iBookstore expanding internationally ... eventually

In the Netherlands we don't even have movies/videoclips/tv series yet (I don't know if this is also for the rest of Europe) so I don't see the books arriving anytime soon which again leaves a gap in the 'i-philosophy'.

Offtopic: Is the ipad already jailbroken?

let's not get too carried away books will not be going the way of the music industry anytime soon. However the publishers are not going to give away the keys to the castle like the music industry did with mp3, which is why prices will not differ greatly and as for the hardback ebook I can only SMH.

@ Yos

My main concern is not price but availability of works in other languages besides English. For instance, will I be able to buy eBooks from the French or Italian iBooks Stores for my iPad ?

For comparison's sake 20$NZ = 15,4AUD = 14,4CAD = 13,9US = 10€ the last I checked. That doesn't seem "prohibitively expensive" to me.

Being From Australia I too would like to add my name to the "guaranteed customer" list.

As the poster said the non-competitive nature of publishers is going to be their downfall. With the uprise and popularity of eBooks and their cheap self publishing style I see a future where many authors will simply upload their work to iBooks/Amazon instead of employing a current day Publisher. If this does happen we might see companies like Google begin an eBook advertising standard like their current AdWords, and other companies like those supporting advert revenue on iPhone apps developing their own styles of advertising.

I have a horrible feeling that, at least, in the beginning we might be limited to only those books from the iBooks store, but with apps like the Kindle app there are always options, and the development of a $0.99c app to natively read .mobi and other formats won't be far down the line. I just hope Apple doesn't block this kind of thinking with "We already made that" thinking.

I read an article today or yesterday about the price of eBook and finally I understood why we don't see competitive prices: they (the publishers) don't want to kill the paper editions and will strive to keep the eBook prices high.

Now it makes sense.

As for the geo-restrictions it will always puzzle me. Why electronic media is restricted to a particular region? Right now I have no restrictions in Canada to buy books from Amazon.com (yes, the American store), then why I'm not allowed to buy electronic media the same way? If someone care to explain the reasons I'd be very grateful.

And for the eBooks in the iPad in Canada, I hope it supports adding external books to the device, just like I can do with music and videos right now.