iBooks could be US-only at launch

Yes, the Apple iPad supports ePUB but what does that mean exactly? As I read about it on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPUB), I have to wonder if the Apple iPad will support all of what ePUB does. There's a lot to it and Apple might "contribute" a few things to it as they have to other open source projects.

Without a clear understanding of what Apple will do with ePUB, we are at a serious disadvantage in our attempts to compare and contrast he iPad and its technologies with anything else.

Same thing on the Canadian Apple site. If you look at the "Features" page http://www.apple.com/ca/ipad/features/, the Books feature is absent. On the US store it is just to the right of the APP STORE in the list. It is missing on the Canadian site.

Please post your Engrish spam elsewhere.

Despite the Australian dollar currently being worth ~0.90 USD, a paperback that costs less than $10 (USD) in the USA costs over $20 (AUD) in Australia. This is yet another example of the kind of collusion that goes on over here - and the sad thing is, only Australians who have lived overseas realise how much we get the shaft.

I'll continue to download all my books illegally, and feel really good about it. I used to buy them when I was in the US, but if anyone's going to be shafted in this relationship, I'll let it be the authors and publishers who continue to lobby the Australian government to control print distribution to the detriment of everyone else in this country.

As long as there is a way to sideload .epub files onto the iPad, who cares? All the really good books were written long ago and can be gotten from feedbooks.com or Project Gutenberg for free.

Hopefully this changes, as books is a big part of what I want from the ipad. I can see the licensing agreements being behind, but I really hope it won't take a year or two as happened with tv and movies. Those were dark times.

Nothing would surprise me less. It was well over a year after iTunes music store opened in the US before it was available in Australia, UK, etc. Rights negotiations take time! It was about another year after movies and TV shows became available via iTunes before Apple made them available outside the US and Canada. Initially only a very limited set of titles was available too. There's still not as big a selection as in the US store. Rights negotiations again. Lots of lawyers, agents, egotistical CEOs, individual contracts and copyright laws to navigate.

And the print industry is *worse* than music and the movie guys at this stuff too, they're a much older industry and have more legal cruft built up that has to be taken into account. Amazon's Kindle has only recently become available outside the USA for the same reason, and it has a much more limited set of available titles than the US store. Same with every other ebook store from B&N to Fictionwise.

In the early days of ebooks (pre-Kindle) publishers and authors agents didn't worry too much about enforcing geographic rights to ebooks, ebook sales were too small to bother, but since the Kindle they've all woken up and are enforcing their rights like crazy.

http://img3.imageshack.us/img3/4673/ibooks.png

There's the confirmation, and the disappointment for me. That's from the NZ site.

I wonder if Gene Munster knew THIS.....

I'm most looking forward to the new version of iTunes the must be coming along with the iPad and iBookstore releases: surely they've got to build a method into iTunes for reading your eBooks; tying them into the iPad doesn't make much sense. I envisage iBook readers becoming standard in iPhone OS, not just on the iPad, and hopefully the supporting version of iTunes will finally be 64-bit!