee to “unwrap” it.
