Apple books - page 2

Apple offers free audiobooks narrated by celebrities

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Apple Books free audiobooks
‘Great First Listens’ get you started with Apple Books.
Photo: Apple

Apple is offering a bunch of free audiobooks narrated by celebrities, including Kate Beckinsale and Kelsey Grammer.

The giveaway is an effort to promote Apple Books, which saw a big overhaul with iOS 12 — but audiobook fans will probably feel Apple could have done better.

Download iOS 12 now to make your iPhone and iPad faster

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iOS 12
iOS 12 launched on September 17.
Photo: Apple

The biggest iOS update of 2018 is finally here.

After months of beta testing, Apple finally released iOS 12 to the public, making it available as an over-the-air update. The new iPhone and iPad operating system comes with tons of new features and performance improvements that will make even older devices faster than ever. Best of all, if you have a device that can run iOS 11, iOS 12 will work on it — no problem.

Here’s how to download it.

Small Fry offers complicated portrait of Steve Jobs as a father [Review]

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Think Steve Jobs was tough as a boss? Lisa Brennan-Jobs memoir
Think Steve Jobs was tough as a boss? Here's what he was like as a father.
Photo: Luke Dormehl/Cult of Mac

Small Fry is the memoir of Lisa Brennan-Jobs, the daughter Steve Jobs didn’t want. Frequently sad and occasionally disturbing, it’s not the airbrushed portrait of Steve that Apple would like to see in print.

But it also relays some charming moments, showing us a side of the Apple co-founder that we’ve never seen before. It’s a glimpse of Steve Jobs at his most personal.

New book shows how Apple makes great software [Review]

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Ken Kocienda's book Creative Selection is an insider's account of how Apple makes great software.
Ken Kocienda's new book offers an insider's account of how Apple makes great software.
Photo: Leander Kahney/Cult of Mac

When Steve Jobs died in 2011, pundits wondered how the company would continue to make great products without him.

The question is partly answered by programmer Ken Kocienda’s new book, Creative Selection, which describes his 15 years working at Apple helping to develop the original iPhone, iPad and Safari web browser.

Kocienda’s book is a remarkable insider’s story that shows how Apple creates the software that it’s rightly famous for.

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Walmart horns in on the $1.1 billion e-book market

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A Walmart eBooks iOS app just launched, hoping to take on the established leaders in the market.
A Walmart eBooks iOS app just launched, hoping to take on the established leaders in the market, Amazon and Apple Books.
Photo: Walmart

While brick-and-mortar bookstores have almost disappeared, the number of e-book stores grew today with Walmart throwing its hat into the ring.

This is clearly an attempt to take on arch-rival Amazon in yet another market, but Apple Books is caught in the middle too.

Coffee table book is self-taught photographer’s valentine to Apple design

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Jonathan Zufi's book ICONIC has been popular with Apple fans.
Jonathan Zufi's book ICONIC has been popular with Apple fans.
Photo: David Pierini/Cult of Mac

Cult of Mac 2.0 bugThe fun Jonathan Zufi had playing RobotWar on his high school’s lone Apple II in the early 1980s re-emerged one day. He just had to play it again.

The lark that led Zufi to an online search for an Apple II to play the game grew into the acquisition of more than 500 vintage Apple items, which he lovingly photographed, but then sold to fund production of a coffee table book that has sold more than 15,000 copies.

Becoming Steve Jobs searches for answers in Jobs’ wilderness years

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Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac
Becoming Steve Jobs explores Steve Jobs' exile from Apple. Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac
Photo:

New biography Becoming Steve Jobs attempts to answer an important question: What happened to Steve Jobs during his wilderness years outside Apple that turned him from a gifted-but-impossible-to-work-with youngster into the seasoned digital emperor he would be following his return to the company he founded?

It’s a question that’s crucial to understanding Apple’s rise back to prominence from the late 1990s onward — but one that was ignored by previous Jobs’ biographer Walter Isaacson, whose 2011 book Steve Jobs sold a gajillion copies, but is now (perhaps unfairly) being recast as an unqualified failure.

In Isaacson’s book, these crucial years away from Apple take up just five chapters out of 42 — and that section also includes Jobs’ marriage to Laurene Powell and the birth of his children. In Becoming Steve Jobs, the lessons from that era permeate almost every page.

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The iApple Book Giveaway [Giveaway-Contest]

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2012-06-15 19.59.00

How would you like to win an entire library of 10 Apple-related books? Everything from Insanely Great to Steve Jobs: A Biography to Inside Steve’s Brain by our own fearless leader Leander Kahney? There’s even a chance to just win Leander’s book (one lucky winner a week!), and how does one achieve this awesome feat?

Well, then it’s all on the iApple Book Giveaway page here on Cult of Mac. Read on for all the details…