Apple Allows iBooks Customers to Give the Gift of Reading

Just in time for the holiday season, Apple has made some changes to the iBooks service for iOS and OS X to allow customers to now gift a book to family, friends, and loved ones. Gifting a specific book title is new for the iBookstore, a feature that has been a staple on rival Amazon’s Kindle store, and allows customers to buy a book for friends. In the past, until this most recent change, customers could only buy iTunes or iBookstore credit for gifting, and once the recipient receives the credit, they can buy whatever they want.

Now, when you’re on iTunes, you can click the drop-down arrow to the right of the book’s price and you’ll be presented with an option for gifting the book.

And though iBooks has been available for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad customers for some time now, it was only this fall that the service became available to desktop Mac users running Apple’s OS X operating system. The iBooks app became available with the introduction of OS X Mavericks and allows Mac owners to continue to read where they left off on their mobile devices.

With the change, being able to gift a specific literary title seems to be a welcomed and thoughtful addition whereas the iTunes credit system for gifting before that was more akin to giving someone a gift card.

Additionally, with gifting, you can also now schedule when the gift will arrive for the recipient. For Christmas shoppers, this mean that you schedule your gifting of reading to arrive on Christmas day and not before that. When you give a book, your recipient will receive email notification with instructions on how to download the title.