Apple’s new operating system, OS X Mavericks, will be available this fall with some stunning new features. One of those is that it will let you read and operate your multimedia iBooks on the Macintosh.

For those of us who produce multimedia books with iBooks Author, the implications and possibilities are huge.

What it means simple is that the books we produce, such as those in the Tennessee Journalism Series, are no longer confined to the iPad. Students who have Macs will also be able to buy and use these books. Here’s what they will look like (a screenshot from the Apple website):

An iBook on the Mac will let students expand it so that the notes the student has made can appear along side the page. The notes themselves will be searchable.

• Students will be able to use their keyboards to make notes.
• They will be able to open more than one book at a time.
• All of the books bought from the iBookstore will be pushed to iCloud and be available on any OS device the student has. They will be synced so that the book will appear on a second device where the student left it on the first device.

Apple debuted this new operating system at the recently concluded World Wide Apple Developers Conference in San Francisco. Developers also showed off some improvements in iBooks Author.

Stay tuned.